The Shout

The idea of making a film based on the short story by Robert Graves came from the producer, Jeremy Thomas. In order to screen it, Skolimowski embellished the original narrative with a number of extra characters and plot lines, whilst preserving the subjective mode of narration. The film begins with a woman inspecting some human corpses in a mental asylum. Then the action moves to a small village in Devon, some years earlier. A childless couple, composer Anthony Fielding and his wife Rachel, are visited by a traveller named Crossley. This man, who apparently lived among Australian aborigines for many years and learnt their deadly shout, causes a deep crisis among the couple, testing their rationality, even sanity.
The Shout belongs firmly to the British cinema of the late 1970s. It was almost concurrent with Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). All these films focus on ‘aliens’ – people who come from afar and disrupt the lives of ordinary citizens, and are told in non-linear ways. Another typical feature is the use of an electronic score, perfectly suited to the subject of a duel between different types of music. Its centrepiece is a shout, uttered on the dune by Crossley. Here Skolimowski used a voice but re-worked it, taking advantage of the most advanced technical equipment. (EMK)