The films of Nicolás Zukerfeld pit images against words, staging wily games of onscreen meaning-making. Literary miscellanea often spur the ambulatory narratives of the Argentine director’s works: a mysterious letter opens into two Rashomon-esque views of a street encounter in the short La distancia entre las cosas (2008); annotated articles and battered books punctuate the post-breakup meanderings of the characters in the feature-length Winter Comes After Autumn (2016), co-directed by Zukerfeld and his frequent collaborator Malena Solarz; and a page number scribbled on a photocopy brings together a community of cinephiles in the duo’s short, Let Us Now Praise Movies (2017). At a certain point in each film, these incidental connections turn into contests: a voice reads or narrates text over tenuously related visuals, the two mediums wrestling for our interpretive attention.
But Zukerfeld and Solarz’s (2020), seems to declare a victor. A thirdperson narrator describes the movements and thoughts of a young filmmaker as he wanders through the Spanish city of Vigo at night, waiting for his friends, “Nicolás and Malena,” to join him. As the filmmaker takes in the vibrant Christmas lights canopying the streets, the narrator tells us that he’s contemplating making a film about the evening’s encounters and sights. It would be “a movie made of…” the voice begins to say, but it breaks off mid-sentence; a flurry of images follows, completing the thought. What movies are made of—shots, pictures of and in motion—exceeds language, the film suggests; or perhaps the idea is that it’s more efficient to make a movie than to describe it. The film theorist Christian Metz put it rather well: “A film is difficult to explain because it’s easy to understand.”
