The art of waiting

Cinema is the one medium that takes your time whether or not you consent. The long take does not describe duration; it administers it — from Akerman's Jeanne Dielman to Tsai Ming-liang, the slow film makes the viewer wait and makes the waiting visible. Theatre does it with a body on stage; music does it with silence held one beat longer than comfort.

And the maker waits too: the poet who waits for words to arrive rather than searching for them, the improviser who listens before playing. This is the other waiting — receptive, chosen, compositional. It occupies the same posture as the queue and not the same position. The rhetoric of patience works by confusing the two; art may be where the difference is easiest to see.