He has made more than fifty films in little more than thirty years. Mention his name to anyone with knowledge of the movie industry and the responses are almost always sighs of admiration for his visual poetry and documentary essays and for his trademark independence and artistic integrity, demonstrated in films like Instrument (1999), a film ten years in the making about the band Fugazi; Benjamin Smoke (2000), also a decade in filming, on the titular singer-songwriter; and Museum Hours (2012), a drama about a museum visitor and a security guard, set in the Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.