April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 19By Erika Balsom
Frank Beauvais’s Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream
(2019) opens with a photograph of a man’s face
in close-up. A cigarette burns through its centre,
obliterating eyes, nose and mouth. Like every
image in the 75 minutes that follow, this one has
been torn from another movie to appear here
for just a flash. Speaking with quiet intensity in
voiceover, Beauvais begins: “I’m 45 years old.”
As images unfurl, he relates the basics of his
existence. He is alone, following a break-up, in a
village in Alsace that is a stronghold of the right,
suffering, watching three to five films per day as
France rattles through a state of emergency and
the world at large seems to grow ever darker.
The intimate voiceover grounds the film
immediately in personal experience. The opening
image of the ruined face, meanwhile, moves
in another direction. First of all, it does not
belong to he who says ‘I’. What’s more, this face
is no face – the iconoclastic burning is already
underway when the image appears. Individuality
is voided. From the very start of this diaristic
chronicle of depression, cinephilia and solitude,
the self is in jeopardy, sapped and splintered.
Later Beauvais will list the pitfalls of
autobiographical expression – “platitude,
narcissism, pride, dishonesty, self-pity” – asking,“How to avoid them?” But already in this first
gesture, he has begun to provide an answer. To
communicate the experience of all those blank
days, the weight of so much sadness and anger,
the problem of being “too old for revolution, too
young for resignation”, Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream
(original title: Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle)
takes a detour beyond the self. It moves from
the outside in. To provide an account of one life,
it travels through some 400 films watched over
seven months, as well as through the horror of
current events and the sustaining comforts of
friendship – all things that, in different ways,
shatter solipsism, exposing the individual to the
chafing of the world as it exists beyond them.
I could give the name of the film from which
the shot of the defaced photograph is taken; all
sources are listed in the closing credits, including
the inspiration for the title, the East German
drama Denk bloß nicht, ich heule (1965). But pinning
down such references feels against the spirit
of this magnificent film. In recent years, many
engagements with found footage have sought
to exploit the recognisability of recycled images,
staging a memory game, relying on the viewer’s
knowledge of the original to generate meaning.
Beauvais takes another path. The corpus on
which he draws is vast and obscure, culledJust Don’t Think I’ll Scream: Frank Beauvais draws on a vast, obscure body of movies to create a sombre film for sombre timesJUST DON’T
THINK I’LL
SCREAM
PREVIEW
Frank Beauvais’s feature uses
images torn from a mammoth
film binge to evoke our present
maladies, and hint at their cureWide Angle
EXPLORING THE BIGGER PICTURE