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).