Silence and Presence

or certain filmmakers—attractive women—there is a popular kind of on-set photo that telegraphs authority: one eye pressed to the viewfinder of some behemoth camera, she is caught in a contra-glamour shot that codes the pragmatic as cool. Naturally, there is one of Chantal Akerman, taken some time in the late ’70s—shaggy-haired and squinting while filming (1980), a project commissioned for French TV—that has since adorned the various retrospectives and publications bearing her name. It offers a quintessence: here is the artist with her tools of choice, fiercely focused and rapt in her practice. True enough, though I prefer to think of this artist with another set of tools: in a Criterion interview on the making of , Akerman described how she “stitched pieces of time together,” reconstructing fragments to feign the “real time” of a dragged-out present, where a minute onscreen feels like five in the spectating body. “Stitching”: hardier than Tarkovsky’s “sculpting,” and much more pragmatic. Of the editing process for (1993), undertaken with her longtime collaborator, Claire Atherton, Akerman evoked a similar tactility: “I have to be very relaxed, very close to myself, so that I can really feel each shot… when I felt that the shot has gone for just the right length, so that something came through,