BISSFF2025 | Correspondence 通信计划051：A Robin in the Room 屋中的知更鸟

BISFF Correspondence 通信计划

This program involves conducting brief email interviews with the directors of the international films featured in the festival, in lieu of the traditional Q&A session that follows the screenings. Through this program, we hope to provide a platform for filmmakers to discuss their work and share their insights with our audience in China.

为了跨越种种障碍，开辟更多交流空间，我们设置了“BISFF Correspondence 通信计划”，对部分国际单元的参展作者进行系列访谈，这些访谈将在作品放映后发布在联展各个媒体平台。

A Robin in the Room | Un Petirrojo En La Habitación | 屋中的知更鸟

Nicolás Martín Pintos 尼古拉斯·马丁·平托斯

2025 | 0:09:48 | Argentina | Spanish | Asian Premiere

Director: Nicolás Martín Pintos

Interviewer & Translator: Nai Shen

Coordinator & Editor: Suliko

导演：尼古拉斯·马丁·平托斯

采访、翻译：王乃申

统筹、编辑：苏丽珂

Q1: Robins are known for singing at dawn, and in Chinese their name zhīgēng niǎo (知更鸟) literally means “the bird that announces the coming of a new hour.” The robin motif in the film is intriguing: beyond signaling dawn or evoking insomnia and anxiety, it seems to gesture toward something deeper. Could you elaborate on how you conceived this motif and what symbolic or emotional layers you intended it to carry?

A1: Robin birds are generally associated with positive feelings and good omens. One only needs to look at the end of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, where the bird appears by the window on a bright morning, following all the darkness the characters endure. In the case of this essay, the figure of the robin was conceived with a logic that slightly escapes that association, becoming intimately linked to the melancholy of this old love that the character evokes and the phantom of insomnia.

Furthermore, it is connected to the painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which was a very important inspiration during the screenwriting process. In the painting, the bird is close to the lagoon, alongside other birds, and harbors beneath it a man with a look of suffering. This can be seen in one of the final shots of the short film. Upon realizing this, after continuously observing the painting hanging in my room, the bird became a revelatory element and a structuring device in the narrative. Let's say the ending serves to condense that leitmotif of birds that was expanded throughout the entire structure, often orbiting from the off-screen space and the sound design. Thus, the robin is treated in this context as a figure of that dark process of eternal nocturnality that the narrator character goes through. The arrival of dawn is not necessarily something hopeful, but rather a kind of suffering, as another day simply begins again. Darkness, anxiety, and insomnia are also part of its essence.

The robin's song is not pleasant; rather, it is something the character hopes will stop when the person to whom he addresses his words finally makes her way back. This phantom inhabiting the room manages to materialize in every corner of the short film: in the dancer, in the strelitzias — commonly called Birds of Paradise — in the men who cannot sleep in their beds, and in all the fragmented corners of that great garden.

Q2: The film conveys the anxiety, melancholy, and racing thoughts of insomnia. How did you explore audiovisual strategies to communicate these bodily and emotional states?

A2: We can say it was an intense cause-and-effect relationship among the process of writing the voice-over, the aesthetic proposal, and finally, the editing and sound design. Right from the start, the voice-over suggested a detailed journey and an exacerbation of those thoughts, a fruit of not being able to sleep. When we began conceptualizing the short film, there were two clear elements regarding the visuals. On one hand, we would have wide, nocturnal, and liminal spaces of Buenos Aires City, and on the other, details of everyday life. The challenge was figuring out how to thread them together. There was a very important element already established in the script's structure, which was later amplified in the editing: the attempt to decompose the continuum of space and time, something very characteristic of the logic of insomnia.

There is a line within the essay that somewhat summarizes what I am explaining: “You see all these scenes in front of you, and you are there, but at the same time, you are not”. If we consider real life as a sequence of cinematic editing, what gets altered when one suffers from insomnia is the raccord. One jumps from one location to the next, without continuity and often without fully understanding how one got there, as the mind feels as if it were lethargic. Therefore, one of the audiovisual strategies was to propose a journey for the viewer where they could connect with that feeling, jumping from one place to another, working very meticulously on the sound design so that it could enable these sequences and promote an immersive tone, almost like a trip into the narrator's mind.

A Robin in the Room, Nicolás Martín Pintos, 2025

Q3: Compared to the film's expressive music, sound design, and imagery, the voice-over remains unusually calm, functioning almost solely as a vehicle for information. This seems to have become a common voice-over paradigm in essay films. How do you understand the relationship between this “rational voice” and the film's thematic expression?

A3: It is true that there is a common voice style in essays, and I believe it often arises from a creative process that fosters a state of introspective reflection where filmmakers tend to place or focus themselves to decide what they want to express. In any case, I believe it is always a matter of balance, or if you will, dynamic range. That is, the dialogue proposed between the voice-over and what the rest of the chains of sound language answer back. That is why the search for the essay's tone was very important to me, leading me even to record several voice-over options. I didn't want a voice that was highly expressive, nor one that sounded too convalescent, much less one with extroverted or theatrical undertones. I always considered the sound and image to be expressive enough. Therefore, the voice-over had to feel like someone talking at 2 AM who hasn't slept in days, almost on autopilot. The voice in the early morning is usually calm; it is a moment of reflection for any human being who prides themselves on being a nocturnal subject. When one doesn't sleep, one isn't euphoric or overly expressive; one is simply apathetic, monotone, navigating reality in a state of self-absorption.

