Just Don't Think I'll Scream (Frank Beauvais, 2019)

Is cinephilia healthy? It's a question I suspect a lot of us ask ourselves from time to time, and although we may have our doubts, we keep coming back to the cinema, that artificial world, for pleasures and reassurances that our "real" lives cannot provide. As I have mentioned on various occasions, I became a hardcore cinephile after my first wife left me and I was living alone in relative isolation. I found myself seeing upwards of four films a day, just to stave off the loneliness and to avoid the emotional work that I, of course, eventually had to do.

Just Don't Think I'll Scream is a beautiful and disturbing film about one man's extended period of similar, more extreme emotional and physical isolation. Organized much like a diary or an essay film, it contains a constant first-person voiceover in which Beauvais explains his predicament. He and his partner couldn't afford to live in Paris, so they moved to the woods in Alsace, a very conservative, even backwards, Germanic region of France. As Beauvais describes it, being in Alsace is like going back in time by about 50 to 75 years. After four years living there, the relationship ends, and Frank is left alone in the apartment, with no friends and no real mobility. So, between obsessively collecting and e-selling LPs and DVDs, he spends his days watching movie after movie after movie.

Visually, Just Don't Think I'll Scream is a found-footage film, a narrative compendium of the hundreds of films he watched during this time. A bit like a more diaristic version of Marclay's The Clock, this film consists of exquisitely edited clips that imply connections between Beauvais's ongoing plaint and explosions, movie monsters, bloody giallo sequences, and shadowy film noir interludes. There is simultaneously a formal elegance and a semi-diegetic impetus that organizes the relationships from shot to shot, in a manner recalling avant-garde filmmakers such as Bruce Conner, Su Friedrich, and Jay Rosenblatt.

Not everything in Just Don't Think I'll Scream is solipsistic. As an ongoing refrain, Beauvais considers his distance from the news of the world, particularly as relates to war and terrorist violence. He considers how his political commitments seem to matter less and less, in practical terms, because he is geographically marginal to "where things happen." And when he manages to get back to Paris, he is a visitor, not a full participant in its life.

The film isn't perfect. Sometimes Beauvais's film clips can be a bit too directly illustrative and on-the-nose. But overall, Just Don't Think I'll Scream provides an object lesson in cinematic obsession as a kind of malaise, one Beauvais could only escape by ceasing to be a mere consumer and starting to produce something. The end result moves at the speed of thought, and has the scan and flow of our hypermodern screen culture. It's a film about digging ourselves out of representation through representation, of transmuting an anchor into a provisional life jacket.