Friday 4 November 2016

SERGIO LAIGNELET AND THE KULESHOV EFFECT

Sergio Laignelet as the Big Bad Wolf
“The three little pigs
walk back home
in their shorts”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:




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