8 Apr 2025

Tunde Adebimpe’s Closet Picks

The musician and actor talks about what makes Stan Brakhage’s films “very punk rock,” reflects on working with Jonathan Demme, and selects favorite films such as Black Girl and True Stories.

Tunde Adebimpe: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

8

6 single, 2 box sets

single films

6

chosen on their own

box sets

2

one choice, many films

films reached

23

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.

842 Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams 1990 140 8½ 1963 SET By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two 951 True Stories 1986 852 Black Girl 1966 1083 Pariah 2011 13 The Silence of the Lambs 1991 SET Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954–1975

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams	Akira Kurosawa	1990	3
2	8½	Federico Fellini	1963	18
3	By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two box set, 2 films			3
4	True Stories	David Byrne	1986	7
5	Black Girl	Ousmane Sembène	1966	7
6	Pariah	Dee Rees	2011	2
7	The Silence of the Lambs	Jonathan Demme	1991	4
8	Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954–1975 box set, 15 films			8

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1963 to 2011, box sets 1954 to 1975

Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954–1975

a single film, at its year a box set, across the years of its films the collection, by decade

1 of the choices is not on the axis: By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two (no year on record for its films). 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

Its 23films run 43.6 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 327.1 minutes of film for each of its 8 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 8 choices had been taken by 6.5 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 Pariah, taken by 2 visits in total.

This visit reached the work of David Byrne, through True Stories, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com