20 | Sight&Sound | April 2020
An image from Just Don’t Think I’ll ScreamMILLIGAN
WAYS TO DIE
WIDE ANGLEfrom esoteric corners of private BitTorrent
sites. Even when excerpts are relatively
famous – Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of
Roses (1969), Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It
(1956) – the way he selects and deploys images
means that they are likely to pass incognito.
Each shot is uprooted, pushed into a fast-
flowing stream. Beauvais takes up residence in
the kingdom of the detail. Few whole bodies
appear, even fewer faces: rather, isolated objects
and gestures, an abundance of close-ups, a cascade
of visual curiosities liberated from narrative
constraint. That all these images come and go
without asserting their provenance is a fitting
evocation of Beauvais’s great bingewatch. When
cinema becomes “an aesthetic rampart against a
vile world”, the boundaries between films matter
less than the medium’s capacity for analgesic
immersion, its skill at chasing out the hours and
installing bewildering visions in their stead.
Beauvais’s choice cuts are propelled towards
various aspects of his life recounted in voiceover.
They collide with his daily habits and political
sensibilities, his sense of affective paralysis and
anxious need for change. Sometimes the accord
between sound and image is loose; more often,
content-based motives are identifiable. When
Beauvais mentions a departure for Lisbon, for
instance, we see suitcases. A frustration with
current events is matched with the smashing
of a television set. We hear that 2016 is the
deadliest year yet for refugees crossing the
Mediterranean and see a man lying face down
on a beach, an echo of the widely circulated
image of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian
Kurd who drowned in that sea in 2015.
One might worry that this relation of image
to sound is simple illustration, the appropriated
clips little more than slavish supplements taskedwith enlivening a verbose text. Beauvais evades
this sorry fate by selecting images of such visual
power, so laden with sensation, that they escape
containment by the voice, asserting themselves as
its inquisitive interlocutors. Beauvais has watched
these films, but they too have watched him. They
are, he says, more like mirrors than windows. As
much as he turns to the screen to escape, this ever-
faithful companion invariably reflects aspects
of his own emotional state – not the precise facts
of his situation, but condensed and displaced
clusters of affect of the sort that appear in dreams.
Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream balances the
narcissism of this screen-mirror with a
consistent preoccupation with a wider context:
popular protests, elections, terrorist attacks
and mass shootings. Beauvais’s problems
are not just personal. His despair is tied to
political disillusionment in an age of fear and
opportunism. It is inseparable from the feeling
that any possibility of meaningful social change
has been foreclosed and that the ideals that
formed him – like anti-capitalism – have faded
in currency. Beauvais professes an interest in the
worldviews of the cinemas of the Soviet bloc,
particularly their treatment of the relationship
between the individual and society, but cannot
bring himself to join collective movements
in the present, when all seems already lost.
That Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream is a sombre
film for sombre times is confirmed by the
music Beauvais plays at the end, having earlier
deemed it his “companion in misfortune”:
Bonnie Prince Billie’s ‘I See a Darkness’. The
song is devastating, but it is addressed to a loved
one, a possible saviour. If Beauvais finds hope
anywhere, it is in the presence of things and
people that sustain us, films, songs or friends.
It is the last who, with the offer of a Paris room,
spur him to leave the village and help him move.
The torpor breaks and he goes on to make this
film of films. In a world on fire, full of violence,
we may not be able to wish for happiness. But
we can, Beauvais suggests, find comfort in the
mutual understanding that is friendship.
Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream is screening at the
ICA, London, on 29 March as part of the Essay
Film Festival. Details: essayfilmfestival.comFew whole bodies or faces
appear: rather, isolated objects
and gestures, an abundance of
close-ups, a cascade of curiosities
AT A GLANCE
FRANK BEAUVAISBorn 1970 in Phalsbourg, France.
He has directed numerous shorts, including
On My Knees (2005), Sun and Death Travel
Alongside (2006), I’ll Be Floating Without Any
Desire (2008), The Diamond’s Guitar (2009).
He is also a programmer for a film festival at
Brive-la-Gaillarde, Corrèze, in central France.
Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream is
his first feature-length film.By Kim Newman
In The BFI Companion to Horror, which I edited,
Stephen Bissette and Douglas Winter sum up
Andy Milligan (1929-91) as “American writer,
director, cinematographer, editor. The tenacious
but untalented Milligan’s impoverished films are
characterised by amateurish scripts, direction, and
performances; anachronistic horror stereotypes;
grating ‘canned’ music; and risible nudity and gore.”
Nevertheless, Milligan is the subject of an
in-depth biography, Jimmy McDonough’s The
Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker
Andy Milligan (2001), which has been revised and
expanded as a lavishly illustrated luxury artefact
from FAB Press, The Ghastly One: The 42nd Street
Netherworld of Director Andy Milligan. The BFI’s
Flipside label, devoted to odd extremes of British
cinema, has issued Milligan’s uncharacteristic,
London-shot art movie Nightbirds (1970)- the nearest thing in his filmography to a
The films of trash auteur Andy
Milligan are even too bad to
count as so-bad-they’re-good:
and therein lies their greatness