25: Gareth's Top 25 & Knight of Cups
From the Soul Telegram: Movies & Meaning Archives…
Gareth Higgins on TOP 25 FILMS & A YEAR OF SOUL TELEGRAM
{Image above from Andrei Rublev, maybe the greatest film ever made, but who can say for sure?}
When we launched Soul Telegram, our newsletter about Movies & Meaning, a year ago this week, Kathleen and I knew we wanted three things:
1: To share deeper conversations about how cinema helps us reflect on our lives.
2: To continue our evolving collaboration as friends and fellow cinema aficionados.
3: To help nurture a community of folk who love cinema, love life, and want to take them seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.
I smile a broad smile thinking of how this has unfolded over the past year - hundreds of you are now receiving this newsletter, we’ve written thousands of words about dozens of films, and - I hope - we’ve helped shine a light on movies that emerge from off the beaten track.
We believe deeply that art and storytelling helps shape our lives, for better or worse; and that becoming conscious about the icons through which we view the world, we can grow, our lives can expand, and we can help others more too.
Cinema happens to be the art form I love the most. Ever since I was a little child, it created a certain kind of second home for me. I’ve learned so much about empathy, courage, and imagination through the films that have come to mean the most to me.
I’ve said here before that my friend the Scottish architect-photographer Colin Fraser Wishart teaches me that the purpose of architecture is "to help us live better". I've come to believe this to be true of all art, all storytelling especially. The task of the critic is to be in dialogue with the artist and the audience, to help us make sense of what is going on in the world, and in our hearts; it's my privilege and joy to collaborate with Kathleen to share with you some of stories that are helping us live better, and to participate in a conversation together about art, meaning, community, courage, honoring each other's needs, and the world around us.
And to mark our first anniversary, I’m publishing my current list of Top 25 Films. The concept of “greatest” is harder to define than “favorite”, and this is a list that contains both “great” films, and “favorites”. I’ve limited myself to one film per director, and reserve the right for this list to change (!), but I won’t publish a revised version more than once a year.
There’s so much to be discovered in the cinematic realm about real life. So much to be revealed through the poetry of image meaningfully woven by artists devoted to their craft, and to the common good. Thank you for supporting our exploration of this gift, and we look forward to another year of Soul Telegram: Movies & Meaning.
TOP 25 FILMS
25: The Dam-Keeper
24: Monsoon Wedding
23: The Muppet Movie
22: Make Way for Tomorrow
21: Daughters of the Dust
20: The Apartment
19: Stories We Tell
18: Faces Places
17: Wonder Woman 1984
16: A New Leaf
15: The Exorcist
14: Babette’s Feast
13: Fearless
12: Moonlight
11: Do the Right Thing
10: Dekalog
9: 2001: A Space Odyssey
8: The New World
7: Embrace of the Serpent
6: A.I. Artificial Intelligence
5: Ikiru
4: Where is the Friend’s House
3: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
2: After Life
1: Andrei Rublev
Kathleen Norris on THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS/KNIGHT OF CUPS
In the late 1960s when I was just out of college and living in New York City, on many weekends I’d go to the empty office of the arts organization where I worked, and spend hours writing poems. I knew the phone wouldn’t ring, and not a sound came from the Frank Campbell Funeral Chapel next door. When I thought a handwritten draft of a poem was ready, I’d type it on an IBM Selectric. And this is how I learned I was a writer. A young woman can do many things on a weekend in the island of Manhattan, and only a writer would do what I was doing.
The city then had many cinemas showing foreign films and classics, and when I wasn’t writing I went to movies, often scheduling my Saturday or Sunday so I could go to two or three in a row. I was able to see On The Waterfront, East of Eden, The Producers, and also contemporary French films: Shoot The Piano Player, Jules and Jim, and Robert Bresson’s haunting and heartbreaking Au Hazard Balthazar. I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Busby Berkeley musicals from the 1930’s on a big screen, and also the greatest double bill imaginable: A Fistful of Dollars and Barbarella. (They’re both essentially cartoons, one saturated with testosterone, the other with estrogen).
Looking back, I’d say that I was trying to make the best of a life that felt like only half a life. Fearful and lonely, I was an immature twenty-something woman suffering from a naïveté common in young adults, who see themselves as sophisticated. I lived mostly in my head, and had mostly superficial relationships with others. Having no clear idea of who I was or what I wanted to make of my life I was adrift, and in New York City that can be dangerous. When a wise older friend realized how depressed I’d become, feeling stuck and even unable to write, she suggested that I ask a poet we both knew, James Wright, if I could audit a class he was teaching at Hunter College on 17th and 18th century novels? This odd suggestion intrigued me. Why not? I thought; I had nothing to lose.
One book we read was The Pilgrim’s Progress, in the Similitude of a Dream by John Bunyan, a 17th century British tinker and self-taught preacher who spent twelve years in jail for refusing to stop preaching. Wright said that while scholars had made much of Bunyan’s use of symbolism we needn’t focus on that. He told us we’d find the novel’s allegories to be fairly obvious; he wanted us to keep in mind that the book was written by a man in prison. That was excellent advice, as it made all the more powerful Bunyan’s envisioning of himself as a troubled but free man bent on making a pilgrimage to find his true self and grow closer to God.
How this book written in 1678 came to me in the 20th century at the time I needed it most seems a miracle, for reading Bunyan made realize I was also on a pilgrimage. I wasn’t sure about the God bit, but the book revealed to me that I was in a prison of my own making. I recognized myself especially when reading about the Giant Despair and his wife Diffidence locking the pilgrim in a prison called Doubting Castle. I knew doubt and despair all too well, and wore my diffidence as armor that I hoped would protect me from the pain life can bring.
