3 Oct 2023

Paul B. Preciado’s Closet Picks

The writer, philosopher, and director of Orlando, My Political Biography praises Spanish cinema masters Pedro Almodóvar and Carlos Saura, talks about the “visual therapy” of Jacques Tati and his love for the poetry of Chris Marker.

Paul B. Preciado: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

7

4 single, 3 box sets

single films

4

chosen on their own

box sets

3

one choice, many films

films reached

21

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.

855 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown 1988 403 Cría cuervos . . . 1976 SET Pasolini 101 17 Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom 1976 SET The Complete Jacques Tati SET La Jetée/Sans Soleil 522 Red Desert 1964

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown	Pedro Almodóvar	1988	7
2	Cría cuervos . . .	Carlos Saura	1976	2
3	Pasolini 101 box set, 9 films			13
4	Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom	Pier Paolo Pasolini	1976	11
5	The Complete Jacques Tati box set, 6 films			19
6	La Jetée/Sans Soleil box set, 2 films			10
7	Red Desert	Michelangelo Antonioni	1964	4

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1964 to 1988, box sets 1949 to 1983

The Complete Jacques Tati

La Jetée/Sans Soleil

Pasolini 101

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

Its 21films run 35.1 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 301 minutes of film for each of its 7 choices, counting a box set as the one choice it was. Across the 375 visits with a complete total, the median is 136.4 minutes.

How unusual this haul was

Its 7 choices had been taken by 9.43 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 Cría cuervos . . ., taken by 2 visits in total.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com