"The beach" is an excellent experimental short by french master Patrick Bokanowski, a miniature masterpiece.
It is divided in four "panels", that, once more as in his other short films, trigger our memory's retina, without ever wanting to abide in any allusive crux, yet is playfully evocative. The third and fourth parts, with their technique, look forward to his future elaborations "By the Lake" and "Solar Beats" respectively, making this an ongoing, involving and deeply pleasurable preoccupation with the mysteries, the politics, even the science fiction of light and shadow.
The first part, that could be entitled "Figures on a Beach", could stand at the side of Cezanne's "Bathers", especially his last take on the subject, and Courbet's mysterious even if quite straightforward, and critical if somehow elusively ironic, "The Edge of the Sea at Palavas". The blue's hue comes into that tradition. Also, it is as if Lascaux's paintings came to live on the sea's ever-changing, fluctuating surface. The sea becomes a cave, and the, ever-so-present in Bokanowski's films, human shadows, like cut-outs in motion, coming after the Enlightment's fascination with the darkly "silhouettes" that saw the emergence of subjectivity, play like signals, rather than signs, of a certain void.
The second, and quite brief, part, reads like the sky come down on the wet sand, with somnambulists stumbling and strolling on its rococo clouds.
The third part employs the same technique with "By the Lake" to astounding effects. Look what happens with the wind-surfing images. Surfing, french philosopher Gilles Deleuze's favorite sport, is not any more a sport of power and domination directed toward some goal, but instead it is a practice of merging with a wave, of becoming-wave, as it were. But look what happens to this most modern of sports (or, rather, to its windy variation) when cubist bumps seem to come in its way: for me this was the most fascinating part of the film; while recognizing the shapes "behind" the distortion, that distortion somehow becomes one with our gaze, hence, I think, our fascination with it. Distortion as the blind spot in our gaze, is also our gaze as playful effect integred in the movement.
The fourth part leaps forward to the most recent installment by the french artist, "Solar Beats", and its golden reflections are the culmination of a sensibility first presented in his so '70s tinted use of animation in "the woman who powders herself" (recalling anime films like Topor's "forbidden planet") and since evolved into this, a new, solar community.
And once more, one has to celebrate Michele Bokanowski's soundtrack. The couple's collaboration must be one of the most under-appreciated recent artistic acts.
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