Kuleshov researched the way in which two different images put together in sequence are capable of creating a concept, as well as recreating different emotions in the viewer. The following are two virtues of visual rhetoric: the reality of the film image consists in an accumulation of fragments that the spectator joins together unconsciously, thereby making sense of the story; and the veiling of this rhetoric allows for a supposedly objective look, which thus creates a narrated history (the meaning of which is, at the same time, questioned by the image).
El efecto Kuleshov – la produccion de sentido is part of a series of experimental studies carried out by Jacobo Sucari around the concept of thinking the image. Whereas in REM. Estudios sobre el comportamiento nocturno / REM. Studies on night time behaviour his focus was on the capacity of human beings to create their own images during sleep or unconscious states, in El efecto Kuleshov – la produccion de sentido Sucari emphasises the physical relationship between images that generates thought.
This is an essay structured like a grand collage of film, advertising, photography and domestic video images. The resulting effect is that of a visual Frankenstein. This is a sequence of images as the development of an open concept, a story about what is displayed and what is veiled: a longing and the subliminal.
In the early years of cinema Kuleshov carried out the famous experiment in which he filmed a shot of an actor’s face with a neutral expression and then edited it with alternating shots of a plate of food, a small dead girl and a sensual woman. The ensuing effect was that the viewer, on seeing each of the different montages, would associate the sequence with a third idea, different in each case: hunger, sorrow and desire. For El efecto Kuleshov – la produccion de sentido Sucari swaps around and dismantles these images and concepts, showing the same actor’s inexpressive face together with small ideas articulated at a more complex level, using the previous three and other concepts. The piece seems like a set of mathematical equations that generate further unknowns.
Jacobo Sucari uses the medium of video as a transmission channel for alternative thinking. By positioning himself outside the mainstream, he plastically dismantles that thinking institutionally represented by the film industry and its by-products which make up that mainstream. His is a subjective practice which classifies images and sounds, and in the process unveils their manipulation. In toying with the idea of the representation of subjectivity, Sucari establishes the context within which an image becomes visible. He makes visible that which is usually veiled: “an objective “past”, which dreams or awaits impatiently in the planetary filmotheques.
