17 Mar 2024
Cheryl Dunye’s Closet Picks
The writer, director, actor, and producer shares what Marlon Riggs’s work means to her as a Black queer filmmaker, praises Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s radical approach to melodrama, and spotlights Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, and other directors whose work she can’t live without.
Cheryl Dunye: 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 |  I Married a Witch | René Clair | 1942 | |
| 2 |  A Hollis Frampton Odyssey | Hollis Frampton | ||
| 3 |  Mudbound | Dee Rees | 2017 | |
| 4 |  The Cameraman | Edward Sedgwick | 1928 | |
| 5 |  Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978 box set, 9 films | |||
| 6 |  To Die For | Gus Van Sant | 1995 | |
| 7 |  The Signifyin’ Works of Marlon Riggs box set, 7 films | |||
| 8 |  The BRD Trilogy box set, 3 films | |||
| 9 |  The Complete Films of Agnès Varda box set, 22 films | |||
| 10 |  The Watermelon Woman | Cheryl Dunye | 1996 |
How far across film history it reaches
1 of the choices is not on the axis: A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (no year on record). Left off rather than placed at a guessed year.
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
46 of its 47 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 64.6 hours. The other one is unmatched, so the real figure is higher. 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 10 choices had been taken by 6 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Two of them have been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was A Hollis Frampton Odyssey, taken by this visit alone.
This visit reached the work of Agnès Varda, through Cléo from 5 to 7, Agnès Varda, through Vagabond, Agnès Varda, through La Pointe Courte, Agnès Varda, through Le bonheur, Agnès Varda, through Jacquot de Nantes, Agnès Varda, through Uncle Yanco, Agnès Varda, through Black Panthers, Agnès Varda, through Lions Love (. . . and Lies), Agnès Varda, through Mur Murs, Agnès Varda, through Documenteur, Agnès Varda, through One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, Agnès Varda, through Daguerréotypes, Agnès Varda, through The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès Varda, through Varda by Agnès, Agnès Varda, through The Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda, through One Hundred and One Nights, Agnès Varda, through The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, Agnès Varda, through Jane B. par Agnès V., Agnès Varda, through Kung-Fu Master!, Agnès Varda, through Faces Places, Agnès Varda, through Les créatures, Agnès Varda, through Agnès de ci de là Varda and JR, through Faces Places, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.
One of the choices is their own: The Watermelon Woman. Left out of the lineage count, because reaching for yourself is not reaching for somebody else.