15 Nov 2023

Hlynur Pálmason’s Closet Picks

The writer and director of Godland —Iceland’s 2023 Oscar submission—shares his love for Ana Torrent’s performances in Cría cuervos and The Spirit of the Beehive, talks about the physicality of Naked and the fear and inspiration in L’humanité, and praises the craft of Bresson as “like no other.”

Hlynur Pálmason: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

10

every one a single film

single films

10

chosen on their own

box sets

0

none this visit

films reached

10

no set to open

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.

351 The Spirit of the Beehive 1973 403 Cría cuervos . . . 1976 307 Naked 1993 162 Ratcatcher 1999 62 The Passion of Joan of Arc 1928 1084 Mirror 1975 886 L’argent 1983 981 L’humanité 1999 865 Blow-Up 1966 897 Barry Lyndon 1975

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	The Spirit of the Beehive	Víctor Erice	1973	4
2	Cría cuervos . . .	Carlos Saura	1976	2
3	Naked	Mike Leigh	1993	14
4	Ratcatcher	Lynne Ramsay	1999	8
5	The Passion of Joan of Arc	Carl Th. Dreyer	1928	3
6	Mirror	Andrei Tarkovsky	1975	11
7	L’argent	Robert Bresson	1983	5
8	L’humanité	Bruno Dumont	1999	2
9	Blow-Up	Michelangelo Antonioni	1966	7
10	Barry Lyndon	Stanley Kubrick	1975	10

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1928 to 1999

a single film, at its year 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 19.2 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 114.9 minutes of film for each of its 10 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 10 choices had been taken by 6.6 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.

This visit reached the work of Mike Leigh, through Naked, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com