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. It’s to this film’s credit, then, that Beauvais regards his passion in much the same way. To a non-cinephile, Beauvais’s curatorial devotion might seem baffling, and even some cinephiles may find his rigor extreme. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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