Bunyan’s pilgrim suffers greatly in his cell until one day, as if waking from sleep, he says: “What a fool am I, to lie in a stinking dungeon when I may as well be at liberty. I have a key in my possession, a key called Promise that is able to open any door in Doubting Castle.” That struck me hard, as a truth I needed to grasp and hold. Maybe I did have the key of promise and hope, the way out of darkness. But I lacked grounding: with little sense of my place in the world I knew something was missing but didn’t know what it was or how to find it. In a sense I was living two lives. I’d landed a great post-college job that I loved and was diligent in my duties. But I was also exploring Manhattan’s demi-monde. Shy and reserved, I wasn’t tempted to take drugs like heroin or speed, but often hung out with people who did.
One night my two worlds collided. After Wright’s class I took a subway downtown to meet a friend, a writer and artist who had worked for Andy Warhol for years. My destination was Max’s Kansas City, a raucous den of iniquity I still think of fondly. John Bunyan would have recognized it as a version of what he calls Vanity Fair, a festival of worldly pleasures designed to distract any pilgrim from his path. I headed for the fabled back room, where you’d always find people from the Warhol crowd, rock stars, and well-known actors.
Still enthused from the class, I took out my copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress and read portions aloud to my friend. When I think of that now it makes me laugh. But it made sense to me at the time, and it led me to make an important decision about my life. When an impossibly beautiful young man, high on speed, interrupted my reading with a great flow of words, I put the book aside. I hadn’t met him before but had seen him in several Warhol films. We engaged in a strange and unsettling conversation that convinced me it was time to leave Max’s behind and go home, probably for good. (I describe this encounter in greater detail in The Virgin of Bennington).
I hadn’t thought about that night in years, until I viewed Terrence Malick’s 2015 film, Knight of Cups. Malick’s a courageous director, who makes the kind of movies he wants to make without much concern for the box office. His films are contemplative and often mysterious, full of good actors surrounded by dream-like imagery whose beauty can be so intense that I don’t much care if I understand exactly what’s going on: meaning becomes secondary to other, deeper elements in the film.
Knight of Cups is a boldly imaginative adaptation of The Pilgrim’s Progress. It opens as a narrator (John Gielgud) quotes from the book. Then we meet Malick’s pilgrim Rick, portrayed by Christian Bale, a successful Hollywood star who’s having doubts about his career, his love life, his very identity. Another narrator (Brian Dennehy) relates a story Rick was told as a child about a knight who is seeking a pearl. After he drinks from a cup that’s offered him, he forgets that he’s the son of a king. He forgets about the pearl. The king does not forget his son, however, and sends messages in the hope of waking him. But the knight sleeps on.
Rick’s long sleep includes agents trying to sell him on his next big career opportunity, saying “They love you, they want you for this role.” But Rick remains distant and uneasy, unable to respond as expected. Bale speaks only in voiceover, a technique that makes it all the more powerful when he describes himself as “living the life of someone I don’t even know.”
An admitted womanizer, Rick drifts through relationships and is a regular at hedonistic parties and strip clubs, where a seductive dancer tells him “I can be anything you want me to be.” A wealthy man in a luxurious mansion promises Rick that money, women, and cars are his for the asking. “Take whatever you want,” he says,”why do you hold back?” Rick has stayed too long in this world, and reflects that he can no longer “remember the man I wanted to be.” All the glittering, dark-lit clubs, the huge rooms with chandeliers and elaborate furnishings begin to look like tombs.
Rick’s family is troubled. One brother committed suicide, and he tries to help a younger brother whose implacable anger is often expressed in violence. The father, played by Brian Dennehy, seems as angry, lost, and helpless as his sons, but Rick musters some compassion and forgiveness for him, understanding that it may be best to just “let him die with his blinders on.” Rick’s estranged mother tells him: “You told me sometimes you felt like a spy; you always had to pretend, and you were afraid.” His ex-wife expresses regret that she couldn’t help him stay in the marriage.“You were on the right path,” she says, “but your head was turned in the wrong direction,” Even though he can’t say this to her - we hear Rick only in voiceover — we learn that he felt she had provided him with “peace: what the world cannot give: mercy, joy, love - all else is cloud, mist.”
A narrator (Ben Kingsley) presents the powerful passage from The Pilgrim’s Progress about the traveler waking in Doubting Castle and recognizing that he’s always been free to leave. Walking alone in desert landscapes and along a beach, Rick asks: “How do I reach you, and find the way home?” Seeking answers, he visits a Zen practitioner (an uncredited cameo by the writer Peter Matthieson), who recites a poem that begins “Pay attention to each moment; everything is there.” Rick also consults a priest who tells him that while it may seem that he’s alone he’s not. He is being guided. And we wonder if even the pimp who once told Rick, “though I live in darkness, I believe in the light,” may have been steering him along the right path.
“If you’re unhappy,” the priest says, “maybe it’s a sign that he loves you,” adding that “suffering binds us to something larger than ourselves. We’re meant not only to endure but to regard our suffering as a gift.” It’s rare to hear such solid, realistic theology expressed in a movie, but it’s welcome here. Both this film and The Pilgrim's Progress tell an ancient story of journeying from slavery to freedom, from darkness into light. The film ends as we hear Dennehy’s voice offering Rick what he needs for his pilgrimage. “Find the light you knew as a child,” he says, “the moon, the stars. They guide you on your way; the light in the eyes of others - the pearl.” Finally he says to Rick: “remember,” and Rick responds, “begin.” It feels right.
Knight of Cups is available for streaming on a variety of platforms, and from Neflix as a DVD that includes interviews with several of the actors. The remarkable cast includes Antonio Banderas, Wes Bentley, Cate Blanchett, Brian Dennehy, Cherry Jones, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Frieda Pinto, Imogene Poots, and Natalie Portman.