Ottawa Tonite.com : Section Title

 

WORLD PREMIERE

Body Double: Works by Brice Dellsperger

Presented by SAW Video and

Inside Out Ottawa-Gatineau LGBT Film and Video Festival

 

For the 2009 edition of Inside Out Ottawa-Gatineau LGBT Film and Video Festival, SAW Video is presenting a program of videos and an artist’s presentation by Paris-based filmmaker Brice Dellsperger.

We are proud to host Dellsperger in Ottawa for this world premiere screening of his work before he heads to Montréal for a second screening.

 

Ottawa Program:

Video screening of Body Double, Followed by Q&A with the artist
5pm, Saturday, November 21, 2009
National Gallery of Canada, Auditorium

 

Artist presentation
12:30pm, Monday, November 23, 2009
Ottawa University
100 Laurier Ave., Room #114

Description

For the 2009 edition of Inside Out Ottawa-Gatineau LGBT Film and Video Festival, SAW Video is pleased to present a program of videos by Paris-based filmmaker Brice Dellsperger, who, for more than a decade has produced remakes of archetypal sequences of cult movies (Dressed to Kill, Return of the Jedi, Saturday Night Fever…) forming a series of over 20 works entitled Body Double. Through meticulously collaged soundtracks, and substituting the original characters for one or two actors who play all the roles, Dellsperger questions the hierarchy of roles and overturns Hollywood conventions of gender relationships. In a Brice Dellsperger film, gender is not what it seems: male actors play women playing men, and heterosexual characters become queer.

The films Dellsperger selects for his digital partners have pre-existing complicated relations to sexuality and identity. For example; in Body Double 16 (2003) based on A Clockwork Orange (dir. Stanley Kubrick) and Women in Love (dir. Ken Russell) both films speak about relationships caught in a debate between love, lust, and violent hate. The artist uses a single actor in drag to replicate all the roles in this complex digital manipulation. Other films in the program include Body Double 23 (2007) based on The Black Dahlia (dir. Brian De Palma), which is in turn loosely based on the real life murder of Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress found dead in 1920s California; and Body Double 19/20 (2004) based on Flash Gordon (dir. Mike Hodge), in which Dellsperger replaces the heroic Flash Gordon characters with female figures, twisting our notion of empirical domination. Completing the program is the world premiere of Body Double 22 (2009) a remake of the feature film Eyes Wide Shut (dir. Stanley Kubrick), in which French actor and visual artist Jean-Luc Verna plays all the roles – resulting in a triumph of gender-bending oddities.

“Brice Dellsperger, with dressing and making up, shows us it’s still possible to realize our desires that come from a cinematographic imaginary.”

- NY Arts Magazine

 

Special Programming

Dellsperger will be in attendance at the Inside Out Ottawa-Gatineau LGBT Film and Video Festival thanks to support from the Canada Council for the Arts  and the Embassy of France, and will be available for Q&A after the screening of his work. Dellsperger will also be presenting a behind-the-scenes view of his practice as part of the public lectures series for the Visiting Artist Program at the Ottawa University, November 23^rd at 12:30pm (talk will be given in French). Finally, the artist will travel to Montréal for a second presentation of his work at the Cinémathèque québécoise, Thursday, November 26^th at 7pm followed by Q&A facilitated by independent curator and artist Philippe Hamelin. This event is co-hosted by Espace Vidéographe.

 

Bio

Brice Dellsperger was born in 1972 (Cannes, France) and has been making films for over a decade. His international reputation is preceded by travels to Switzerland, USA, Austria, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, Italy, France and now Canada for film presentations, artist talks, and exhibitions. In 2002 the artist had a groundbreaking exhibition at the New York gallery Team, where he received high praise from many critics, including New York critic Roberta Smith who included the artist in her art review in a small group of “Most gratifying Dark-room experiences”. He is collected in museums — Sammlung Goetz (Munich), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (PACA, Poitou-Charentes, and Puteaux) — and has been featured in many articles and publications. Currently, Dellsperger is the gallerist of Air de Paris and teaches at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

 

Montreal Program:

Screening of Body Double and artist discussion facilitated by Philippe Hamelin
7pm, Thursday, November 26, 2009
Cinémathèque québécoise, 335, boul. de Maisonneuve Est
Co-hosted by Espace Vidéographe

 

SAW Video is an artist-run-centre committed to support ground breaking artistic production, presentation and programming of independent video and media art. SAW Video provides many services to its membership including affordable technical facilities, and a wide range of programmes designed to create an atmosphere that will inspire production through the exchange of ideas around form, content and style.

Tags: bodydouble, bricedellsperger, Film, sawvideo

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.