17 Oct 2014
Volker Schlöndorff’s Closet Picks
The director of The Tin Drum and Young Törless says a prayer to the spirits of the closet and makes a beeline for a masterpiece by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Volker Schlöndorff: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest
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.
| Chose | Director | Year | Taken by | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  L’eclisse | Michelangelo Antonioni | 1962 | |
| 2 |  All That Jazz | Bob Fosse | 1979 | |
| 3 |  Coup de grâce | Volker Schlöndorff | 1976 | |
| 4 |  Boyhood | Richard Linklater | 2014 | |
| 5 |  Le beau Serge | Claude Chabrol | 1958 | |
| 6 |  Le Havre | Aki Kaurismäki | 2011 | |
| 7 |  Ace in the Hole | Billy Wilder | 1951 |
How far across film history it reaches
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 7films run 13.6 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 116.1 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 5.57 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Le beau Serge, taken by this visit alone.
One of the choices is their own: Coup de grâce. Left out of the lineage count, because reaching for yourself is not reaching for somebody else.