A MAN JUMPS INTO THE WATER

A man submerges himself in a lake in a Buenos Aires park, and no one sees him reemerge. Starting out from this unsolvable and mysterious brief news item, the meaning of which blurs the deeper we try to dig, Nicolás Zukerfeld constructs a film that unfolds less like an investigation and more like a meander. It is not so much about finding out what’s happened as measuring the distance that separates an event from the narratives that try to give an account of it.

The river bank, the deserted park, the various voices taking turns and overlapping – the film gathers clues that fail to amount to evidence. Each new approach shifts the narrative’s centre of gravity to some extent, like any description with its own blind spot. Where the news item aspires to settle the facts, Zukerfeld multiplies the points of view, the registers and textures, opening up a space where uncertainty becomes a method.

Marked by the anachronism of the photochemical medium, the images themselves have the consistency of a trace. Like the trees, the paths and the reflections the water records, they too are survivors, without our really knowing what of. The landscape acquires a strange density: it stops being a background and becomes a silent deposition onto whose surface are incorporated movements and signs whose source remains hidden.

The remains gathered by the film do not only refer to the news item. Rather, they bring to mind other losses, other interrupted stories, other images that may never reach their full form. Between essay, investigation, and meditation, Un hombre se tira al agua finds in the elusiveness of its materials an unexpected research tool. Faced with an increasingly opaque reality, the film offers an even more patient focus on that which defies explanation.
Manuel Asín