And there was something fundamental in the conception of this essay: insomnia was not something new for the narrator character. It was something he had been suffering for a while, a kind of friend walking beside him. Consequently, the focusing of the voice-over often operates as a chronicle of detail, due to his life being affected by the lack of sleep.

Q4: The film blends images of many different forms and styles. How did you source and collect these materials? During the editing process, did you follow particular principles to organize and sequence them?

A4: Right from the beginning of the script, the connections between the exterior shots, interiors, and the archive material were already planned. What happened during the editing process is that more and more layers of archival footage were added, as they started to generate a good dialogue with the rest of the filmed material. On the one hand, the search focused on diverse digitized audiovisual sources. Sometimes this search responded to concepts that the editing process itself requested to assemble the sequences and structure the narrative: a chessboard, men struggling to fall asleep, the dancer, the birds, swamps, and gardens. Likewise, there was a proposal to play with color and black and white, with aspect ratios, and even with some shots recorded with a handycam. Let's say that the essay film is a variant within the audiovisual spectrum that allows one to play, contrast, foster dialogue, and co-exist different formats. And in a way, this provided structure for me when aesthetically conceiving the editing of the short film.

During the editing process, the organization and sequencing were often enabled by the poetics proposed by the voice-over and the sound design, since the challenge was to achieve a certain harmony among these dissimilar materials. Sometimes this responded to aesthetic concerns and at other times to narrative ones, but the premise was clear: the editing had to be metric, precise, and absolutely never lose the tone of internal journey that the essay proposed.

A Robin in the Room, Nicolás Martín Pintos, 2025

Q1：知更鸟通常在清晨啼叫，它在中国的名字“知更鸟”意为报时的鸟。影片中的知更鸟意象让人十分好奇，它在黎明到来与失眠焦虑之外似乎带有其他层面的意味，可以请你谈谈这一意象的设计吗？

A1：通常，知更鸟与积极情绪和好兆头相关。不妨回想一下大卫·林奇《蓝丝绒》的结尾：在角色经历了漫长的黑暗后，一只知更鸟出现在清晨的窗边。而在我的这部散文式短片中，知更鸟的意象稍微偏离了这种寓意，与角色追忆的旧爱忧郁、以及失眠的幽灵紧密相连。

此外，它还与《人间乐园》（The Garden of Earthly Delights）那幅画有关，这是我在剧本写作阶段非常重要的灵感来源。画中，这只鸟与其他鸟一齐立于水潭边，并在它身下环护着一个满脸痛苦的人。这个画面也出现在本片的最后一个镜头中。注意到这一点之后，我不断观察着挂在房间里的这幅画，而画中的鸟儿成了叙事中的一个启示性元素和结构性装置。可以说，影片的结尾起到了一种凝聚作用，把贯穿全片、不断从画外空间与声音设计中环绕出现的“鸟的母题”收束起来。因此，在这个语境中，知更鸟被视为一种象征，代表叙述者那无休无止夜间活动的黑暗经历。黎明的到来并不一定意味着希望，而更像是一种痛苦——新的一天又开始了。黑暗、焦虑、失眠也是这种痛苦的本质。

知更鸟的鸣叫并不令人愉悦，不仅如此，它是角色渴盼停止的声音，因为那将意味着他倾诉的对象终于回到了他的身边。这个栖居在房间中的幽灵物化于片中的每个角落：在舞者身上、在鹤望兰（俗称“天堂鸟”）中、在那些躺在床上无法入睡的人们身上，以及在那座宏伟花园每一个支离破碎的角落里。

Q2：影片传达出了失眠过程中的焦虑、惆怅和胡思乱想，你是怎样将这种具有身体性和情绪化的感受和氛围转化为视听表达的？

A2：可以说，本片的旁白写作、美学目标，以及最终的剪辑与声音设计之间都存在一种强烈的因果关系。从一开始，旁白就表明本片是无法入睡带来的一段复杂旅程与纷繁思绪的恶化。在我们构思这部短片时，有两个确定的视觉要素：一个是布宜诺斯艾利斯广阔、夜间的阈限空间，另一个则是日常生活的细节。而如何把它们连接起来就成为了难题。最终，一个在剧本结构中已有的要素，在后期剪辑中成为了关键：那就是对时空连续体的分解，而这是失眠逻辑的一个典型特征。

影片中有一句话多少可以概括我的意思：“你看着眼前的一切景象，你在那里，但同时又不在那里。”如果把现实生活视为一连串的电影剪辑，那么失眠所影响的正是影像的连贯性（raccord）。人物从一个地方跳到另一个地方，缺乏连贯，又搞不清楚自己如何抵达此处，头脑迟钝。因此，本片的视听策略之一是为观众开启一段旅程，让他们能够与不同场所之间的跳跃感产生共鸣；同时，精密化声音的设计，使这些镜头序列得以成立并营造出一种沉浸感，宛若一次进入叙述者内心的旅行。

