Inclusum labor illustrat; it is because I am enclosed that I work and glow with all my desire.

— the silkworm’s motto, from Roland Barthes’ Leaving the Movie Theatre

Since streaming platforms and the ease of illegal downloading have allowed for cinephiles and filmmakers to diversify their cinema diet, one would expect to see a miscellany of influences reflected in filmmakers’ outputs. Of course, the assumption that digitization has rendered every film accessible is a fantasy. Many films hors-canon get left behind in the shuffle. And yet, Frank Beauvais’ assemblage of the 400 films that he downloaded and watched while living as a recluse for six months in 2016 is richly varied and nuanced. At once a personal essay film and a collage film, Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream presents cinephilia as an illness from which Beauvais suffers. In a densely-packed 75 minutes, French filmmaker Beauvois traipses through a plush terrain of cinematic meaning-making, mining personal truths and extrapolating from political events. As varied and wide in scope as his musings are, the image is the glue that binds them together.

Following a breakup, Beauvais is left isolated in the small Alsatian town to which he and his ex-partner had moved together. With no driver’s license and few friends, Beauvais’s daily rhythms conform to his depressive state. He downloads films and clears out his attic. Once a hoarder of knick-knacks, he becomes a hoarder of mp4s. Early on he describes his curatorial vision as broad as much as it is compulsive: “silent movies out of copyright, pre-Code Hollywood gems, incunabula of Soviet cinema, Scandinavian erotic films, gialli, pink films, German dramas, 70s Euro-thrillers. Anything goes and I can’t stop.” This cine-bulimia, as he describes it, is debilitating. His obsession with what’s on his screen has deadened any desire to create, or “anything other than watch others’ films.” This is a different kind of cinephilia than the one Roland Barthes writes about, when he likens movie-watching to a hypnosis and the screen to a mirror (1986, 345-348). Or perhaps the screen’s transfixing power yields numbness instead of revelation. For Beauvais, cinephilia is a symptom of his depression. Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, then, is a kind of cine-purge–though by no means is it haphazard or impetuous in its execution.

The first image of the film immediately recalls Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia): a black and white picture of a woman is scorched through its centre. For those familiar with Frampton’s avant-garde film, which places delayed narration over burning photographs, this invocation immediately renders the narration, and the film itself, a suspicious object, while reminding the viewer of cinema’s potential for preservation and destruction. Paired with Beauvais’ first sentence: “I’m 45 years old,” the first image sets the stage for a personal essay composed of impersonal images. Though of course, Beauvais’ words infuse these images with affective tension and mystery. Stripped of their original context, these images are given a new meaning through Beauvais’s monotonous narration, which encases each clip in a subjective web of meaning. Immediately noticeable is that the film avoids showcasing recognizable actors. In fact, fewer than a dozen actors show their faces. Thomas Marchand, the editor, cuts the shot before it pans to reveal the actor’s identity. Beauvais seems to be less interested in star power or expressive faces than in the worlds they inhabit. His film is a supercut of inserts, establishing shots and crowds, of hands and feet and occiput, of close-ups of objects and animals, etc. He is the protagonist and thus requires no identifiable surrogate beyond the panoply of images. In a film culture in which favourite films and top 10s dominate, Beauvois’ curatorial choices might seem in defiance of a brewing sense that only our favourite films can say something about our attachments and ourselves. Many, if not all, of these movies are first-time watches for Beauvais.

The title is, fittingly, a reference to a film: Just Don’t Think I’ll Cry, a 1965 film by Frank Vogel, which was banned in East Germany up until 1990. Beauvais’ title, connoting a mine of emotions kept under wraps, is peculiar in its intensity and unclear address. Is the title an assurance? A warning? A defiance of the spectator's requisite silence in front of a screen? Of course, this isn’t the only vocalized allusion to a film. Beauvais’ narration is peppered with references and puns, as when he refers to his screen as “the place of magnificent obsessions where the mirages of life seem sublime” or when he asks how he may free himself from his “fatal attraction for films, an aesthetic rampart against the vile world.” Towards the end of his essay “Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment,” Thomas Elsaesser argues that “cinephilia has reincarnated itself, by dis-embodying itself” (2012, 41). This disembodiment through digitization might reincarnate cinephilia, but it also arguably disembodies the spectator, who is no longer forced to leave the house to watch a film. If we believe cinema’s myth of requisite togetherness, and share with traditionalists in pining the imminent loss of watching a film in the dark with strangers, a loss brought on partially by digital technology, then this new age of spectatorship is a potentially lonely one. For some, like Beauvais, the cure is to keep watching.

