Review: Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream Is a Haunting Cine-Window into a Man’s Soul

Staring at a glowing screen for numerous hours a day in the confines of one’s home as we struggle to stave off the dangers of the outside world isn’t a phenomenon specific to the past year. Nevertheless, it’s hard to address Frank Beauvais’s Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream without commenting on how uniquely of the moment it feels. Elegiacally recapping a four-month period of self-exile in 2016 during which Beauvais coped with personal and global horrors via a steady home-viewing diet of four to five films a day, this intimate found-footage memoir is driven by a frantic internal monologue, narrated by the director himself, that will feel painfully familiar to many cinephiles in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

There’s no scary virus in the background of Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, though if you can remember a distant four years ago, you’ll recall that the same epidemics that have been superimposed onto the Covid-19 crisis and lockdown—exclusionary nationalism, extremist violence, and police overreach—were also raging then. Beauvais’s narration betrays a conscience rattled by these developments, and specifically by his geographical and emotional distance from them, though this cine-diary’s real focus isn’t the external but the internal.

The particular episode of personal history dredged up in Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream finds Beauvais wiling away his hours in the remote, conservative-leaning French region of Alsace, fresh off a breakup and the death of his father, who quietly expired next to him during a home screening of Jean Grémillon’s 1944 film The Sky Is Yours. The detail isn’t arbitrary: Beauvais’s entire project here is to conceive of his viewing log as a fundamental component of his autobiography, to such a degree that all we see in Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream are fragments from the 400-plus films he watched during this reclusive period in his life.

To a non-cinephile, Beauvais’s curatorial devotion might seem baffling, and even some cinephiles may find his rigor extreme. It’s to this film’s credit, then, that Beauvais regards his passion in much the same way. Alternately invoking drug addiction, obsessive compulsion, and even bulimia to describe his cinephilia, he contemplates the degree to which immersing himself in moving images is an escape or a burrowing inward—and if it’s the latter, whether that burrowing only reveals unsavory truths about himself. In one of the film’s most stirringly edited passages, cinematic images seem to egg on Beauvais’s psychological torments, as a flurry of abstracted clips—a throng of pigeons filling a widescreen frame, a black-and-white close-up of a juddering machine-gun barrel, a point-of-view shot from the front of a roller coaster—flash by to underscore an anxiety attack described as a “tsunami on my neurons.”

Beauvais’s democratized rummaging through film history is similarly non-contextual, favoring unassuming interstitial moments over establishing shots and star-mugging while eschewing any recognizable faces from his choice of clips. Despite not citing any Robert Bresson films in the exhaustive list of citations featured in the end credits, Beauvais shares with his countryman a fondness for hands and backs of heads as unlikely windows to the soul. And the most recurrent motif in the film’s rather brisk montage is a fist tugging at something—a bed sheet, a thicket of dead grass—as if to visualize the inchoate yearning for new experience that competes with the filmmaker’s admitted embrace of knowable comforts. Barring the occasional literal-minded cut that too neatly colors in Beauvais’s recollections, Thomas Marchand’s editing is marked throughout by such poetic resonances with the director’s words.

Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream’s most immediate appeal is the simple scavenger’s thrill of encountering so many tantalizing images in different formats from across film history in swift succession, a thrill that places the viewer in much the same consumptive role that Beauvais bemoans in a passage discussing the merits of communist films over Western ones. Of the heroes represented in these respective cinematic legacies, the director posits, with provocative broadness, that “one creates and produces, the other consumes.” At one point, Beauvais offers a fleeting glimpse of a rock thrown through a television set, which bluntly expresses the same revulsion to the idea of falling captive to the screen, of sacrificing a dynamic and reciprocal relationship with the outside world and becoming an “impotent spectator” to violence and unrest. That Beauvais’s film both condemns and inhabits this spectator position is what gives Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream its piercing honesty and haunting relevance.