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| Sergio Laignelet as the Big Bad Wolf |
“The three little
pigs
walk
back home
in their shorts”
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| The Master's words |
In 1964 Fletcher Markle interviewed Alfred Hitchcock for the CBS. In
this interview the great master explains the Kuleshov effect: how to create
suspense just by juxtaposing images. He makes us imagine a middle-aged man in
close-up. He’s looking at something. Now the camera shows a mother playing with
her child in the park. Back to the man, we can see his reaction to what he’s
seeing: he’s smiling like a kindly man. Then Hitchcock suggests that we
substitute the mother and the child for a young girl in a bikini. What do we
perceive in the man’s smile now? The grin of a pervert.
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| The Birds |
The Dutch artist Erwin Olaf invites us to peep into two keyholes. In
the first one we can see a man in his forties with a little boy on his knees.
He caresses his hair while he reads him a story. The scene is unsettling,
probably because of the rough quality of the man’s bony hands, which contrast
with the infant’s skin. If we look into the second keyhole, we’ll see the same
boy sitting on a matronly woman’s lap. She’s doing exactly the same, but her
gestures exude warmth and cosiness.
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| Sergio Laignelet |
The Colombian poet Sergio Laignelet disturbs us with his “Tales without
Fairies”, a collection of poems in which he twists the comforting world of our
childhood bedtime stories. In just a few verses, with an amazing economy of
words, he manages to awaken our most terrifying nightmares. Sergio starts with the
seed of a story in his head. The writing process will be long and agonizing. There
will be innumerable versions he’ll submit to the critical eye of his partner
Fernanda, witness of the evolution of a long story that finally simmers down to
a few words with the effect of a punch in the stomach.
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| Sergio Laignelet |
“Later on
tied to a bed in
a motel room
with the shorts
around their ankles
they break into tears
Meanwhile
exhausted and out
of breath sleeps the wolf”
Finally, Sergio
prints the poem and files it away in a folder he made a long time ago with his
sister’s riding boots. Disturbing.
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| Sergio Laignelet & Lorenzo Hernandez |
© Photos: Lorenzo Hernandez 2016.
Laignelet,
Sergio, Cuentos sin hadas / Contes à
l’envers, édition bilingue, Éditions Villa-Cisneros, 2015.
More about Serdio
Laignelet at:
The exhibition “Hitchcock.
Más allá del suspense” (Hitchcock. Beyond
Suspense) can be visited at Espacio Fundación Telefónica (Madrid) until 7 February 2016.
Hitchcock explains
the Kuleshov to Fletcher Markle:
