Details presents a succession of scenes filmed in static shots, sometimes in black and white, sometimes in color. The viewer is led to guess the motif through a black mask in which a word is cut out, different in each scene: INSTEAD, BECOMING, CONTINUE, ALONE, UNKNOWN, ESTATIC, FORGOTTEN, EXPECT..

The letters cut into the black screen, allowing us to glimpse a scene filmed by the artist: the camera positioned parallel to the road while travelling by car, perpendicular to the traffic on a street in New York, facing the museum wall during an installation for the artist's exhibition...

Each suggested scene corresponds to a word. If the relationship between the meaning of the word and what is being acted out through it is based on association of ideas, this association is purely arbitrary and fortuitous. 

The rhythm of the appearances is punctuated by a black, silent screen. This ‘black' marks a pause before the opening of a new scene and seems to release the background sound that inhabits it. The system also operates a syncretic return to silent cinema, grafting the principle of intertitles onto the filmed image itself. But here, the ‘card', i.e. the word, indicates nothing about what is happening or what is about to happen; it is simply superimposed on the moving image.

Robert Barry attributes the function of framing to words and reformulates the link between language and image. He thus seems to take a radically opposite stance to that of F.W. Murnau, who believed that ‘the ideal film would not need text'.