10 Oct 2023

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Closet Picks

The acclaimed writer, director, and producer of About Dry Grasses talks about how seeing Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence changed his perception of cinema, praises the timeless and deceptively simple qualities of Stranger Than Paradise, and shares how Abbas Kiarostami gave him the courage to make his own films.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

7

3 single, 4 box sets

single films

3

chosen on their own

box sets

4

one choice, many films

films reached

55

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.

SET Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema SET Six Moral Tales 400 Stranger Than Paradise 1984 34 Andrei Rublev 1966 SET The Apu Trilogy 215 Knife in the Water 1962 SET The Koker Trilogy

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema box set, 40 films			13
2	Six Moral Tales box set, 6 films			10
3	Stranger Than Paradise	Jim Jarmusch	1984	6
4	Andrei Rublev	Andrei Tarkovsky	1966	5
5	The Apu Trilogy box set, 3 films			7
6	Knife in the Water	Roman Polanski	1962	5
7	The Koker Trilogy box set, 3 films			7

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1962 to 1984, box sets 1946 to 2003

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Six Moral Tales

The Koker Trilogy

The Apu Trilogy

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 55films run 92 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 788.6 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 7.57 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 Knife in the Water, taken by 5 visits in total.

This visit reached the work of Jim Jarmusch, through Stranger Than Paradise, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com