1 Apr 2023

François Girard’s Closet Picks

The writer and director reminisces about seeing Short Cuts at the Venice Film Festival, selects Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence out of love for Ryuichi Sakamoto, and takes home the one Stanley Kubrick film he hasn’t see.

François Girard: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

10

9 single, 1 box set

single films

9

chosen on their own

box sets

1

one choice, many films

films reached

16

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.

138 Rashomon 1950 265 Short Cuts 1993 536 The Thin Red Line 1998 535 Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence 1983 575 The Killing 1956 726 Macbeth 1971 SET Eclipse Series 2: The Documentaries of Louis Malle 870 Othello 1952 886 L’argent 1983 1150 Exotica 1994

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Rashomon	Akira Kurosawa	1950	6
2	Short Cuts	Robert Altman	1993	5
3	The Thin Red Line	Terrence Malick	1998	2
4	Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence	Nagisa Oshima	1983	3
5	The Killing	Stanley Kubrick	1956	5
6	Macbeth	Roman Polanski	1971	2
7	Eclipse Series 2: The Documentaries of Louis Malle box set, 7 films			5
8	Othello	Orson Welles	1952	2
9	L’argent	Robert Bresson	1983	5
10	Exotica	Atom Egoyan	1994	2

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1950 to 1998, box sets 1962 to 1986

Eclipse Series 2: The Documentaries of Louis Malle

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

15 of its 16 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 25.6 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 10 choices had been taken by 3.7 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 The Thin Red Line, taken by 2 visits in total.

This visit reached the work of Atom Egoyan, through Exotica, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com