Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Professor of English, Southwest Texas State University

mbeky@yahoo.com

Film occasionally offers privileged moments in which a director's vision is so powerful that it alters a culture's vision of itself. Three landmark films from the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand imprinted unforgettable beach scenes on the psyches of millions of viewers. The proposed analysis will view the project of mass media as not "empty distraction of 'mere' false consciousness, but rather as a transformational work on social and political anxieties and fantasies which must be 'managed' or repressed" (Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, 1992, 23).

Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity, takes full advantage of the physical magnetism of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in a scene of abandonment to sensuality. The film presents the spectacle of an illicit couple making love on the sand, defying the twin taboos of exhibitionism and adultery. In political and social terms, this conquest of the staid British persona by the robust American male reflects shifting national positions during the 1950s. By the seventies, the beaches of the United States and Australia had begun to wash up less passion and more blood, in the aftermath of military, race, and class warfare. Sensitivity to cultural and environmental exploitation surfaced in such films as Peter Weir's The Last Wave. The central character's progress through subterranean sewers and out onto a polluted beach makes concrete the revenge exacted by nature and by members of colonized cultures. Weir's depiction of links between the natural world and the Aborigine received immediate disapproval from Aboriginal viewers, but Weir captures the guilt and insecurity of many intellectuals during the 70s. During the 1990s the beach is percieved as a location of change and renewal in Jane Campion's The Piano. Beach scenes comment on gender and cultural codes, resistance through silence, alternative modes of expression, appropriation and assimilation. All of these pivotal beach scenes simultaneously reflected and shaped the consciousness of their audiences.