privilege to the profilmic. She has claimed that she does not make montage films: «My work is close to [Dreyer, Bresson and certain Japanese directors] regarding the use of the camera. What I did in «Jeanne Dielman» are actions in real time: the fixed camera is not, for me, that different from… Warhol.» [5] The fixed focus and extended duration of Akerman's shots create a relatively stable texture that allows one to perceive the disjunctions between body and character, speech and script. The predictability of her methods of framing and cutting forces one to attend instead to her mise-en-scène. Discussing a scene in his «11 X 14» (1976), the minimalist filmmaker Benning confirms this effect of duration: «When you start to watch the smokestack scene it's obviously a smokestack …—but since it's on for seven minutes and a half eventually you have to deal with it as swirling grain on screen. Near the end of the scene, however, a plane comes through, so that after you've begun to look at the image formally it's reintroduced into the narrative. [6] A crucial quality of extended duration, then, is this polarity of reception. The oscillation between (or rather coexistence of) representational

and literal registers can be further proposed as the hyperrealist factor intrinsic to Akerman's cinema. Hyperrealism is understood here as a cinematic translation of the effect of distance that results when a picture or sculpture reproduces a subject which is already an image—when, for example, a Richard Estes painting reproduces a photograph. We are looking at an intermediary, frozen stage of reproduction, which subtly undoes referentiality, presenting it at a second degree of removal. In some hyperrealist art, the emphasis on surface details intimates an estrangement, an excess—one sees more than one needs to in order to «read» the image. Hyperreality is attained through a fake impression of depth, the excess of detail resulting from a fixed stare. At the core of the defamiliarizing hyperrealist image, of its simulacrum effect, lies the hesitation between the literal and the symbolic registers exemplified in the work of Benning and Akerman, as well as in Warhol and Michael Snow's cinema.

Andy Warhol's minimal-hyperrealist cinema can be proposed as a layered, material realism. Even when Warhol records a natural referent (for example in