Closet Picks

3 Oct 2025

Sergei Loznitsa’s Closet Picks

The writer and director talks about the connection between Le corbeau and Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom; praises the strength of Kira Muratova and Larisa Shepitko; and selects Deep Crimson for his friend, Arturo Ripstein.

Sergei Loznitsa: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices
6
3 single, 3 box sets
single films
3
chosen on their own
box sets
3
one choice, many films
films reached
10
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.

single film, with its spine number box set

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1943 to 1996, box sets 1966 to 1994
Eclipse Series 11: Larisa Shepitko
Eclipse Series 29: Aki Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys
Brief Encounters / The Long Farewell: Two Films by Kira Muratova
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

Its 10films run 15.6 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 155.8 minutes of film for each of its 6 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 6 choices had been taken by 3.17 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Three of them have been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Brief Encounters / The Long Farewell: Two Films by Kira Muratova, taken by this visit alone.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com