3 Oct 2022

Cauleen Smith’s Closet Picks

The director of Drylongso talks about her fondness for Jean-Pierre Gorin, her love of To Sleep with Anger ’s title sequence, and the influence of Sergei Parajanov on her own work.

Cauleen Smith: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

11

9 single, 2 box sets

single films

9

chosen on their own

box sets

2

one choice, many films

films reached

14

the same visit, box sets opened

Criterion's own upload · on criterion.com

This visit as a strip, a cell for each choice: paler the older the film, indigo for a box set, which is one cell however many films it holds. The order is the order Criterion's own page lists them in, which is probably but not provably the order they came off the shelf.

97 Do the Right Thing 1989 SET La Jetée/Sans Soleil 989 The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice 1952 SET Eclipse Series 31: Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin 888 Stalker 1979 865 Blow-Up 1966 918 The Color of Pomegranates 1969 852 Black Girl 1966 963 To Sleep with Anger 1990 360 Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes by William Greaves 1968 948 The Princess Bride 1987

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Do the Right Thing	Spike Lee	1989	20
2	La Jetée/Sans Soleil box set, 2 films			10
3	The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice	Yasujiro Ozu	1952	2
4	Eclipse Series 31: Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin box set, 3 films			3
5	Stalker	Andrei Tarkovsky	1979	5
6	Blow-Up	Michelangelo Antonioni	1966	7
7	The Color of Pomegranates	Sergei Parajanov	1969	7
8	Black Girl	Ousmane Sembène	1966	7
9	To Sleep with Anger	Charles Burnett	1990	11
10	Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes by William Greaves	William Greaves	1968	2
11	The Princess Bride	Rob Reiner	1987	9

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1952 to 1990, box sets 1963 to 1992

La Jetée/Sans Soleil

Eclipse Series 31: Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin

a single film, at its year a box set, across the years of its films the collection, by decade

The axis is the same 1920 to 2030 on every visit page, so a haul that stayed inside one decade looks like one. A box set is drawn across the years of the films inside it, which is a range of release dates and not a claim about the set. Nothing here is in the order the choices were made: displayed position moves film year by a fifth of one percent of its variance, which is not a slope worth drawing.

How long this haul is

13 of its 14 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 20.6 hours. The other one is unmatched, so the real figure is higher. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

What one of its choices was worth is not published for this visit. That figure divides the whole runtime by every choice, so a total missing one film would understate it rather than be approximately right.

How unusual this haul was

Its 11 choices had been taken by 7.55 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Every one of them has been taken by somebody else too. The least-picked was Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes by William Greaves, taken by 2 visits in total.

This visit reached the work of Charles Burnett, through To Sleep with Anger, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com