The Beach: Beginnings and Endings

by Emma Ben Ayoun

Last fall in Los Angeles, I taught a college seminar called Cinemas of the Beach. The campus was far from the ocean, but in LA, much like New York, where I grew up, something of the beach can be felt in even the city’s driest and most solid parts: a feeling of the edge, never too far off. My students, like all students, were generous and eager and weird and cool and full of ideas. I went in to the classroom on the first day with only a vague sense that something deeply connected these two utterly different realms, beach and cinema—both sites of leisure and escape and danger and beauty and strange encounters with the self and with emptiness. I left the semester at once certain of that truth and newly in pursuit of it. What follows is an adaptation of that syllabus.  

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A meme that leads with the text: "if you had a time machine what would you go back and fix? me:" Below is a drawing of a fish emerging from the water towards land, followed by another drawing of the fish going back into the water after being prodded by a stick.

The beach is one of the very first things ever filmed. Here is Rough Sea at Dover, from 1895.

The beach can feel strangely timeless, devoid of the markers of history. In this way it already echoes the cinema’s own complex relationship to time. But it also feels primordial, like the site where everything began, even if the traces of that beginning are insistently wiped away by the beach itself. 

In the West, the beach is, in a lot of ways a modern invention, inextricable from the development of urban life, of the work week and vacation, of the smog-cluttered city and the restorative powers of the seaside air. I especially love Eugène Boudin’s late 19th century paintings of the beach at Trouville—

An oil painting of richly dressed people on the beach.
Eugène Boudin, Bathers on the Beach at Trouville, 1869
Another oil painting of high society people on the beach, a horse drawn carriage and sailboats dot the scene.
Eugène Boudin, On the Beach at Trouville, 1863
Another oil painting of a large group of well dressed gentlefolk sitting with parasols on the beach.
Eugène Boudin, Beach of Trouville, 1867

—full of bourgeois families in heavy clothes sitting at awkward distances from the sea. 

In Daughters of the Dust (1991), Julie Dash lovingly recreates beachside tableaus of a very different history. The film chronicles the final day of the Peazant family’s life on Ibo Landing, on Dataw Island, as they prepare for their migration to the mainland and to the North. There have only been two generations since the formal abolition of slavery; the island is at once a home and the site of an abduction, a place of connection and trauma (a history both palpable and elusive).

A group of girls in white dresses holds hands and plays on the beach.

The family hires a photographer to capture them together on the shore. Maybe they want to fix a kind of permanence, to pin something down in a space that is so flagrantly ephemeral. Maybe it is a desire to see oneself photographed in a space that offers the illusion of a life outside of history.

Children sit under a big umbrella, smiling for a cameraman operating a big, old fashioned camera.

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Sometimes the beach provokes a journey into the sea and its depths. I love Jean Painlevé’s underwater explorations most of all (read James Leo Cahill’s recent Zoological Surrealism for more on that). There is the strangely violent and beautiful The Silent World (Louis Malle and Jacques Cousteau, 1956). Here is a very sweet film of squid giving birth. Read Margaret Cohen’s The Underwater Eye alongside these, for a history of underwater cinema. 

Or the movement of the tides brings something out of the sea, like in Ponyo (Hayao Miyazaki, 2008), in which a goldfish who washes ashore falls in love with a little boy, or in The Secret of Roan Inish (John Sayles, 1994), about mystical, beautiful women who are secretly seals (!). Of course the thing that comes out of the water can also be terrifying—see Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975). But Jaws is also about two other important things: the singular strangeness of the summer vacation; and the thrilling, virile fantasy of the boat. 

For more boat thinking it is worth looking at Michel Foucault’s essay “Of Other Spaces:” “the boat,” he writes, “is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.” The boat (like Cousteau’s, or Wes Anderson’s kooky take on the same in The Life Aquatic) is a capsule of possibility, a chance at the fantasy of a second life. If you are thinking about this watch L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934).
 
The fantasy of a second life—and the violence and terror that lurk beneath the fantasy of leisure—appears in more cynical form on the ominous beaches of Danny Boyle’s The Beach (2000); watch this alongside Hazel Andrews’ essay “Tourism and Violence,” and Bruce Brown’s cruelly racist and extremely famous surf film The Endless Summer (1966). As a minor antidote to that film’s mocking, orientalist gaze, read Afro Surf, and William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, watch this nice Billabong documentary about surfing in Senegal, and this documentary about Moroccan surf culture. And also Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991). Point Break is a silly, high-octane thriller about two men—a beach-bum bank robber and an undercover FBI agent sent to tail him—whose identities slowly start to merge in the vague, unclear space of the beach (blurry shoreline, blurry horizon, long sunsets and sunrises). In this way it is startlingly similar to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966).

Two women read by the beach, one of them gazing curiously over at the over.

And to go back to terrible vacations: read John Cheever’s devastating short story Goodbye, My Brother, about a family trip to the beach in which decades of repressed pain come bursting forth, made manifest in the narrator’s bitter hatred of his brother, Lawrence: 

“That beach is a vast and preternaturally clean and simple landscape. It is like a piece of the moon. The surf had pounded the floor solid, so it was easy walking, and everything left on the sand had been twice changed by the waves. There was the spine of a shell, a broomstick, part of a bottle and part of a brick, both of them milled and broken until they were nearly unrecognizable, and I suppose Lawrence’s sad frame of mind—for he kept his head down—went from one broken thing to another. The company of his pessimism began to infuriate me, and I caught up with him and put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s only a summer day, Tifty,” I said. “It’s only a summer day. What’s the matter? Don’t you like it here?” 

