Body Double
Anne Bonnin invites the artist Brice Dellsperger.
Listen to the lecture on France Culture !
Since 1995, Brice Dellsperger has been creating video remakes of scenes from famous genre films – American ones for the most part. His filmography includes: Alfred Hitchcock, Brian de Palma, David Lynch, Gus Van Sant, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Zulawski. He has given his project the single, general title Body Double, borrowed from a film by Brian de Palma, but he distinguishes each work by a number. Body Double means “stand-in”, and this underlines the two principal aspects of his art: the duplication operations that a remake implies, and the bodies that perform them. “The postulate behind the Body Double films is primarily a concept, that of replacing the visual elements of a film with a body that is foreign to the film.” This foreign body is not only that of the actor, but also that of the viewer, whom the artist takes along on a captivating exploration of the self.
The body of work making up Body Double currently consists of 35 videos. Brian de Palma ranks first in terms of the number of films remade: 15 out of 35. This singles him out as a mentor who, over time, turned into the artist’s spiritual or virtual fellow traveller. Dellsperger gives shape and body – a new body – to the viewer’s experience of cinema, deploying many of its facets. He intensifies the cinematographic hypnosis, which is broken up into several points of view. Many details draw attention to the staging, producing mise-en-abyme effects: cross-dressing characters, visible make-up, scenery, special effects, voice-dubbing. Viewers of the Body Double videos watch stagings of stagings. Attention latches onto details that hold together the seams of the constructed scenes and images. Dellsperger’s re-films are dizzying. They provoke a split in the viewer’s consciousness, linking detachment with psychodrama. One becomes the voyeur of that viewer which each of us is. They draw us into a game that is joyful, funny and deeply disturbing, because Dellsperger’s films are imbued with that passion-fuelled, instinctual violence that characterises genre film and most of the scenes in his filmography.
On 27 March, Brice Dellsperger will reveal his latest new works, and show us round his studio’s backstage. And that’s not all: we will do a bit of cine-genealogy and psypho-cinephilia, since the artist will also talk to us about his relationship with film since childhood.
Brice Dellsperger was born in Cannes in 1972. He lives and works in Paris and has been teaching at the ENSAD since 2003.
Since 1995, Brice Dellsperger has been developing the series Body Double, a readymade title borrowed from Brian de Palma.
From film to film, from remake to remake, he explores the doubling process: the characters are performed by a single actor, and the actors are often turned into actresses. His films have been presented at numerous international film festivals and have been acquired by many private and public collections. His works can be found in the collections at MoMA, at the Musée d’Art Moderne in the Centre Pompidou, and at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. In 2019, he will be presenting solo exhibitions at Villa Arson and La Station (Nice), as well as during the Printemps de Septembre festival (Toulouse). In 2018, his works were shown in a solo exhibition at Marsèlleria (Milan). He has also been invited to participate in numerous group exhibitions, at such institutions as the FRAC Ile-de-France – Le Plateau (Paris), the FRAC Poitou-Charentes (Angoulême), news of the world (London), Le Tripostal (Lille), Haus der Kunst (Munich), and the Swiss Institute (New York).
