6 Feb 2024

Paul Giamatti’s Closet Picks

The award-winning actor talks about his childhood experience seeing Carnival of Souls and his love for low-budget horror treasures, shares how Blue Velvet ignited his desire to become an actor and why Rashomon always moves him to tears, and praises the performances in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds.

Paul Giamatti: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

8

7 single, 1 box set

single films

7

chosen on their own

box sets

1

one choice, many films

films reached

9

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.

63 Carnival of Souls 1962 173 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp 1943 138 Rashomon 1950 164 Solaris 1972 833 Cat People 1942 667 Seconds 1966 977 Blue Velvet 1986 SET Eclipse Series 11: Larisa Shepitko

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Carnival of Souls	Herk Harvey	1962	4
2	The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp	Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger	1943	4
3	Rashomon	Akira Kurosawa	1950	6
4	Solaris	Andrei Tarkovsky	1972	5
5	Cat People	Jacques Tourneur	1942	4
6	Seconds	John Frankenheimer	1966	7
7	Blue Velvet	David Lynch	1986	10
8	Eclipse Series 11: Larisa Shepitko box set, 2 films			3

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1942 to 1986, box sets 1966 to 1977

Eclipse Series 11: Larisa Shepitko

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 9films run 16.5 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 123.9 minutes of film for each of its 8 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 8 choices had been taken by 5.38 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 Eclipse Series 11: Larisa Shepitko, taken by 3 visits in total.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com