The religion of modern cinephilia was born in Paris, evangelized by men like Godard and Truffaut, who were able to transition from watching and arguing over two to three movies a day at the Cinémathèque Française into careers directing films of their own. Godard would later memorialize his cinephilia as a creative act through all-encompassing montage films like “Histoire(s) du cinéma” which used the films of his youth as a prism through which to view history and philosophy. But is this romanticized notion of cinephilia really the way most of us perceive the deluge of images and stories that modern life barrages us with? Director Frank Beauvais uses the same format of montage film in a strikingly different manner in “Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream (Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle)” to give a modern corrective to the myth of Godardian cinephilia.
The first corrective is financial and geographic; Beauvais and his partner were gentrified out of Paris and moved to rural Alsace. When they broke up, Beauvais found himself isolated and depressed and turned to viewing up to five films a day, as both therapy and a means of interacting (or not) with the world. Yet, as he himself admits, ascribing highbrow motives to his behavior is a form of normalizing an addiction. The primary departure from Godard is the melancholy realization that cinephilia often ceases to be a form of engaging with the world and, instead, becomes a form of retreat.
The images of the film are drawn from short clips (each five seconds or less) of the over 400 films he watched in the six months after his breakup in 2016. Drawing from a dizzying array of genres, he shies away from obvious visual references, preferring those shots on the cusp between representative and abstract, returning again and again to effaced human forms – backs of heads, shadows and reflections, and a focus on the gestures of hands. His affinity for thrillers and giallo inserts menacing flashes of skulls and stabbings. The images are too fast to truly take in and catalog, rather they connect to the voiceover through a kind of dream logic of fleeting glimpses and subconscious links, more metaphorical than literal.
Meanwhile, a wide-ranging and lacerating narration gives an unvarnished view into Beauvais’ thoughts during his tumultuous year. He heaps scorn on the circumscribed nature of country life, even as he laments his exclusion from it. He discusses his routine, including the couch he sits on, his internet habits, and the alcohol and pot he uses to numb his emotions. He’s almost always alone watching, though a few times he tries to watch with others. Most tragically, he remembers being thrilled in 2013 that after a lifetime of trying, he found a film he can share with his cine-skeptic father, only to have his father die before the movie ended. Despite the overwhelming evidence of his cinephilia (Beauvais has previously been a film festival programmer), the narrative voice is very literary – unabashedly first person, often dripping in venom directed both inward and outward, and freed by his loose relation to the images to write more poetically than documentary usually allows.
It might sound alienating to some to spend a film trapped in the thoughts of a cranky, gay, theory-influenced Frenchman, but “Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream” is a gift to cinephiles, all at once embodying, criticizing, and transcending an unhealthy mode of passive interaction with life. “Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream” exhibits the best kind of aesthetic innovation, namely, innovation inextricably married to the story being told. [A]