On a Frame from "A Sleepless Night"

Joaquín Camp

On a Frame: Joaquín Camp

One of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movies is Rear Window.

In the film L.B. Jefferies—played by James Stewart—breaks his leg and must stay at home until he recovers. Jefferies decides to pass the time looking out the window at the different apartments in the neighborhood and discovers, by snooping, several different narratives. When the writer of A Sleepless Night, Micaela Chirif, sent me the text of the book, I realized that there was both a main story (Elisa, a little baby who can’t stop crying) and the simultaneous smaller stories of all the neighbors, like in Rear Window.

In some ways, we can say that all the characters in the building are little parts of a composite character that wants to help put the girl to sleep.

Micaela is the perfect writer to work with because she manages to open up very imaginative worlds, while giving the illustrator a lot of space to develop their ideas. Each character in the story had solely a small written description of themselves; I had to complete the rest with my drawings.

I chose this page because it seems to be the most representative of the story—that’s why it ended up being the cover of the book. I like the lighting in the scene: all the characters are in blue tones except for those in Elisa's room. It is very theatrical because, thanks to these contrasting colors, it is as if all other activity has frozen except for the spotlight on Elisa.

Another thing that I like in this scene is the representation of sound. You can almost hear Elisa crying. I have a young daughter and, believe me, trying to put her to sleep when she is in a bad mood is a very complicated task indeed. The creative effort required to put a baby to sleep is a challenging endeavor; suddenly you have to invent songs, dances, voices, etc. Everything helps. I think that this idea is expressed well in the spread.

One of the more interesting aspects of my work is its ridiculousness. This text allowed me to take the ridiculous to the extreme, from a neighbor who lives with fish to animals dressed as dancing fruit. It really fascinates me to see how far ridiculousness can go, because this stretching is really where I find my freedom.