A Robin in the Room, Nicolás Martín Pintos, 2025

Q3：相较于情绪化的配乐、声音设计和图像，旁白显得格外冷静，仿佛只作为信息传达的中介。这似乎已经成为一种散文电影的旁白范式，你怎么看待这种“理性之声”与影片主题表达之间的关系？

的确，散文电影中有一种共同的声音风格，我认为它源于创造过程中内省的反思状态——电影作者可以在其中决定以何种立场和侧重来表达其意图。但总的来说，我认为这是个平衡问题，或说动态范围的问题——也即旁白与其他参与语言系统的声音之间的对话关系。因此，为本片寻找一种合适的“腔调”对我而言至关重要，我甚至录制了好几种旁白备选方案。我不希望它太具表现力，也不想要虚弱感，更不想它过于外化和戏剧化。因为我始终认为，电影的视听本身已经具备足够的表现力。因此，旁白必须让人感觉是一个几天没有睡觉的人，在凌晨两点以近乎自动化的语气说话。清晨，人的声音是平静的，对于自认是夜间生物的人来说，那是反思的时刻。失眠的人不会亢奋或太外露地表达自己，而只是淡漠、单调地在自我沉湎中游走于现实。

另外，在构思这部散文电影时还有一个基本前提：对叙述者而言，失眠不是突发事件，而是长期相随的状态，几乎像一位旅伴。因此，旁白会更多聚焦于对细节的翔实记述，从而表现失眠对叙述者生活的影响。

Q4：影片混搭了多种形态和风格的图像，你是如何检索收集这些图像的？在剪辑过程，你是否会遵循某种原则组织这些影像？

从剧本一开始，内外景镜头与档案素材之间的衔接就已被规划好。在剪辑过程中，越来越多的档案影像被加进来，因为它们开始与实拍素材产生良性对话。一方面，我们的检索侧重于各种数字化的视听资源——有时这种检索是为了应对剪辑过程中对于组合序列并构建叙事的需求，比如棋盘、难以入眠的男人、舞者、鸟类、沼泽与花园；另一方面，我们也尝试在色彩与黑白之间、在画面长宽比上，甚至在手持摄影上做文章。可以说，作为视听谱系中的一种变体，散文电影允许不同影像格式之间的游戏、比较、对话与共存。在某种程度上，这为我在美学上构思本片的剪辑提供了结构方向。

在剪辑过程中，影像序列的组织与顺序往往由旁白与声音设计的“诗性”来推动，因为挑战就在于如何使这些迥异的素材之间达成某种和谐。而对此的解决思路，无论是出于美学考量，还是叙事需要，都需要遵循一个前提：剪辑必须具有节律感与精确性，并且绝不能丧失一部散文电影所呈现的内心之旅的基调。

About the Artist 艺术家简介

Nicolás M. Pintos (Bs As. 1992). He graduated in Image and Sound Design at the University of Buenos Aires, where he also teaches. He has directed one medium-length film and seven short films: Coiffeur (2016), Temporary workers (2017), Vacation in the USA (2018), Essay: Where the true colors sleep (2018), The Hygieias (2018), winner of the INCAA Cine.Ar award, Necochea (2020), The Nest (2023) and A robin in the room (2025).All his projects have been exhibited at various international festivals, in spaces and venues such as MOMus-Experimental Centre for the Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires, Archaeological Museum of Ancient Messene, UNAM, among others.

尼古拉斯·马丁·平托斯（Nicolás M. Pintos，1992年生于布宜诺斯艾利斯）毕业于布宜诺斯艾利斯大学影像与声音设计专业，现于该校任教。他已执导一部中长片与七部短片，包括《理发师》（Coiffeur, 2016）、《临时工》（Temporary Workers, 2017）、《在美国度假》（Vacation in the USA, 2018）、《随笔：真色沉眠之处》（Essay: Where the True Colors Sleep, 2018）、荣获阿根廷国家电影局 Cine.Ar 奖项的《海吉亚斯》（The Hygieias, 2018）、《内科切亚》（Necochea, 2020）、《巢》（The Nest, 2023）及《屋中的知更鸟》（A Robin in the Room, 2025）。他的作品曾在多个国际电影节及艺术机构展映，包括塞萨洛尼基当代艺术博物馆实验艺术中心（MOMus – Experimental Centre for the Arts）、布宜诺斯艾利斯当代艺术博物馆、古墨西尼（Messene）考古博物馆，以及墨西哥国立自治大学（UNAM）等地。

About the Author 作者简介

Nai Shen, PhD candidate at the China Academy of Art, focusing on the reuse and appropriation of found footage, archival image, and ready-made image in film and short-video practices.

王乃申，中国美院在读博士研究生，关注电影与短视频领域中对拾得影像、档案影像与现成影像的利用与开发。

▌more information: https://www.bisff.co/selection/a-robin-in-the-room