Nineteen minutes. That's how long this piece runs. A man sits in a wooden chair in the corner of a bare room. Sunlight crosses the floor. Nothing happens. Everything happens. You will want to skip ahead, and that wanting is the work.

Viola was thirty-one when he made this. He placed himself — because it is him, sitting there — in an empty house and let the camera hold its gaze the way a room holds silence after someone stops speaking. The image is black and white, grainy, the kind of low-resolution that makes everything feel remembered rather than seen. He is small in the frame. The room is large. The walls and floor take up most of the picture. You keep looking at him, but the room keeps pulling your attention away, asserting itself. After a while you realize you've been staring at a patch of light on the floorboards for thirty seconds. You've started keeping the room's time instead of your own.

There are sounds — his breathing, amplified. Occasional knocks from somewhere outside or inside the walls. Each one shocks you a little, the way any noise shocks you when you've been alone long enough that silence has become the default. The title promises reasons, but Viola never gives them. The knocking just happens, sourceless, almost biological, like a heartbeat you've become aware of only because everything else has gone quiet.

This is not a portrait of a lonely person. It is closer to a machine for producing the sensation of loneliness inside you. The earlier stops on this tour showed you rooms with solitary figures and asked you to observe their isolation from the outside — through a window, across a threshold. Here there is no outside. The camera doesn't move. The man barely moves. You are in the room with him, and the room is so empty it becomes a third presence, solid as furniture. Duration does this. Three minutes in, you're watching a video. Seven minutes in, you're waiting. Twelve minutes in, waiting has become a texture, a weather. You're no longer watching someone else be alone. You're sitting in your own stillness, and the question of whose loneliness this is — his, yours, the room's — has dissolved.