"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex." – Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto S.C.U.M = the Society for Cutting Up Men In acquiescence to Valerie and with the full and willing participation of bureaucratic forces, Henry Gets Cut. The film is a series of becomings that highlight the participation in a control system and suggest how it can be overcome. Distortions and sudden jumps in bit rate of images encourage an awareness of the screen; that this medium has circumscribed where you can place your attention. When Henry becomes aware of him/her self, the cycle of violence is broken. This sense of disturbance and coercion is re-enforced through the documentary footage of Lucy Beynon’s performance The Reluctant Striptease which acts as a framing device for the film. This layer of ‘actual’ reality punctuates the narrative, acting at times as a projection of the mental shock that is overwhelming Henry. The position of truth and fiction is reversed. A further series of reversals occurs by divorcing the quoted texts of Valerie Solanas and Georges Bataille from the gender of their particular author. These reversals highlight the mental deterioration experienced, in a biographical sense, by their writers. Their seriousness is also gently undermined by the poor material context in which they are placed, wooden acting, re-used sets…cycles repeating themselves… Henry Gets Cut describes the experience of ‘immanence’, inquiring into how the problematic process of being human can make you feel like divine voices are chasing you over a rooftop. And how self-knowledge and a little kindness, however hard won, can make you a different person.