The Beach in Cinema
Last year’s studies looked into contemporary world cinema and highlighted highly-acclaimed and influential films from many different countries. The course opened with Frenchman Francois Truffaut’s iconic masterpiece The 400 Blows (1959). Much was made of the final scene, in particular the famous freeze-frame of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s character Antoine as he turns to look directly into the camera. Having fled a work camp nearby, he runs down to the sea, contemplating his uncertain future. As Crompton et al (2008) explain, the beach acts as a threshold for this uncertainty with Antoine leaving the land behind and “seeming to ask himself and us: What next?”
Fiona Handyside (2014), explores the “industrial, aesthetic and thematic relations of French cinema to the beach” arguing it is a place that “some of the most iconic and challenging moments in French cinema are associated with”. Earlier (2009), she had looked at the films of Eric Rohmer, tracing the changing ways in which he had approached the beach — both as a “place of the urban mass, and yet also as a site of isolation and dislocation.” Handyside believes that an analysis of the beach as a “nexus of meanings” is important to the overall representation of place in film.
This idea led me to ponder my own exposure to memorable beach scenes in film. I thought of two Australian films which I have watched recently (interestingly enough both starring Russell Crowe) Romper Stomper (1992) and Heaven’s Burning (1997). Geoffrey Wright’s Romper Stomper follows the activities and eventual downfall of a Footscray-based neo-Nazi group, led by the authoritative Hando (played by Crowe). The film’s final scene plays out on a beach where the main trio — Davey, Gabe and Hando — are involved in a violent altercation that ends with Hando lying dead, stabbed in the neck by Davey. While Davey and Gabe embrace they are watched from the clifftop by a group of Japanese tourists, as the trio’s getaway car burns in the background. As Lucille Paterson (2009) notes, the tourist’s voyeuristic angle “conveys the message that the skinheads’ violence and warped worldview can only lead to self-destruction”, while much like in The 400 Blows, the close-up of Davey and Gabe points to “far more uncertain implications”.
Craig Lahiff’s Heaven’s Burning, also has its final climax on the beach. The film follows getaway driver Colin (Crowe) and Japanese hostage Midori (Youki Kudoh) after a failed bank robbery as they flee from both the cops, Midori’s crazed husband, and Colin’s gang members who he has deserted. Midori is driving while Colin is in the passenger seat growing weaker and weaker from a gunshot wound. The police eventually catch up to the two fugitives and the car rolls over and catches fire on the shoreline. Paralysed and hopeless, Midori shoots herself before the car blows up. The camera sets on one of the police officers, hunched over and looking out to sea as the car burns in the background.
Again, it is a quintessentially Australian image, a trail of destruction met with a sense of frustration and irrevocability. The sea is again a metaphor for hope and opportunity, a respite from the dangers of the land. The camera pans outward from the policeman sitting on the beach to focus on the Australian coastline, the foregrounded car in flames, perhaps representing the horror and damage of Australia’s dark history.
References:
- “The 50 best beach scenes in the movies” Sarah Crompton, David Gritten, Marc Lee, Tim Robey and Sukhdev Sandhu, The Telegraph, 23 Aug 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/3558960/The-50-best-beach-scenes-in-the-movies.html
- “Rohmer à la plage: The role of the beach in three films by Eric Rohmer” Fiona Handyside, Studies in French Cinema, Volume 9, 2009, Issue 2, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1386/sfc.9.2.147_1
- “Cinema at the Shore : the Beach in French Film”, Fiona Handyside, Oxford, 2014, http://www.worldcat.org/title/cinema-at-the-shore-the-beach-in-french-film/oclc/870950135
- “Key Moments in Australian Cinema: Special Dossiers”, Lucille Paterson, Senses of Cinema, Issue 52, September 2009, http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/key-moments-in-australian-cinema-issue-70-march-2014/romper-stomper-geoffrey-wright-1992/
