Canada: Saturday, November 14, 2020
KimStim
http://www.kimstim.com/film/just-dont-think/
Frank Beauvais's intimate essay film assembles excerpts from the 400-plus films the French director watched over a four-month period of seclusion in 2016. On the soundtrack, Beauvais speaks of the breakup that led to his retreat, the estranged father with whom he bonded over cinema just before his death, and the symptoms of our current cultural climate that make pressing on an act of resistance. Beauvais's montage composed of both international classics and obscurities alights upon small but specific details, reframing otherwise incidental images into an indelible and immensely moving reflection on life, love, and loss.
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Gregory M. - Rated it 3 out of 5
"Just Don't Think I'll Scream" January 2016. The love story brings Frank Beauvais (himself) to this village in Alsace where he lives ended six months ago. At 45 he's now alone, without a car, a job or any real prospects, surrounded by luxuriant nature, the proximity of which is not enough to calm the deep distress into which he's plunged. France, still in shock from the November terror attacks, is in a state of emergency. He feels helpless, he suffocates with contained rage. He's lost, he struggles with monotony by watching four to five films a day. He decides to record this stagnation, not by picking up a camera but by editing shots from the stream of films he watches. Six months after separating from his companion, whom he had followed to a village in 'Alsace Bossue', he confronts the silence of nature. "Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream" assembles excerpts from the 400-plus films Frank Beauvais watched over a four-month period of seclusion in 2016. It's about the breakup that led to his retreat, the estranged father with whom he bondes over cinema just before his death, and the symptoms of our current cultural climate that make pressing on an act of resistance. The film's montage, composes of both international classics and obscurities, alights upon small but specific details, reframing otherwise incidental images into an indelible and immensely moving reflection on life, love, and loss. The introspective work is the result of a boundless passion for cinema. The film relates the boredom, the anger and the increasing anguish in this stifling world. In this enormous, poetic mash-up of excerpts, cinema is the unique source of escape for this modern-day 'Sisyphus' in the 'Land Of The Pretzel'. There's a poetry of shots which, once isolated, no longer betray their origin. Shots of clocks, windows, keys, screens, furniture, traffic signs, cogs, keyboards, vegetation, landscapes but also face shots, those of extras suddenly isolated for editing purposes and that we never see again in the film. Through a mashup, the film brings together this type of mute shots, to claim their heterogeneity, to alternate black and white and colour, to respect their original format and to make them dialogue with the evocation of the dark days we lived through in 2016. To create a reflexive dynamic for the audience, to constantly play with the gap and correspondence between what they see and what they hear. But all this may be nothing more than a discourse on the method, an attempt to establish a rule of the game, a temptation to theorize a deep urge. The idea is above all to recreate a cry, to express anger by the collusion of the chronicle of my despair with images from another time and space that nevertheless commented on my daily life, embodied it better than our own images could have done. Images and words that express my inner turmoil, our helplessness, our dereliction. The fear of the social, police, economic, ideological, human violence actively at work today in our country, France and throughout the world. Thinking that we've to utter this scream so we wouldn’t suffocate. written by Gregory Mann
