25 Nov 2024
Johnnie To’s Closet Picks
The legendary director shares the importance of learning from the work of Krzysztof Kieślowski, talks about how Straw Dogs sparked his desire to pursue filmmaking, and selects box sets by two of his favorite filmmakers, Martin Scorsese and Masaki Kobayashi.
Johnnie To: 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 |  Roma | Alfonso Cuarón | 2018 | |
| 2 |  Dekalog | Krzysztof Kieślowski | 1988 | |
| 3 |  Three Colors box set, 3 films | |||
| 4 |  Harakiri | Masaki Kobayashi | 1962 | |
| 5 |  Eclipse Series 38: Masaki Kobayashi Against the System box set, 4 films | |||
| 6 |  Straw Dogs | Sam Peckinpah | 1971 | |
| 7 |  Raging Bull | Martin Scorsese | 1980 | |
| 8 |  Scorsese Shorts | Martin Scorsese | ||
| 9 |  Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa box set, 4 films |
How far across film history it reaches
1 of the choices is not on the axis: Scorsese Shorts (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
16 of its 17 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 28.4 hours. One of the others is a television series, which has no total on record at all: TMDB gives one episode's length, not a series'. 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 9 choices had been taken by 6.33 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Eclipse Series 38: Masaki Kobayashi Against the System, taken by this visit alone.
This visit reached the work of Alfonso Cuarón, through Roma, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.