Les femmes d’Anvers en Novembre (Women of Antwerp in November), 2007. Video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris. Photo by David Ulmer

What is it about women and cigarettes?

I went to the Contemporary Art Museum Sunday to see Chantal Akerman’s “Moving Through Time and Space” one more time. It was closing day, and I wanted to see again ”D’est” (From the East), her brilliant video installation of a wintry Moscow soon after the fall of the Soviet Union.

But mostly I went to see “Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre” (Women of Antwerp in November), the new piece Akerman made for this traveling exhibition. It was not ready for viewing when I was there to review the show, and when I went back to see it about a month ago, it was experiencing technical difficulties — its imagery was fluttering. (There’s always something with video, film and audio projects, isn’t there?)

Although the video projection seemed to be out of focus, my effort was well rewarded. “The Women of Antwerp” was the most beautiful of the five projects that made up the show. And how could it not be? The women of Antwerp in the video did nothing but smoke, and Akerman, a committed, apparently unrepentant, smoker, captured without apology the seductive appeal of the burning weed wrapped in thin white paper. In 2007, in collaboration with fellow smoker and Belgian Jan Fabre, Akerman created a theater piece that included a paean to smoking that concluded, “I am faithful to the pleasure that is killing me.”

The piece comes in two parts. In a wall-size projection, a woman, whose face fills the wall, smokes a cigarette down to its butt in a short 4 minutes. (This reminded me of a multi-channel video by Sam Taylor-Wood I saw in London about 10 years ago. The work, the title of which I forget, was about the dregs of a party in an upper-class bohemian house in London. One of the shots, static like those of Akerman, focused on the bored face of Marianne Faithfull, who slowly dragged away on her cancer stick, equally unapologetically.)

On the opposite wall, a five-part frieze tells 20 short stories in 20 minutes, the number corresponding to the number of cigarettes in a pack. The stories are mixed up, and the same actresses play multiple roles, so you can’t easily follow the stories unless you commit yourself to watching it repeatedly. But that’s not really necessary — you get enough information from the fragmented imagery to keep you interested. (Certainly it’s more interesting than “Coffee and Cigarettes,” the unfortunate Jim Jarmusch film on a similar subject of a few years ago.) There’s the drunken woman in the party dress stumbling through the streets, the three students smoking in the rain outside a school building, a woman sitting by herself on a park bench, two women in a bar. All the images are shot at night and there is no sound. There is enough existentialism to bring back the ghost of Jean Seberg. In a number of gorgeous black and white shots of blank female faces enshrouded in silvery coronas of smoke, Bette Davis and the stars of an age when the movies really were projected on silver screens are invoked.

What is it about women and cigarettes? A lifelong non-smoker, I don’t really know, but after watching “The Women of Antwerp in November” I think I have a better idea.