Robert Wilson's nine-minute-four-second video portrait of Isabelle Huppert frames the actress in medium close-up. She appears at first as if motionless, cradling her head in her hands. Her nails and her downturned lips are painted a matching shade of scarlet. Her hands emerge from the sleeves of an oversized knit made of soft fabric that cloaks her tiny frame; the left is ever so slightly higher than the right. Her hair is parted on the left and smoothed down to the right, creating a frame for her alabaster face: her familiar freckles veiled with powder. Her lips are downturned, her eyes thickly made-up under perfectly arched brows and heavy lidded. She seems bored, drowsy. Eighteen seconds in she closes then opens her eyes languidly, almost in slow motion.

For nearly ten minutes, Huppert's eyes are the only thing that move. Each time they open and refocus we are reminded that Huppert knows she is being watched. More than that, she watches us back.

This chapter began life as an intuition, while reading Stanley Cavell's Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, that Isabelle Huppert has something in common with the women who inhabit the titular genre. Ingrid Bergman, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich. But most of all Greta Garbo, the actress Cavell calls ‘the greatest, or most fascinating cinematic image on film of the unknown woman’.

You can imagine my delight, then, when I came across Robert Wilson's video portrait of Huppert, in which she poses as Garbo. This portrait of Huppert is part of a series, inaugurated in 2004, that involves about 50 celebrity subjects, including Salma Hayek as Marlene Dietrich, Winona Ryder as the character Winnie in Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days, and Robert Downey Jr in a modern-day version of Rembrandt's 1632 ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp’. Each of these portraits is shot in high definition; in Wilson's touring exhibition they are displayed on separate plasma screens, playing on a loop. Some of the subjects perform gestures, but many remain still. Seen from a distance they look like a photographic image, but on closer inspection we see the subject is breathing, blinking, perhaps swaying gently.