Inside Out - Living Costume in Brice Dellsperger's Body Double (X), Drake Stutesman for the Fashion in Film, ICA, London, 2008

Prejudice is one of the subtlest forms of crime. In Body Double (X) (2000) French video artist Brice Dellsperger reconstructs Andrezej Zulawski’s cult film L' Important c'est d'aimer (The Important Thing is to Love, 1975) to explore the cultural prejudices around narrative and, as such, how it defines “self.” He wishes to “empty the fiction and draw out all the action, of the [original] film […] so that it would no longer be anything more than an empty shell.”1 He “question[s] identity”2 by stripping a story of its acceptable genre and replacing it with another. His aim, in his revisionist art, is to make, as he puts it, a “dreamlike memory of a movie.”3 But what is fascinating about Body Double (X), among many aspects, and where Dellsperger departs from other artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon and Ute Friedrike Jürss who dismantle and reassemble classic cinema in their work, is that, in his desire to re-approach “narrative” as a form and wash it away, he has created an intensely substantial work that neither derides nor exalts its original.4 Body Double (X) transubstantiates or re-inhabits L' Important c'est d'aimer to become something entirely new and yet retain its melodramatic feeling. Dellsperger creates this particularly with clothes and the body of performance artist Jean-Luc Verna who acts out all the film’s roles. Mouthing the voices (for 102 minutes of the 113 minute feature), Verna appears in numerous, overlapping versions of himself and in the drag costumes of male/ female/ young/ old. He plays each part convincingly.
L' Important c'est d'aimer, starring Romy Schneider and Fabio Testi as lovers, is a perfect vehicle for this exploration of prejudice because, in the film, people are used and objectified. Not so much amoral as fallen, they struggle in a demi-world of exploitation, drugs, and despair. Schneider is a stage actress forced into soft porn films and Testi, a photojournalist with a past in Algeria and Vietnam, forced to photograph gay and straight sex. Though this is the periphery of criminal life, the film is not interested in crimes themselves. Rather crime is a syndrome and the crimes within L' Important c'est d'aime are emotional – they are crimes against humanity. Body Double (X) confronts the detriments of this objectification by “objectifying” the film.
To do this, Dellsperger faithfully matched the original - scene by scene, set by set, shot by shot. He used real locations - darkened rooms, crumbling mansions, corridors, walled stairways or open grassy areas – because he wanted “the constraints imposed by the scenery/background” found in “places that offered the same spatiality as in the original.”5 Similarly he kept the swirling or tracking shots, close-ups, and fluorescent-like lighting. His devices of interruption also match the film, which is punctuated by abrupt cuts (by editor Christiane Lack who won the Best Editing César) and by comedic sounds in George Delerue’s otherwise lyrical score.
Set into this duplicate, digital cinema is Verna - his acting, his body movements, his facial diversity, his wigs, make up and costumes. But it is the costumes,6 faithful to the original look, fabric, style, cut or tailoring, that speak the loudest and with the most coherence because costumes carry profound narrative codes. The dirty outfit, tailored outfit, sexy outfit or drag outfit is predictably interpreted. Though, here, the clothes are a gay reference, they still make the Body Double (X) characters recognizable. But Dellsperger explores clothes (as drag) through clothes (as cultural classifications) by subverting their social placement. How and where is a man dressed as a woman playing a man positioned? With these kind of questions disrupting the narrative, what happens to the cinematic fantasy world, what happens to the storyline, if referents, such as clothes, are played as referents? This manipulation of dress exploits the tension between clothes and costume. As Deborah Landis, costume designer and former head of the American Costume Designer’s Guild, states – “Costumes are never clothes.”7 What she means is that we perceive costumes as clothes but they aren’t – costumes are simply part of a production. They aren’t for street wear or for couture. Drag can easily comfort the audience into false security – it’s “only drag.” To see Body Double (X) as an exercise in drag misses the point. In the video, the clothes, both as drag costumes and as “clothes,” are the overt storyline. The only solid structure inside Verna’s and Dellsperger’s replications, they allow the viewer to move freely between the remake’s instabilities because they steady the plot as much as undermine interpretations of it. Dellsperger wants to empty the narrative of narrative, then he seems to want to reinvent the narrative within clothes – so that they aren’t even “drag.” They are something else – a new story.
