Pico Iyer

Akira Kurosawa is best known for his epic battles, his scenes of torrential energy, his mastery of weather—always he seems to be painting on a canvas as large as the heavens. From Rashomon and Throne of Blood to Ran and Kagemusha, he compels and shakes us with titanic majesty and force. But in this least typical of his works, shot in Russian, he gives us something as simple and uncluttered as a haiku: the story of a quiet nomadic hunter at home in the forests of far eastern Russia. In place of drama we get heartrending scenes of loyalty, friendship and sacrifice. In the 51 years I’ve been talking to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, this is the one film I’ve thought to send to him.

This is, quite simply, the great aesthetic experience of my lifetime, the one that left me silent the first time I saw it, in February 1979, and the second time (one afternoon later) and most of the next 40 times. There are too many reasons why Terrence Malick’s all-American Biblical tale engages with my mind, my senses and my soul, but let me just say that he catches something through film that no poem or painting or piece of music could ever replicate. Most of the books I’ve written have been written in the light (or shadow) of this enduring classic, an attempt to honor its vision of the heavens, of the natural world putting us in place and of everything that leads us toward silence and dusk and humans seen as silhouettes on a much vaster, deeper frame.

For me, Mira Nair is one of the great novelists among filmmakers; her renditions of such classic books as The Namesake and The Reluctant Fundamentalist are in some ways richer and subtler than their sources. But such achievements all go back to this first feature, made by a young foreign woman in New York with little funding, sharing an editing studio with Spike Lee. Fired by her uncommon energy and gift for improvisation—and for inspired casting—she turned here to real street children from Mumbai’s red-light area to bring their pluck and sorrows to the larger world. This is the only film I saw that reduced my Bombay-born father to tears.

No theater director was more powerfully committed to taking us to places within ourselves, and beyond the reach of thought, than the magician Peter Brook. His nine-hour rendition of the Sanskrit epic—which I saw on a small L.A. stage in 1987—overpowered me as nothing I have seen in the theater. On an intimate, uncluttered, elemental bare stage, lit up by music and silence and great bursts of Shakespearean prophecy and curse, Brook gave us the grandeur of Lear in a more colorful, vibrant and mythic setting. In the three-hour film, the effect is diluted a little, and others may point you toward his Meetings with Remarkable Men as his ultimate spiritual treatise. But to me this is a heroic attempt to give us the battles of the gods themselves.

Transport is always an ambiguous proposition. As a lifelong traveler, I’m constantly looking to be turned upside down, to be flung out of my easy assumptions and to be confronted with a wonder that can sometimes feel close to terror. Few writers have caught the way an encounter with the unknown can bring about an entire dissolution of the self, a loss of all orientation, as deeply as Paul Bowles did in his classic novel. And Bernardo Bertolucci, in his late golden age, brought to life every aspect of Bowles’s North African nightmare with unsparing power. Pundits will always choose The Conformist as this director’s masterwork, but this is the haunting, harrowing exploration that I can never get out of my system.

After I devoured Michael Ondaatje’s novel, in an advance reading copy, back in 1992, I felt flooded, transported, newly alive. He’d charted a whole new land of post-national souls in an intricate story that was sensuous and tense and gloriously precise. He’d used words to evoke the feel of winds and the urgencies of love in the midst of the complexities of Empire and violence and war. What a miracle that he found another not-quite-Englishman, Anthony Minghella, so literate, sensitive and daring that he could fashion a parallel masterwork that doesn’t always follow the letter of the book but invariably honors its spirit. Watch Juliette Binoche holding a taper as she swings in front of Piero della Francesca frescoes in a Renaissance church, and you gasp at what cinema can do.

If anyone could make a film about a man of spirit and conscience engaged in the very real world, it would be onetime seminarian Martin Scorsese. Working with nonprofessional actors, powered by a swirling meditative score from Philip Glass, drawing on all his mastery of cinema to create scalding images and cinematic mandalas, the master gives us the first 22 years of the 14th Dalai Lama’s life in images that leave me shaking every time. Other Scorsese films will always be central to the history of movies, but this one gives us his heart—his soul—in radically different colors, and largely without words.

I’ve spent much of my adult life in monasteries, and I know they’re not for everyone. But as you watch Philip Gröning’s film about near-silent life in La Grande Chartreuse, you’re pulled into a world of stillness, of concentration, even of intimacy that may awaken a longing inside of you. After Gröning applied for permission to make a film about the monastery, he had to wait 16 years for a green light and then was told that he had to live with the brothers for six months and take care of all camerawork and sound himself. When this 169-minute meditation on almost nothing happening first came out, in 2005, it received raves in both The New Yorker and Variety and played and played—then played some more—in New York City cinemas.

I couldn’t tell you why, but this film seems to me a portrait of a saint. I knew nothing about Bill Cunningham the first time I saw it, and I have no interest in the social occasions he photographed or the fashions he captured on New York’s streets. But something in the man’s humility and simplicity, his sweetness, caught inside my throat, so I had to keep returning to see the film again. I watch, over and over, Wim Wenders’s inspiring film about Pope Francis and Mickey Lemle’s Compassion in Exile, from decades ago, but this documentary gives me a vision of unselfconscious goodness, in the midst of a busy world, that feels like hope itself.

I grew up in a California where I was surrounded by intentional communities and friends who had given themselves over to some spiritual charismatic. Theirs was a charged devotion that seemed to inspire reverence and uncertainty in equal measure. Yet this 85-minute, low-budget debut from Zal Batmanglij, starring his frequent collaborator Brit Marling, moves past every simplicity and stereotype to find something as intimate and true as heartfelt prayer; it takes us into a spiritual circle in which every reductive answer disappears. I couldn’t tell you where it stands exactly on its central figure, which is the highest compliment I can pay. At heart it’s a portrait of mystery.