Much of direction is production: the material conditions under which a movie is made plays a major role in the creative process. Movie lovers tend to think of producers as dictators of formulas, oppressors of originality, the enemies of art, but that just reflects the unfortunate history of studio filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. In fact, producing a movie can be a kind of art in itself, a practical imagining of possibilities for filmmakers that they wouldn’t themselves have come up with. The complete retrospective of Chantal Akerman’s work that runs at MOMA from September 11th to October 16th includes a superb instance of this phenomenon—of visionary production fostering directorial artistry—in her “Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels,” an hour-long movie fr

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