At the shore, we can go no further. Wavering between that omnipotence and our insignificance, between observation and disorientation, between change and stillness, superiority and alienation, between the verb and the noun, there we find the sea—stopping us in our tracks. Its edges are unnegotiable, active, and our movements must be delicately choreographed in conjunction with its grander, more powerful motions. In our human patterns there is no discovery without the simultaneous urge to conquer, and like this we’ve created our portions and divisions, set up our posts and our borders, we’ve decorated the earth with our cities and our grand tours, devised undercurrents of mechanisms and technologies to occupy every available corner, we’ve collected endless specimens and souvenirs to make the earth our spectacle. The sea has not been entirely immune to these advanced tactics of possession, but it has survived—still intact. It doesn’t belong to us, and it has kept its secrets. Any track we make upon its surface disappears in an instant.
Beyond meticulous cartographies, our most valuable and instinctual understanding of place is as a container of narrative, of knowledge both inherited and experienced, and this is how the sea has remained free, if not in the arbitrary clutches of mare clausum, then at the very least in our discrete appeals and wonders. But the desire to appropriate and to re-imagine is second nature to the mind, so at the interstice of land and water, we cast out graphs of story and fantasy, layering the expanse with our simulacrums and our meditations. “There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams,” Virginia Woolf wrote in The Waves. Could you define the sea without its vastness, without its immortal age, without the slightest sense of trepidation or alternative temporality?
All these qualities, which we necessarily borrow for our own interpretations and expressions, have been given cinematic explorations in three documentaries that generate the multiple and mobile perspectives of a fluid domain: Mais Darwazah’s My Love Awaits Me by the Sea (2013), Agnès Varda’s The Beaches of Agnès (2008), and Sky Hopinka’s Małni—Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore (2020). Because we cannot own the depths, we must draw our accounts along the surfaces, and as such the sea shares affinity with the film-screen as a shallow zone of encounter, with all of its vertical capacities substantiated in the mind: phantasmagoric architectures of fantasy, faith, and idea.
I. Returns
To tell the story that Mais Darwazah seeks, one must shift the consciousness from the water’s rejection of enforced borders, and return to the physical body on land, monitored and policed by administrative violence and explicit reductions of identity. Sixty-six kilometres separate the city of Hebron, in the Palestinian West Bank, from the coastal city of Jaffa, but should a Palestinian seek to make their way across that distance towards the waters, they would be met with concrete, metal—a barrier dotted through with heavily armed and fortified checkpoints. A soldier would demand their identity card as well as a daytime permit, which was often refused to even workers who went daily to Israel, and most of the time they would be left sitting at the side of the road, their identification stuffed into the pocket of some officer, watching people from the other side freely make their way through the barricade towards their unlawful settlements. The artist and poet Hasan Hourani was amongst the many who were mostly forbidden to cross the demarcation. Born in 1974, after the Nakba, he would’ve never known the shorelines panoramic with Palestinian homes, ports, and markets, and even as he traversed other landscapes, making his way eventually to New York, where the ambivalent Atlantic unfurled its wings, those who knew him said that he always spoke of the Mediterranean, its bidding phantoms and inherited revolutions, its passages that spoke of how Palestine had been built by the roaming Sea Peoples, he would miss it until he was eventually able to make his return, to again attempt a crossing of that forbidden, deadly arena of conquest, and one day, in August, when he finally reached Jaffa in the company of his loved ones, it was there—after 29 years of writing and drawing visions of freedom, in those waters that spoke to him as if he were prodigal—that he drowned.
Hasan Hourani is the love that figures the distances in My Love Awaits Me by the Sea, but Darwazah has never met him. Instead, the film charts a map designed around his presence: his poems, his reveries, flashes of his features found in other people, along certain streets. Born in Canada, the director also aligns the documentary’s vococentrism to lay her own momentous journey—the first trip to Palestine—atop this embodied spatialization of Hourani, and as such there are two lovers, the man and the country, merged by her similar inquisitions and desires. Through the film, they are explored with the intimate curiosity of someone tracing the surfaces of a body revealed to her for the first time. She is at times hesitant, at times fearless.
Composed of mesmeric sceneries, casual interviews, sketches of watercolour and granite, and still photographs, Darwazah uses fragments to forge together the enormous unknowns—the riddled home country, the strange man that harbours her emotion, and most of all, the elusive, shifting definitions of freedom. Knowing that the camera is free to capture certain realities but not others, a tender narration fuses a connection between the images and the surging passions beneath: “So I started my journey to find you, amongst people who, till this day, are still searching for a home to shelter their dreams.” Uninterested in the menial procedures of travel, Darwazah rarely shows any scenes of navigation or active positioning; instead, she posits us directly within closed-in spaces—homes, courtyards, the white margins of a photograph. The film is more interested in lived space than in motion, and in this, one is reminded that Darwazah is not simply traveling, but creating tableaus, fundamental relationships, essential fabrics, out of a fractured region. She wants to show the cities and fields as havens of belonging—as places where people go despite being unwanted or forbidden, even if they are only able to return from exile in their dreams. It also mimics the displacements and anachronisms of love, which, in the aftermath of its primary conflagrations, leaves behind only cinders, which one must dissect in search of narrative: how we loved, why we loved, where that love lived within us.
