This review of Brice Dellsperger, Refreshing Fassbinder ...and others at Team gallery in New York
was initially published in the Huffington Post 02/09/2011
Brice Dellsperger.
Body Double 27 (After In a Year with 13 Moons). 2010.
(video still).
Courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery New York.
French artist Brice Dellsperger continues to surprise and fascinate us with two new films from his ongoing series, Body Double a title referencing both Brian de Palma's movie and its literal meaning. For the past fifteen years Dellsperger's series has offered us strange and powerful remakes of movies like Hitchcock's Psycho , Georges Lucas' Return of the Jedi, Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho or de Palma's Blow out.
Currently on view at Team Gallery in New York are his latest two remakes. In the main room, Body Double 27 serves as a remake of Rainer Fassbinder's In a Year with 13 Moons. Occupying a small room at the back, Body Double 22 is a remake of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. In the artist's version of Fassbinder's film, a threechannel video installation, the same scene is repeated, side by side by different actors. The scene the artist selected is the one in which one of the characters, Anton, cross dresses to seduce his coworker, is rejected by him and cries. This scene, played over and over is poignant and beautiful.
In his Eyes Wide Shut remake, Dellsperger again meets his long time accomplice, brilliant and generous artist, JeanLuc Verna. The later incarnates all the film's characters (male and female) with humor, vigor and focus (which must be quite demanding considering that for him the film is a succession of monologues). Together they bring us into the spiral of few key scenes of the movie, the recurring and final one being the famous masked ball where Verna exhibits his superb body.
Dellsperger uses each film as material, extracting from it dialogues, gestures, content but by doing so, he creates something that transcends it. He tears each movie apart, he does not care much about authenticity, lipsynch, and digital mishaps. He plays with and displaces archetypes and cinema's mythology, covering and revealing them at the same time. Through multiple and fascinating layers, he reveals other archetypes and meanings. Ultimately, and most importantly, he manages to touch us. By breaking resemblances, he actually creates heartrending resemblances.
Anne Couillaud