In Dubbing, Pierre Huyghe shows a video projected in a room where there are 15 actors sitting on chairs in a recording studio. The length of the project lasts as long as the film being dubbed. Beneath the image of the studio is the rhythm-track which the actors have seen scrolling past while the video was being shot, consisting of the words and other indications required for the dubbing session. A static shot is used to film the 15 actors, who are dressed in everyday clothes. It is only when a voice becomes apparent that the viewer looks harder at one of their faces or bodies. The viewer does not quite know what film is being dubbed, except that it is not hard to tell that the film in question is Poltergeist, that popular horror movie from the 1980s. Several layers of meaning emerge during the screening. First of all, the viewer witnesses a kind of absence of viewing: the film isn't there. Huyghe here pursues an approach which features in several other projects such as Remake (about actors and acting), and The Ellipse (about editing). Production conditions come to the fore once again, and are “visible”. The actors are not “performing”. What this shooting of a dubbing session allows people to see is the micro-events which occur: waiting, time, mistakes, body gestures and facial language which, in spite of everything, appear during the reading of the script, the emotions which come to the surface despite the technical nature of the job, the relations between actors, and their presence as individuals. A community is created and then dismantled before the viewer's eyes. The opening shot where the seats are empty against a background provided by a blue carpet points right away to the interplay of presence and absence to which the viewer is invited. What exactly are we looking at when we see an image? The viewer is looking at a projection of people looking at another image and giving us snippets of information – i.e. the words scrolling by on the screen. He hears the voices which correspond to the absence of image. To these voices are added the inner voice of the viewer putting the film back together again in his imagination. Far more than this actually, for at the same time as the viewer is visually imagining the narrative being recounted, he finds himself in the position of an analyst, because he is able to take in much more than the lines. At the same time he becomes aware of the other side of the text, its borders, the performative dimension of the words pronounced linked with the subjective features which are displayed by the arrangement set up by Pierre Huyghe. This work is based on the twofold movement of projection and translation. It highlights the interplay of absence and presence which are produced in the context of the two phenomena. As far as the projection is concerned, Huyghe so positions the viewer as to see a projection where the fi lm remains invisible, save for the directions given by the voice of the actors doing the dubbing and by the scrolling strip putting the viewer in the position of dubber. Everyone becomes the double of the other: the viewer doubles the dubbers, who for their part double the actors they see on the screen, which remains invisible to us. This real-life experience of the notion of double, which relates back to the constant failures of the same and the other, is akin to the film's subject: the apparition of an invisible monster, a ghost, come to abduct one of the family's children. The text describes this monster as being a monster of the light which people refuse to enter. The is a phenomenon which is associated to that of strangeness too, which consequently presents the relation to the other. This is certainly what Huyghe puts us in a position to observe, having decided to group his dubbers in the same room to do the recording rather than record them separately, as is usually done with films. We see not only the text transposed into a language other than the original language, but in addition, the written text is transposed into orality. Over and above the meaning of the words, the dimension of the affect linked with the interpretation and translation comes to the fore, individualizing the text all the more. Gestures and vocal textures contribute to this subjectivization. For these reasons, the choice of Poltergeist (which Huyghe incidentally does not publicize, letting the viewer guess), certainly does not seem trifling to us. What is more, we note that what is involved is showing the translation into French of an American movie. This choice does not appear trifling either, given the importance of American cinema in the history of modern sensibility and the political nature of its growing hegemony. Dubbing “questions word and time through the interpretation of the narrative,” says Huyghe. His work demonstrates how the subject shows through, despite the metanarratives which inform everydayness.

Chantal Pontbriand

Translated by Simon Pleasance