The Shout
This week the From Below Microcinema presents *The Shout *(1978) on Thursday, November 14, at 7 pm.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!
The quiet country life of a woman and her husband, an experimental noise artist, is upended by the arrival of a drifter, Crossley, who claims he has the power to kill anything and anyone with a single shout.
A shout, a proto- or even anti-linguistic eruption, exists as the restless antipode to narrative, sound composed into meaningful order. Told with the bareness and tone of a chilling, Freudian folk tale, *The Shout *is about sound and story, two ways power can be exerted at a distance, as a seduction, a conjuring, or a death magic.
I’ve noticed that we’ve been recently programming and previewing a lot of films about looking, image, and surveillance. That psychoanalytically inflected films tend towards being about sight, voyeurism, and the Gaze isn’t terribly surprising, given the nature of the medium made by and for a view. In The Shout, however, the ambivalent erotics of sound, not vision, are foregrounded, and the psychosexual implications (turns out there are some) of making, hearing, and recording noises becomes the engine of the story.
Directed by the great Jerzy Skolimowski, whose most recent installation in his miraculously long career was *EO *(2022), the donkey film that ruined Christmas, and featuring a cast almost exclusively of heavy-hittters like Alan Bates, John Hurt, Susannah York, and Tim Curry, it’s puzzling to me that this film is not more well known. Besides being full of big ideas and excellently told, the film looks great, from the shots of the brown, windy dead dunes of England to the lingering studies of the tapes, reels, microphones, and artist clutter in John Hurt’s *musique concrete * laboratory.
Part one of a two-part pairing of movies about sound!