2 Oct 2024
RaMell Ross’s Closet Picks
The director and cowriter of Nickel Boys praises The Qatsi Trilogy as “vital for understanding the visual world,” quotes from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil , and talks about watching Bruce Lee movies with his dad.
RaMell Ross: 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 Tin Drum | Volker Schlöndorff | 1979 | |
| 2 |  World of Wong Kar Wai box set, 7 films | |||
| 3 |  La Jetée/Sans Soleil box set, 2 films | |||
| 4 |  Mirror | Andrei Tarkovsky | 1975 | |
| 5 |  Stalker | Andrei Tarkovsky | 1979 | |
| 6 |  Cameraperson | Kirsten Johnson | 2016 | |
| 7 |  The Qatsi Trilogy box set, 3 films | |||
| 8 |  To Sleep with Anger | Charles Burnett | 1990 | |
| 9 |  Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai | Jim Jarmusch | 1999 | |
| 10 |  Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits box set, 5 films | |||
| 11 |  Jubal | Delmer Daves | 1956 |
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 24films run 41.4 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 225.6 minutes of film for each of its 11 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 11 choices had been taken by 6.27 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Two of them have been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Jubal, taken by this visit alone.
This visit reached the work of Charles Burnett, through To Sleep with Anger, Jim Jarmusch, through Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and Volker Schlöndorff, through The Tin Drum, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.