Cut To: The Beach

The significance of the beach is not found in its metaphor but in its expanse. If you are lying on the beach on your belly—whether you’ve positioned yourself or emerged violently from the water like so—beyond you, horizons emerge like short valleys of beige and blue. There is no better place to wonder about presence and absence, the terms of arrival and departure, than at these points.

On the Internet, as the Syrian refugee crisis began to receive attention in major US publications, an image of a child’s body washed up on the beach became the heartstrings of a campaign to incite empathy for the migrant bodies that arrive this way. The image floated up and down Facebook and Twitter timelines, with laments for the loss of a three-year-old life. For some, the image was enough to inspire communion with a Syrian body. For others, it emphasized the washed up bodies with dark skin and eyes that do not receive visual eulogy across the Internet’s expanse. The least imaginative demanded to know why a child would be made to arrive on a shore at all, the parents alive and their baby belly down, horizons receding. You wonder if the photographer had dared to lie face against the sand to get the shot.

In film, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ show a beach that is communal and liminal. The Pezant women, the last of the Geechee tribe off the coast of South Carolina, cook, play, sing, argue, appear, and disappear, all on the beach. And there Guido, a prolific but uninspired film director, finds the women he’s ever loved and courted, and they all hold hands. The beach represents too broad of a range for anything to be absolute, and so Antoine Doinel runs along the shore in the final moments of The 400 Blows, a child’s life is not bookended nor begun, but transmitted across the stretch of water and sand. Terrence Malick’s beaches, like Fellini’s beaches, are where memory meets imagination. In The Tree of Life, The New World, and Knight of Cups, the camera itself seems to toggle between its belly and its back, on the ground or up against the sky. In filming The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès Varda, without explanation, asks her family to dress in white and meet on the beach for a scene.

Still from 8 ½, from 1963.

If you spend some of your summer out of the filmic or digital expanses, and on the actual beach, you might be in the Caribbean, where white bodies slacken at shore, the sun hitting them and bouncing back, sometimes striking and piercing with a burn. The image of this beach is familiar enough, obsidian and boyish meets Nordic and hungry, and sex is not only a service but a capital E Exchange. But often, the encounters are both dull and insidious. In the film A Bigger Splash, there is a brief encounter between rich white travelers and black immigrants on an intimidating arrangement of rocks. The white people halt, startled, silent, and the black people speak in untranslated phrases, locking their gazes on the white man and woman, and then leave. When you’re 11, you emerge from a hotel pool in The Gambia and see large pale wrinkled breasts, oblong twin pendulums, at every corner. In the distance, on the beach, a Gambian man in leather sandals walks along the water and without turning his head, seems to look right at you.

So when you arrive at the beach, the images you’ve collected rise and recede. Beaches might look alike—part of an extended family—yet they are not all analogous. The beaches of departure, of arrival, of hope, of communion, of memory, of sex, of body-image consciousness, of racism, of rejection, of languor, of nostalgia do not necessarily exist in continuum. In a moment of flashback, as the sandaled man continues past your line of site, you remember that not everything is connected—much is montage.

Header image: Still from The 400 Blows, from 1959. Image courtesy of nicksflickpicks.com.