It’s hard to know what assumptions Beauvais makes about his audience’s familiarity with the films he’s chosen. Needless to say, this isn’t a greatest hits compilation, or a supercut of the AFI 100. Even of the films that I realized I had seen upon checking the credits, I failed to recognize them while watching Beauvais’ film. Rather, the dominant feeling was that of vague, comforting familiarity and mild frustration towards the film for consistently cutting right before revealing an actor’s face, so that I could more easily pinpoint the film. The visual pleasure doesn’t derive from identifying the films, of which, by the way, I identified just one while watching. The only reason I recognized the three brief shots from The Age of Innocence was because I myself have watched that film somewhat obsessively over the years. There’s something comforting, but also precarious, about clinging to a raft made up of a few stray moments in a sea of unknown films. If I began the film envying his furlough, by the end it seems more like a self-imposed sentence than a cinephile’s feast. He refers to his 4 months as akin to being held as a consenting captive: “my stockholm syndrome.”

Despite the severity of Beauvais’ narration and subject matter, there is humour and pleasure to be had, much of which comes from the semiotic game of word-image juxtaposition. He says, “my mother” and the films shows a pair of high-heeled legs running over to clean up a spill. Speaking on the culture of Alsace he says, “in my valley where folklore rhymes with identity” and a shot of a lily of the valley held carefully between two fingers shimmers on screen. Most compelling are the images that don’t quite fit with the words and beg more consideration. Such as when a series of descriptors of cinema (“films as bandages, hospices, [...] films as miracles, semaphores, [...] films as electric shocks, races against time”) is accompanied by a long close-up of a doctor injecting a woman’s arm. These uneasy associations rub up against one another, producing new meanings and subtexts for the images and the words.  

As with Christian Marclay’s The Clock, of which I have only seen a mere half hour, every image is indexical of its time period. As Catherine Russell writes in her analysis of Marclay’s 24-hour video installation, “each clip marks a certain point in film history, which also turns out to be cultural history—insofar as fashion, hairstyles, and even modes of behavior and gesture signal a moment in time and are read as indices and traces of the past” (2013, 249). Little known films and well-loved classics coexist in Beauvais’ archive, where history reveals itself through the images but is also jumbled by the reassemblage.

The heft of Beauvais’ essay wrestles with the political potential of movie-watching. Despite living a hermetic lifestyle, Beauvais maintains contact with the outside world and keeps up to date with current events. None of the world events reported in his essay are worth celebrating. Terror attacks in Nice, Istanbul, and Florida drive Beauvais deeper into his cinephilic carapace, and deeper into inaction. Or at least that’s what Beauvais seems to be contending with. At 45, which he describes as being “too old for the revolution and too young for renunciation,” Beauvais describes feeling helpless when faced with the 24-hour news cycle’s onslaught of horrific events. As he puts it: “who could reason with it? Who could calm me, dare to recommend detachment, counter despondency, despair, disgust, stifle my screams of impotence, the guilt of inaction, being a distant witness who doesn’t act, but merely retreats into passive silence? The films, of course: Outlet, escape, recovery.” What’s peculiar about Beauvais’s admission is how the making of his film troubles this view of cinephilia. The archiving of films and their subsequent re-assemblage is without a doubt valuable work. These films, though biased towards European cinema, reveal our global cultural history and their (albeit pruned) preservation is a political act of resistance. In a section on his immersion in Soviet and East German cinema, Beauvais reflects on his draw to communist cinema: “the hero of the east is in a dialectical relationship with the world, [...] he is driven by an ideal.” This yearning for a cause, though in the case of communist cinema motivated by ideological indoctrination, seems to propel Beauvais’ entire oeuvre and is partially what leads to his withdrawal in the first place. Not to sound ingenuous, but can’t cinema be its own, worthy and necessarily political cause?

As news about the climate crisis floods our timelines and right-wing nationalist parties fueled by fear and ignorance rise to power, many concerned cinephiles, myself included, are beginning to question the relevance of cinema. Perhaps we should peel our eyes from the screen and take to the streets. But then again, how would we share what we did and saw with the world? How would we witness others’ revolutions? In the end, though the narration might read as anti-cinephilic, the film’s sheer creation negates that very idea. Cinema doesn’t just have to be respite and a refuge, it is a force of change and a vessel of history.

In the final shot of the film, after Beauvais has loaded his car to Paris to resume his life, he proclaims, “I don’t know exactly what’s in store for me, but I’m leaving.” Yet, the aerial shot of an endless field that accompanies his final lines lingers beyond his last word. He may have at last peeled his eyes away from the screen, but we are still watching.

Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream

Produced by Justin Taurand, Michel Klein, Matthieu Deniau, Philippe Grivel; directed by Frank Beauvais; screenplay by Frank Beauvais, edited by Thomas Marchand

Color and Black & White, 75 min, 2019

A Capricci Films and Les Bookmakers release, capricci.fr and les-bookmakers.com

Works Cited

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Cinephilia,or the Uses of Disenchantment,”in The Persistence of Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2012): 27-43.

Barthes, Roland. "Leaving the movie theater," trans. Richard Howard in The Rustle of Language. (New York, Hill & Wang, 1986): 345-349.

Russell, Catherine. "Archival Cinephilia in the Clock." Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Volume 54, no. 2 (2013): 243-58.

Volume 28, Issue 8-9-10 / August 2024 Film Reviews   documentary   essay film   experimental cinema   french cinema   ridm   video essay