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For lighter fare (or maybe not) there are Rohmer’s perfect films about people who just can’t  relax and have a good time on the beach: Pauline at the Beach (1983); A Summer’s Tale (1996); and what I think is one of the greatest films ever made about loneliness, The Green Ray (1986).

A woman lies on her side on a crowded beach, looking glum.

And alongside this The Green Ray watch Tacita Dean’s The Green Ray (2001). Watch that one alone if you can. Read Jean-Didier Urbain’s At the Beach for further philosophical investigation surrounding the great disappointment of the seaside traveler. 

Perhaps some of this malaise comes from a sense that the beach is nowhere at all, anonymous, inconsequential. When this is the case, turn to Marc Augé in Non-Places, and back to Foucault on heterotopias, and to Rachel Carson’s “The Marginal World,” from The Edge of the Sea (1955), in which she writes: “Looking out over the cove I felt a strong sense of the interchangeability of land and sea in this marginal world of the shore, and of the links between the life of the two. There was also an awareness of the past and of the continuing flow of time, obliterating much that had gone before.” Read, also, Geologic Realism, by Kathryn Yusoff. Think about rocks and sand, erosion, unthinkable quantities of time. See Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran, from 1934: a fictional documentary that imagines a kind of primordial life by the craggy seashore.

Life feels at once fragile and grounded on the beach, totally fleeting and totally expansive. It is a place where you can feel singularly small and singularly alone. Probably the most famous scene of beach solitude in all of cinema comes at the end of The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959), but my favorite beach ending is in Diego Lerman’s Tan De Repente (2002), in which a teenage punk lesbian couple semi-kidnaps a bored shopgirl and takes her on a road trip towards the beach.

A wide shot of the beach, from the water looking towards land.

The beach is, sometimes, where we go to assure ourselves that we have gone as far as we can go. Watch Stranger by the Lake (Alain Giraudie, 2013), On the Beach At Night Alone (Hong Sang-soo, 2017, and read the Walt Whitman poem of the same name), Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018), Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016). 

And what to do once we get there? Stare at the ocean in silence and daydream. Ralph Steiner made Surf and Seaweed in 1931, two years after his iconic H2O. Maya Deren’s At Land unfolds in the endless and endlessly transforming beach of dreams. Here we see two examples of the beach as a place where time and space become elastic. Standing inches away from an unthinkable mystery—a place where our bodies can float instead of sinking, where we cannot breathe or speak or last very long—we begin to feel other rules slip away too. Virginia Woolf opens The Waves on the beach:

An excerpt from Virginia Woolf's The Waves: "The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually. As they neared teh shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old win-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green, and yellow, spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold. The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue fingerprint of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

The beach may offer us the fantasy of seeing time pass without us in it, but even Woolf makes recourse to an arm, a lamp. We are never totally gone; it is never that simple. Here I recommend Freud (and Erika Balsom) on oceanic feeling: out of this world we cannot fall. The beach bears both the promise of total, sublime dissolution and the hard, insistent traces of the world. I am thinking of Courbet’s beach paintings, almost empty save for the tiniest boats.

An oil painting of an empty beach, the blue sky filled with clouds.
Gustave Courbet, The Beach, Sunset, 1867
The sea on a cloudy day, tiny boats visible on the horizon.
Gustave Courbet, The Seashore at Palavas, 1854
Another oil painting of the sea, a luminous blue, sky filled with clouds, tiny boats in the distance and ashore.
Gustave Courbet, The Calm Sea, 1869

And this image from Homo Sapiens (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2016), of the skeleton of a roller coaster left to rot on the perpetually-rising seabed:

The ruins of an amusement park ride sits in the shallow tide on the beach.

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The journey into and out of the sea with which we began does not guarantee continued life. Look at Forensic Architecture’s Drift-Backs in the Aegean Sea for a particularly thorough consideration of one of the ways that contemporary refugee crises play out in boats, in the water, and on the shore. If the beach in the West is a “modern” invention, it is worth remembering that that same modernity was predicated on many lethal, violent voyages and mass deaths at sea. 

Here too is the fantasy of a second life we thought about with Jaws and L’Atalante, but this is not a fantasy of mastery and power; it is the dream of safety, of refuge. Mati Diop’s very magical and beautiful ghost story Atlantiques (2019) is about the migrant deaths that haunt so many shorelines, and the people left scanning the horizon; watch it alongside the short film of the same name she made 10 years prior (Atlantiques, 2009), in which a group of young Senegalese men sit on the beach at night discussing the voyages they have made and plan to make, the possibility of never returning. Diop’s is a spectral beach, a void, an encounter with the abyss and with other forms of life. (A ghost is no harder to imagine than an octopus or a starfish, and far more familiar.) 

A young woman on the beach, gazing into the distance, wind blowing.

The beach is where one thing becomes another; it is the edge of human life. And so it is full of death—sometimes violent, sometimes calm. Watch A Scene at the Sea (Takeshi Kitano, 1996—and, for a detour through Japanese surf culture of the 1980 and 90s, Piper’s classic Summer Breeze and their amazing music video for Sunshine Kiz), read Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Perfection,” and finish with The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda, 2008), alongside Michael Taussig’s essay “The Beach: A Fantasy,” which contains, among other things, this thrillingly cinematic image:

A train chugs through the ocean, wild waves all around it. The caption reads: From Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, 1987), 1:xviii.

I’ll close this syllabus the way Taussig opens his article, quoting Nietzsche in The Gay Science: Thus live waves—thus live we who will—more I shall not say.

The Beach: Beginnings and Endings is referenced in Looking at Light, a syllabus by Nellie Kluz.