30 Oct 2023

Lina Rodriguez’s Closet Picks

The writer-director of So Much Tenderness and This Time Tomorrow shares her love for the magnetic monstrousness of Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven , praises the visual grammar of Portrait of a Lady on Fire , and talks about “impossible love” in Flowers of Shanghai and Exotica .

Lina Rodriguez: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

7

6 single, 1 box set

single films

6

chosen on their own

box sets

1

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.

965 Wanda 1970 1020 Leave Her to Heaven 1945 1034 Portrait of a Lady on Fire 2019 SET Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema 946 Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day 1972 1077 Flowers of Shanghai 1998 1150 Exotica 1994

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Wanda	Barbara Loden	1970	15
2	Leave Her to Heaven	John M. Stahl	1945	3
3	Portrait of a Lady on Fire	Céline Sciamma	2019	3
4	Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema box set, 4 films			1
5	Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day	Rainer Werner Fassbinder	1972	1
6	Flowers of Shanghai	Hou Hsiao-hsien	1998	1
7	Exotica	Atom Egoyan	1994	2

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1945 to 2019, box sets 1963 to 1969

Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema

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

9 of its 10 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 15.8 hours. One of the others is a television series, which has no total on record at all: TMDB gives one episode's length, not a series'. 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 7 choices had been taken by 3.71 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Three of them have been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema, taken by this visit alone.

This visit reached the work of Atom Egoyan, through Exotica, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com