Scream Along – Saskia Takens-Milne / The Bohemians Space, London

Get it all off your chest during International Women’s Month by visiting Scream Along, a participatory installation in an unusual space in Deptford.

Scream Along

Last weekend was an excellent time for thought-provoking interactive experiences. On Saturday I saw Where We Meet, a dance theatre production combining technology and human connection. And on Sunday I had the opportunity to visit Scream Along, a participatory installation by conceptual artist Saskia Takens-Milne.

The idea behind Scream Along is simple on the surface. Take footage from a range of films in which women scream. Remove the audio of their screams but leave in the ambient sound. Play it to an audience, and allow anyone who is inspired to do so to add their own screams: to scream along, as it were. To achieve this, the basement Bohemians Space at 53 Deptford Broadway (which in its upstairs incarnation is a hairdressers) becomes a speakeasy cabaret. Visitors can sit at small tables with soft nightclub lighting. Or the bolder amongst them can get up and use the microphone. As we’ve established, I prefer my interactivity on the passive side, so I took a seat and watched.

The looping film isn’t overly long: at some point you will recognise clips you’ve seen before. But it is thought provoking. I found myself thinking about a number of topics as I watched the women silently scream. I’ll share a few of those thoughts with you below.

Focusing Attention on What We Normalise

I think the heading above is a key point for me. It’s not until you see something like Scream Along that you really think about how normalised this on-screen female suffering really is. Sometimes it’s relevant to the plot. Sometimes it’s gratuitous. But even when it’s relevant to the plot we must ask ourselves: why is women suffering so often relevant to the plots of the media we consume? Takens-Milne has sourced as broad a range of source material as possible in terms of geography and genre. But if we look across the whole, the women tend to be beautiful, young, able-bodied. The ubiquity of this trope points to something much more systemic than individual directors’ biases or fantasies.

And Takens-Milne’s work is grounded in extensive research which suggests the same. As she herself notes, “In a patriarchal society, […] cinema broadcasts men’s supremacy and women’s dispensability.” It’s an issue that is rife in film and television (see here or here for further reading). And the range of films included in Scream Along underscore the pervasiveness of women’s on-screen agony. There are cheap thrillers, teen horror, and also films we generally consider to be “art”. Like the debate around whether to separate the art from the artist in the case of badly-behaved men, the question arises: is the suffering of women “worth it”? And if so, to what end? I thought of this in particular as I watched a clip of Shelley Duvall in The Shining. Her suffering for that performance is now perhaps as infamous as that of her character.

What do we do with this? Well, I think Takens-Milne gives her audience a nudge in the way she sets up Scream Along. The cabaret setting heightens the voyeurism and role of the audience in relation to media. Films exist for us. Lauding certain films, or even watching them, legitimises them. We’re complicit in this patriarchal subjugation of women on-screen, which in turn normalises violence against women off-screen. I may have to go back to Deptford in the coming weeks: there’s really quite a lot to scream about.

Scream Along is free to visit, and on until 31 March 2025 (with additional workshops on 8 and 15 March). Check here for opening hours and further details.