Young body on the beach

Abstract

In cinema, the beach often becomes something beyond the kind of luscious but perfunctory site suggested in classical painting and in the complexities of eighteenth-century therapeutic discourse. It is a setting for notable drama, emphatic, romantic or apotheotic. Screened beach scenes go beyond nature by showing the sands as a heightener of dramatic effect. The beach often sets the display of a particular body, powerful and young but also, like the sand, part of the cycle of history. The young body on the beach is the object of distanct adoration in Death in Venice (1971), a metaphor for commercialization in Jaws (1975), a sign of the immortality of romance in Pauline à la plage (1983), and an outgrowth of ego confronting its reality in The Beach (2000).

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Murray Pomerance

Murray Pomerance is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University and the author, editor or co-editor of more than two dozen books including Alfred Hitchcock's America, The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect, Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema, The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory, Johnny Depp Starts Here, An Eye for Hitchcock, A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film and Cinema and Modernity. He is also editor of the ‘Horizons of Cinema’ series at SUNY Press and the ‘Techniques of the Moving Image’ series at Rutgers University Press, and with Lester D. Friedman and Adrienne L. McLean, respectively, co-editor of the ‘Screen Decades’ and ‘Star Decades’ series at Rutgers.