11 Nov 2024

Pablo Larraín’s Closet Picks

The director of Maria talks about why Berlin Alexanderplatz is a masterclass on character and capturing a city, praises Maria Callas’s performance in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, and shares how Boyhood is proof that cinema can evoke the feeling of time travel.

Pablo Larraín: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

7

5 single, 2 box sets

single films

5

chosen on their own

box sets

2

one choice, many films

films reached

17

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.

723 Y tu mamá también 2001 SET Pasolini 101 SET Three Colors 411 Berlin Alexanderplatz 1980 839 Boyhood 2014 1012 All About My Mother 1999 612 Certified Copy 2010

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Y tu mamá también	Alfonso Cuarón	2001	9
2	Pasolini 101 box set, 9 films			13
3	Three Colors box set, 3 films			9
4	Berlin Alexanderplatz	Rainer Werner Fassbinder	1980	6
5	Boyhood	Richard Linklater	2014	4
6	All About My Mother	Pedro Almodóvar	1999	7
7	Certified Copy	Abbas Kiarostami	2010	3

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1980 to 2014, box sets 1961 to 1994

Pasolini 101

Three Colors

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

16 of its 17 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 28.8 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 7 choices had been taken by 7.29 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Every one of them has been taken by somebody else too. The least-picked was Certified Copy, taken by 3 visits in total.

This visit reached the work of Alfonso Cuarón, through Y tu mamá también, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com