11 Oct 2023

Catherine Breillat’s Closet Picks

The legendary French auteur talks about the intimacy of discovering yourself in cinema, shares her lifelong connection to Viridiana and Black Orpheus, and praises directors whose work continues to inspire and transport her, from Elia Kazan and David Lynch to Shohei Imamura and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Catherine Breillat: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

7

6 single, 1 box set

single films

6

chosen on their own

box sets

1

one choice, many films

films reached

46

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.

332 Viridiana 1961 725 Eraserhead 1977 647 On the Waterfront 1954 384 Vengeance Is Mine 1979 48 Black Orpheus 1959 34 Andrei Rublev 1966 SET Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Viridiana	Luis Buñuel	1961	2
2	Eraserhead	David Lynch	1977	8
3	On the Waterfront	Elia Kazan	1954	13
4	Vengeance Is Mine	Shohei Imamura	1979	1
5	Black Orpheus	Marcel Camus	1959	10
6	Andrei Rublev	Andrei Tarkovsky	1966	5
7	Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema box set, 40 films			13

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1954 to 1979, box sets 1946 to 2003

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

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 46films run 79.4 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 680.9 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 7.43 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Vengeance Is Mine, taken by this visit alone.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com