12 Apr 2012

Philip Kaufman’s Closet Picks

The director of The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being selects a group of films that he hopes will inspire him in his own work, including Amarcord, The Wages of Fear, Fanny and Alexander, and The Battle of Algiers.

Philip Kaufman: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

6

4 single, 2 box sets

single films

4

chosen on their own

box sets

2

one choice, many films

films reached

10

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.

4 Amarcord 1973 36 The Wages of Fear 1953 533 Crumb 1995 SET Fanny and Alexander 249 The Battle of Algiers 1966 SET Stage and Spectacle: Three Films by Jean Renoir

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Amarcord	Federico Fellini	1973	6
2	The Wages of Fear	Henri-Georges Clouzot	1953	7
3	Crumb	Terry Zwigoff	1995	7
4	Fanny and Alexander box set, 3 films			7
5	The Battle of Algiers	Gillo Pontecorvo	1966	9
6	Stage and Spectacle: Three Films by Jean Renoir box set, 3 films			4

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1953 to 1995, box sets 1953 to 1983

Stage and Spectacle: Three Films by Jean Renoir

Fanny and Alexander

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 10films run 21.8 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 218 minutes of film for each of its 6 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 6 choices had been taken by 6.67 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 Stage and Spectacle: Three Films by Jean Renoir, taken by 4 visits in total.

This visit reached the work of Terry Zwigoff, through Crumb, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com