12 Dec 2023
Ben Gibbards’s Closet PIcks
The singer-songwriter of Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service shares his love of the surreal worlds of Luis Buñuel; praises his favorite filmmaker, Kelly Reichardt; and talks about the emotional impact and importance of Streetwise.
Ben Gibbards: 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 |  The Exterminating Angel | Luis Buñuel | 1962 | |
| 2 |  Three Films by Luis Buñuel box set, 3 films | |||
| 3 |  The Complete Monterey Pop Festival box set, 2 films | |||
| 4 |  Old Joy | Kelly Reichardt | 2006 | |
| 5 |  Take Out | Sean Baker, Shih-Ching Tsou | 2004 | |
| 6 |  Brute Force | Jules Dassin | 1947 | |
| 7 |  Le Havre | Aki Kaurismäki | 2011 | |
| 8 |  Eclipse Series 12: Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy box set, 3 films | |||
| 9 |  Streetwise / Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell box set, 2 films |
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 15films run 21.3 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 142 minutes of film for each of its 9 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 9 choices had been taken by 4.11 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 Streetwise / Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell, taken by 2 visits in total.
This visit reached the work of Sean Baker, through Take Out, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.