Drag, by its subversion, tends to expose rather than obscure, because it jolts the expectation. Dellsperger plays with the notion of “hiding,” key to any crime. He hides in plain sight by subverting the idea of disguise. What happens to audience expectations if L' Important c'est d'aimer’s melodrama and its stock players are swallowed by Dellsperger’s and Verna’s soulful but Brechtian enactment of it? They rely on the costumes. Verna’s “drag” is the melodramatic narrative. The clothes are read and the story understood. As such, Dellsperger’s videos can be seen through fashion. Since the mid 1800s when Baudelaire’s famously declared “fashion” as modernity’s most distinctive sign, a focus on clothing as a touchstone of social reality has continued to escalate. In a recent collection of interviews with designers, editor Francesca Alfano Miglietti, aligns style with new social perceptions of the body and quotes fashion sociologist Patrizia Calefato – “[D]ressing exposes a body to an ever-present possible metamorphosis, and the fashion of our times has allowed itself to recount these metamorphoses… In this way fashion has permitted the confusion of sexual roles, made visible on the surface that which was beneath (labels, lingerie, seams), inverted the covering function of fabrics by adopting transparencies, broke the equilibriums and rigid functionalisms of traditional costume and ritual dress […] it has rendered the body a discourse, a sign, a thing.”8 This jumps from Baudelaire’s sense of clothes and replaces clothes as the modern signature with nudity as the modern signature. The body is now what clothing once was but they have a strong symbiosis, often contextual. For example, the nude beach is still risqué because society is offended/titillated by the nude. Yet locker room nudity - prolonged, casual, ugly or beautiful - with strangers, is not risqué.
Dellsperger’s work mines these anomalies. Clothing, and clothing on the body, are the most critical material of his productions and his approach actually does with the body, and its modernity status, what radical couture often claims, (somewhat emptily), to do. How many of today’s couturiers – Alexander McQueen or Vivienne Westwood - or young designers like John Willie or Carol Christian Poell - or even labels such as Yves Saint-Laurent - use fetish wear, S/M, pornography, body mutilations and tattooing in their presentations, ads, and catwalks? There is an intention to “shock” the public with these allegedly outré looks but, so often, these referents are just rehashed heterosexual pornographic images, hence very safe, nothing frightening. It is the same bondage, same kind of nakedness, same objectification of women and very little objectification of men that has been around for thousands of years. There is no departure from these worn out, depressing norms, rather the “new” version is so predictable, so socially comfortable (for men, for women), that it has no deviation in it at all.
Body Double (X) can so easily seem to fall into that category. It can be dismissed as camp or as bordering S/M. However in the video, something else emerges. It is distinct enough to make the viewer wonder what is being displayed and why. Verna has a stupendous ability to act through body language rather than through mimicry. Thus, his own account is that “I sculpt myself.” 9 More so, he sees his body as able to cross the map of all history – “ My basic statement is like this move in ballet, where you have your legs spread all the way out [grand jeté]. One foot is high culture. One foot is rock and roll. And the whole of human civilization is between my legs.”10 He uses his presence. His walk changes drastically while playing Testi, his energy dissipates as Schneider’s husband or his demeanor flattens as Schneider. Verna’s humanity, his flesh and blood, though codified (as a gay man), brings the narrative into a bodily, and thus realistic, context. But his body, with a dancer’s build and flexibility, that at times appears svelte and womanly and at other times appears heavy and male, is also a constant flag that this is not a typical film. Throughout the video, his maleness carries female signature - he always wears a bra and at times, even as Testi, in a masculine stance, Verna’s bust line is featured prominently. He is always a man wearing women’s clothing, (the bra is always present), even while wearing the clothes of young or old men, young or old women or a variety of people who are pretty, dissipated or haggard. He keeps us focused on the “who” of himself without that identity overcoming the characters he is trying to play. That is a remarkable balance and one that serves Dellsperger’s desire to “empty fiction.” Through Verna’s stolid clothes and his solid self, set in a slippery digital space, the narrative – and all its myriad connotations and intentions - is ever there and ever full but with a fluid life. It can’t be pinned down.

1 - Quoted in REMAKE, Thierry Davila, Exhibition Catalogue (English PDF)
2 - Brice Dellsperger, Introduction to Body Double (X)
3 - Quoted in Sexual Reproduction, Michael Fallon, City News, 2003
4 - In 1995, Dellsperger started what he called his Body Double series, short videos (to date there are 24) which remake, reset and rework sections from well know feature films, many American – from Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) to My Own Private Idaho (Gus van Sant, 1991) and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). Most are from Brian De Palma’s oeuvre such as Body Double (1984), Sisters (1973), Dressed to Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981). The films he chooses to re-invent are themselves multi-layered – full of cultural and cinematic references - and he sees his videos as palimpsests, layering one reality into another. Each, typically only three to fifteen minutes long, re-enacts a scene using the exact soundtrack. In all these “remakes” or “body doubles” of an original film, a few actors will act many roles, wearing expressionistic make up and drag (male as female, female as male or male dressed as female acting as male etc).
5 - Brice Dellsperger
6 - The costumes were devised by Vietnamese American conceptual artist Nicole Tran ba Vang, whose own artwork makes images of nakedness (e.g. breasts or a nude back) appear as if stitched or a removable article of clothing. (Her images appeared in ads for HBO’s sardonic, plastic surgery drama Nip /Tuck).
7 - Screencraft: Costume Design, (Burlington: Focal Press, 2003), p.8 Landis costumed the Michael Jackson music video Thriller (John Landis, US, 1985) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, US, 1981), among many others.
8 - Fashion Statements: Interviews with Fashion Designers, (Milano: Skira Editore, 2006, p.15)
9 - Air de Paris Gallery description of Body Double (X)
10 - Quoted in Sexual Reproduction, Michael Fallon, City News, 2003