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About this episode

http://le-too.blogspot.com Tim Barrus: Le Cunt was a video project everyone at Cinematheque contributed to in one way or another. Talk to me about what you liked, what you didn't like, what the challenges were, where does it fall apart, what is it saying.Kilian: Some people will be upset that younger guys were involved in making a video called Le Cunt. It kept changing. Sometimes I was with the paint group. Other times I was with poetry. It was frustrating working with twelve-year-olds in poetry because they would go from not being serious, to being hilarious, to being serious again. So Tim would read the poetry sometimes about two minutes after they had settled on what they wanted.Joachim: It's different from anything we've done. It's too long. But it is what it is. It's not a Hollywood production value thing. It's not commercial. But what I came away from it with was how to work with something on video that is so organic.Qi: We didn't know what to write. It was about a cunt but then it was about the relationships between men and women. Most of the younger guys are more bitter and mean than the older guys -- they don't trust women. I don't really think they knew or understood what they feel until they saw Tim perform what they had written. I think it shook them to be the ones on who the rest of the thing depended. It was an adult theme but I think they did come to terms with it.Nico: It was James' idea to overlap the poetry because it would still tell a story but with a more chant-like structure. I think that part of it worked. What didn't work for me was how the poetry group -- the little boys because that is who they are -- would replace what they had done at the last minute and what Tim got was what they called "the book." With an older guy joining this group and rotating, they would respond in a variety of ways. With Kilian, they pretty much followed his instructions. With me, they pretty much rebelled.Aron: I was with paint and color. We wanted there to be a fluidity to it that we had never approached as a challenge before. It came out more abstractly than we thought it might.Jorris: Tim hates so many people in art and publishing. And they hate him. I think what comes out is how many of them are women, and how he just expects them to be cunts. Like Jessa Crispin. She has this moral code that is actually a business code and anything that doesn't fit into it or abide by her rules is the enemy. Women like this are cut off from their inner selves. But sometimes I wonder if they're just not facsimiles of men. Men are really cut off. Crispin wouldn't know she has a cunt much less is one. But I liked the drag queen image. The bitch as cunt. It's always so us and them. Women do seem to gravitate to the arts but a cunt can be anyone.Jules: When the little boys wrote about a crucifix stabbing a cunt, it did make me wince.Michel: This woman paid me to eat her pussy one time when I was tricking. All the stuff about showers and wet and rain and fluidity is true enough. The woman who paid me to eat her kept calling me her son. At first, I thought of it as just another sicko trick, and I would just find ways to block her words out of my mind. After this went on for a while, I got the feeling she wantted her son to consume her because he did consume her -- he was her life. Outside of being a mother, she didn't really have much of a life.Tim: How many of you had similar experiences with females while tricking.Hands go up.Tim: Now, there's a stereotype right there. You as whores were supposed to be with men.Henri: I was with anyone who had the money. I was the cunt. Sometimes when men are talking dirty to you as they are fucking you, they use the word cunt a lot. To me it just means like a hole, and maybe an empty person who just gets fucked all the time and then that is what they come to expect from life. To just get screwed over.Thierry: It was kind of liberating to me. To make this video. I have so much anger and rage over how women -- you know, medical women -- treated me with such impersonal disdain after surgery. To be able to just call them cunts in my mind put the sex in it back on them. Instead of touching me when I really had no choice in it, they were on the receiving end this time. Fucking nurse cunts. They will not touch me like that again. I have choices.Laurent: Everything about the video is male except for the timing. I can't exactly say why, but it's got these places that linger in almost painful ways. That feels female. We didn't get in and then get out quickly like we usually do. In that respect I felt like even the little guys were attempting to put themselves in the woman's head if not her place. Tim and Mary talk about what is evil a lot. I thought it was saying women are evil pretty much except for the female who just slides sideways. She's just there. She doesn't say or do anything. I kept waiting for her to be victimized. And the little boys wanted her to be victimized but the older boys vetoed the idea. I think a lot of women do just slide through life hoping that they won't be someone's victim. So there's anger on both sides. Men hate the frigid woman but women feel they have to function in a world made by men.Andres: It needed dancing. But no one wanted to show his face in a vid called Le Cunt. It's like I keep expecting someone to crush it. Dancing could have humanized it.Jos: The computer animation is in lieu of real cunts. We can't do that or it will be attacked. And then I was finally okay with the animation because it could morph better than if we were taking vids of vaginas. I'm not sure I like how it all got transposed against something. But it was Pascal who said everything is transposed against another object so why are cunts if we are using them as objects any different.Pascal: They're not different. I have one.Pulls pants down. Shows the group his asshole. Everyone laughs but Tim.Tristan: I think we were trying to say that women can use their cunts against us. But the territory is so forbidden that we got unsure. It was easier then to put so much of it into the struggles Tim has in art and books because they rage around us all the time. I know it's not about Tim. But I don't think we knew so many mean women until he brought art and books into our lives.Nino: My favorite line is when Tim reads -- and I do like the fact he doesn't hide that he is reading it -- you can never know her.Jordaan: Izaac is straight. I am wondering what he thinks.Izaac: It's not about sex. None of it is sexy. But strangely, I think it is about how people look at sex. I think it asks the question what is the difference between sex and gender in how people use their sex and their gender in life.Gabriel: I have never seen one. Just in pictures.Bjorn: Are you curious?Gabriel: It seems so loaded. Like how can anyone know what they feel. First, you have to separate out how you are supposed to feel. I think I have a lot of garbage that hides how I feel about anything. And that is not male, female, sex, gender, cock, or cunt. It is only me.

• Release Date

  Mar 29, 2009

• Runtime

  15:23