Few have noted that Chantal Akerman’s last film No Home Movie and her death in 2015 represented, more than any other work of art or event, the receding of a certain form of cinema and a certain way of thinking about film. While this formal and conceptual approach known as modern cinema has not yet come to an end, its adventurers have become rare; Chantal Akerman was the most singular of them all. For Akerman, ‘modern’ was probably not a rallying cry, but simply a word with ambiguous implications, such as when she used it in the first screenplay of Jeanne Dielman, 23,…