France Special: Dent De Cuir

The self-styled logo-looting “fuckers” that comprise directing duo Dent De Cuir are insouciant about pillaging the internet for brands, GIFs and memes du jour with which to create their superb mash-up music videos and films. But, despite shocking their own clients and vexing copyright lawyers, the cultural cannibals are increasingly gaining gongs and getting noticed

Dismembered Barbies in PVC pants. Feckless boyfriends whose niggling habits – socks on the floor, dirty dishes in the sink – make them the target of a shoot-’em-up video game. And the standard story of girl-meets-boy that turns, without warning, into girl-eats-boy… Welcome to the insanely creative, and often disturbing, world of Dent De Cuir. The name, curiously, translates as ‘leather tooth’, but on the basis of a grainy Skype interview, shots can confirm there’s nothing dentally untoward with either half of the French-Canadian directing duo. So what’s the story behind these new enfants terribles of the French music video scene?

Twenty nine-year-old graphic designers Benjamin Mege and Jean-Philippe Chartrand met three years ago, when, fresh out of the prestigious École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués in Paris, Mege moved to Montreal in search of work. Pitching up at Chartrand’s small graphic design studio, MIAOU – a basement set-up in which four of the seven employees were cats – the pair bonded over a shared love of felines, and were soon dabbling in videos as a “second-shift project” to challenge themselves creatively. Although Chartrand had spent time in the music industry, neither had any real filmmaking experience, so they “just started putting together images and seeing what happened”.

A trippy, GIF-laden promo for Idiologie by Berlin-based electronic music producer Siriusmo was their first, unofficial creation, infused with the cut-’n’-paste, laptop-centric aesthetic that has become something of a calling-card. Off the back of that video’s modest success, bigger names came knocking: a second, self-produced effort for Modeselektor’s Evil Twin further boosted the as-yet-unnamed collective’s profile when it gained an official selection nod for SXSW 2013. But it was R-rated video She’s Bad for French EDM producer DyE that really catapulted Dent De Cuir into the public eye: a cautionary tale of seduction in which the female of the species proves way more deadly than the male. (Spoiler: oral sex plus bared teeth is never a happy combination).

Heavily inspired by dadaism and the work of 70s British collage artist John Stezaker, the film integrates footage from BBC nature documentary Planet Earth into its protagonists’ silhouettes to stylishly gory effect. As well as attracting wide public acclaim (even Mege’s granny was a fan), She’s Bad was shortlisted for best international alternative video at the UKMVAs, scooped numerous European film festival gongs and bagged a spot on the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors’ showcase. “That was really good for our development – not everyone sees music videos, but being part of the Saatchi showcase was a nice way to reach new audiences and industries,” says Chartrand. It also brought them to the attention of production company Caviar, who promptly snapped them up for representation in France, London and the US.

24-hour remote concept control

Although the collective is now geographically split – Mege is based in Paris, while Chartrand has remained in Montreal – the wonder of modern tech has turned them into a self-dubbed ‘24-hour creative machine’ exploiting time differences to great effect. “We log onto Skype and generate the idea together, then one of us carries on developing the concept while the other sleeps. We’ll meet up for the shooting and production, then come home and continue our lives in remote,” explains Chartrand.

Inspiration comes from multiple sources – galleries, museums and graffitied walls – but many hours are spent online, on a magpie-like quest to pick out the GIFs and memes of the moment, which are brought together with the skill of a Huguenot weaver. Drifted, a recent slice of 90s nostalgia for The Shoes, featured no less than 40 different memes, including a weeping James Van Der Beek (of Dawson’s Creek fame), Mike Tyson’s ear bite, bushels of cute kittens and best of all, Edward Norton in Fight Club repeatedly punching his own face in time to the beat.

The internet might be an indispensable resource, but it provokes complex emotions, evident in work such as 2013’s Planet Online promo for Neosignal, which explored underage access to porn via a children’s game that reimagined the likes of Facebook and Google Chrome as physical toys. Having scoured local thrift shops and stretched their shoestring budget to breaking point, Dent De Cuir spent three months painstakingly – and ingeniously – repurposing the toys as internet institutions. In the video, two tots are seen pitting a Norton anti-virus Transformer against a My Little Pony Trojan horse and racing cat memes on the Scalextric, but when the Parental Control robot blows up, they get a shocking peek into the adult dolls’ houses of YouPorn and Rotten.com, complete with PVC-clad sex Barbies, decapitated Action Men, dismembered Playmobil figures and toy fridges full of dildos.

“The internet is a part of us, we work on it all the time and we’re on Skype all of the time, but it’s definitely a love-hate relationship,” says Mege. “Maybe [Planet Online] is trying to explore how the internet has changed since its early days, but there’s several interpretations you could put on it.” Though they claim not to court controversy deliberately, and refuse to attribute any specific moral messages to their work, the directors “like working with attention-grabbing, bold, graphic images” and “playing with the visual code”, particularly when it comes to thorny issues like internet copyright. “We start from the premise: who owns the internet anyway?” says Chartrand. “As a brand you choose to be public and be on the internet, so you have to deal with the fact that fuckers like us will take your logo, take your image, and play with it a bit.” But while ‘relaxed’ about intellectual property transgressions on self-funded projects, they are well aware that it’s a tough sell for potential clients – especially in the notoriously image-conscious French market.

A cheeky ride on My Little Phoney

Paris fashion trade show Who’s Next certainly put its lawyers on speed-dial for Play, another toy-themed film that also spawned an interactive site. Dent De Cuir tackled the carte blanche brief with typical irreverence (“We didn’t give a fuck about the brands,”) bringing Speak-and-Spells, Furby, My Little Pony and other iconic toys to X-rated life via animated hand-scrawled illustrations. “It was a copyright nightmare, and the client was initially a bit shocked,” Mege says cheerfully, “but they were really happy in the end. The aim was to enhance their overall branding, freshen it up, and that’s what we delivered.”   

While appreciating the creative freedom offered by music videos, Dent De Cuir’s ultimate aim is to move into commercials and interactive projects. “Right now, we want to learn how to be directors, to work properly with a crew and to develop our vision,” says Mege. Bigger budgets would provide a welcome opportunity to scale up their characteristically low-fi approach – if the briefs allow. “We have notebooks full of ideas and concepts that we want to develop,” Chartrand says, “so it’s hard convincing people that yes, we did that internet culture stuff, but we can do so much more. Ultimately it’s about how we can take advantage of one subject and one media and use that as a narrative. How we graphically achieve these, or how we play with something from pop culture – that’s something we’re still interested in keeping up in our commercial projects.”

Since signing to Caviar, they’ve already kicked things up a notch with an ambitiously produced promo for Darwin Deez’s Kill Your Attitude. Brilliantly depicting how small relationship niggles can escalate to full-on war, the video puts Deez in the firing line of a Call Of Duty-style video game – with his pissed-off partner behind the controls. The original idea was to mash up video game footage with in-camera footage, before post house Ruffian suggested using Unity, a cross-platform game engine, to build a complete 3D environment. Cue helicopters, SWAT teams, tanks and numerous other iconic gaming references suggested by the duo’s ‘geeky friends’.

Dent De Cuir’s star is rising fast – picking up bronze in the Director of the Year category at the 2015 shots Awards – so make like a vengeful girlfriend and keep them in your sights.