The sea has captured the imaginations of artists of every sort throughout history, since whatever mysterious, prehistoric, water-like mass evolved into the salty behemoth we now know and love, through natural selection aided, of course, by God. The poetic and terrific potential of the sea has been in evidence nowhere more than in cinema, a medium given to immediacy and grandness of artistic thought.
Bakushū
The opening shot of Yasujirō Ozu’s Bakushū (Early Summer) accounts for one of the most beautiful images of shoreline ever committed to film. A dog trots across the frame in front of waves gently breaking on the beach, their crests catching the sun for split-seconds, reflecting a glorious, ethereal white in the grey seascape, with gently-sloped mountains resting in the background. Possessed of a unique talent for filming space and landscape, the director’s fascination with the sea persists throughout his career, acting as a poetic motif in his domestic dramas, which became beloved masterpieces of Japanese cinema.
Eternity and a Day
Staying on the arthouse side of things, Theo Angelopoulos’ Palme d’Or winning Eternity and a Day features Bruno Ganz as a terminally ill poet struggling to find meaning and purpose in his life. Littered with beautiful landscape shots and scenes spanning a lived and poetic reality, the vast image of the sea lingers and returns as a harbinger of the unknowable, of mortality and, indeed, of eternity. An exponent of a poetic cinema and certainly influenced by Ozu, Angelopoulos’ use of water in his films, as border, metaphor and liminal space, is unparalleled in modern cinema.
Jaws
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws warrants a mention as one of the finest horror films ever made, and a wonderful glimpse into cinematic manifestations of American paranoia and malaise during their military forces’ retreat from Vietnam. The sea here is a paranoid space, housing the chaotic metaphorical and “real” danger posed by the shark, in the nostalgic and fictional seaside town of Amity, where the shark attacks quickly threaten the town’s economy, based as it is on “summer dollars”. As well as its classic soundtrack, Jaws launched proper Steven Spielberg’s career, in which he would go on to make significantly worse movies, none of which featured the sea quite so prominently, and that surely cannot be a coincidence.
Das Boot
Das Boot actually means ‘The Boat’, unfortunately, but it doesn’t make it any less of a wonderful sea-based film set on a submarine. An extremely tense and, indeed, epic war film about the crew of the U-96 during WWII, it is a test of endurance for the spectator which unsettles and rewards in equal measure. No sea-based film of such scale has ever succeeded artistically as Das Boot, with the 3 1/2 hour Director’s Cut amongst the most gripping in cinema. As well as maintaining a psychological and dramatic realism alongside a humane irony most apparent in closing scenes, Wolfgang Petersen’s film really rams home for the spectator how shit it would be to be in a submarine.
Words: Oisín Murphy
