Closet Picks

28 Jan 2024

DEVO: Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh’s Closet Picks

The duo behind the legendary band share their formative memories of encountering Island of Lost Souls, praise Fellini’s unique sonic sensibilit y, and talk about their love for Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success.

Filmed together, each with a page of their own: DEVO: Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh

choices
4
2 single, 2 box sets
single films
2
chosen on their own
box sets
2
one choice, many films
films reached
20
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.

single film, with its spine number box set
Chose Director Year Taken by
1 Island of Lost Souls Erle C. Kenton 1932
3
2 Essential Fellini box set, 14 films
16
3 Sweet Smell of Success Alexander Mackendrick 1957
9
4 Monsters and Madmen box set, 4 films
1

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1932 to 1957, box sets 1950 to 1987
Essential Fellini
Monsters and Madmen
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 20films run 36.1 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 542 minutes of film for each of its 4 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 4 choices had been taken by 7.25 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Monsters and Madmen, taken by this visit alone.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com