Just as the ghost of Hourani lingers like a patina over every shot, the individuals that speak to Darwazah across her journey provide moving, multimodal entrances into a Palestinian body that refuses disappearance or stagnation. The first, a young man living in a camp in Damascus, de-stems herbs for fattoush and tells her, “You don’t own your place, but you created it. Be it distorted emotionally or mentally, twisted, skewed, or whatever. . . you still created it, beautifully nonetheless.” In a serene, sunned garden, a woman named Leila tells the story of falling in love with her husband, Nael, when he told her at the checkpoints: “You don’t need to say please. This is your homeland.” She points at the ground and laughs. Holding their cherubic, blue-eyed daughter, Nael states: “The rhetoric of the powerful is forced on us, and any other rhetoric is considered romantic, stupid, naïve and disconnected from reality…But I disagree. Romanticism is a struggle. It’s someone saying, ‘This is what I think and want.’” Later, with smiling, piercing eyes, he waves a hand and says: “To plant an orange orchard! To see Jaffa’s Sea! What a big dream that is!”
In the Palestinian vernacular, the term al ard is used to define the mutual and permanent relationship between a person and their land, an indestructible bond that pervades through the actions of being. As Fawaz Turki elucidates: “Even if they wanted to, the Palestinians could not have stepped outside of their landhood, a skin of consciousness more intimately enfolding, more woven to their human identity, than their own skin.” This certitude is unimaginable to the many who come from a lineage of arrivers—who come to do battle with the land, to tame it—but it can be felt in dilution for anyone who has ever heard a transgenerational tale, who has been taken to some unmarked spot and told: this is where. . . And suddenly the temporal regime lifts; one is given charge of the past’s vast accumulation. Today, when Palestinians speak of land to one another, it is as an ongoing method, a disinherited where that has no habitation, that goes on searching. So, to survive so many years of fracture, this absolute connection has taken an alternative form—absorbing disorder, propelling itself, deriving expression from motion and coherence from distance, it has mutated from the impassable solidity of land to borrow something of the water.
The sea here is not simply present as symbol. It is a determination, a destination, and from the very beginning of the film, a grave. Yet it cannot help but arch its rejection of stasis over both the broken shape of Palestine and the shimmering, variable dreamscape of Palestine, coalescing them. In one of the drawings that interject the film, a cyan square, framed by dark oblong trees, is centered in the frame. A small dark figure swims there. Darwazah is telling a story—one of Hourani’s stories about his expansive, chimeric travels, of riding bicycles in the skies over urban city blocks, mounting the crest of a curlicue wave, dancing under the rain on top of a camel’s back. This one is about the clouds in spring, and on the screen, Darwazah draws a soft white daub over the blue waters. Then, in one quick cut, the white has blinked into a luminous, setting sun, the cyan has spilled out over its angled borders and is pouring to the outermost edges of the page, uncontainable blue, and instead of one small floating shape, now there are two. There is no partition that can outlast the restlessness of the water. There is no changing the course of something so determined to return.
In this conjunction of metaphor, imagery, and narration, Darwazah veers away from the documentary’s purported objectivity and enters the realm of the essay film, which produces a cinema that is simply, as Barthes said, “rubbed by the real.” Yes, the lover is dead. The tragedy of contemporary Palestine is heightened by our awareness of what has already been exponentially brought to devastation in the last months, and the hope expressed by so many at the center of this film must be counterweighted, in our sights, by a distorted and annihilating war. Yet the whole purpose of Darwazah’s at-times literal caméra-stylo is to give vehicle to free-reining imaginations that are necessary for conveying a subject in transition—when no one yet knows how these realities will reveal themselves. To invent a destination that does not yet exist so that one can keep making one’s way towards something. Say, freedom—which everyone in this film seems to glimpse in the shape of Jaffa’s sea.
II. Recollections
Like many others around the world, I mourned the death of Agnès Varda in 2019 with great intensity—partially because she was one of the few filmmakers and artists who seemed to genuinely be in love with the world, and those in love with the world should get to live in it the longest of all, but more specifically, it was the tremendous loss of how capably and deftly she had always shared that love through cinema. In her works one found the traits of many of Nouvelle Vague contemporaries—Godard’s sense of levity, Resnais’s intuitive hits against the flint of surrealism, her beloved Demy’s eye for color and composition—but amongst them, she was the most capable of aiming that focus and intelligibility, to transform the ordinary into the numinous.
In The Beaches of Agnès, one of her final films (she claimed it would be her last, but two more would follow), Varda turns that luminous eye onto herself, with the mimetic aid of her most formative landscapes. The resulting film weaves together the shores of Knokke-le-Zoute, Sète, Los Angeles, Noirmoutier Island, and Paris (enforced by six truckloads of sand dumped in the middle of Rue Dauguerre), while also imitating the undulating corporeality of the sea in form, revisiting these sites and sets to watch the tide come in and out, extrapolating what matters from the shimmering surfaces, and piecing together the bones and dark letters left along the shores. It is to tell everything as well as it can be told while perpetuating the cycle of aesthetic erosion, in which the beauty and purpose of the final film-product can be ever-lasting and ever-repurposed.
Perhaps from her avid observations of other pedestrian lives, Varda has an acute insight into what makes human existence interesting—how to pursue one face in the crowd with her sensual mélange of portraiture, incident, music, and soliloquy, following it until the veils of its ordinariness are pulled away, revealing the meaning that they themselves have earned with their time, and the impact that each have had on their particular corner of the world. Portioning an individual in front of the camera is one of the most ethically prickly methods of knowledge-extraction, but it is a divide that she mediated through a semiotics of sincerity: close-ups, joyful intrusions and interruptions in the way of a conversation between two friends, and sufficient temporal space to gauge each person’s own comfort in self-performance. Regardless of who is facing the lens, Varda concludes that they are complex, beautiful, endlessly engaging—they know something she doesn’t—and through this beatific wonderment, she is able to integrate her subjects into cinema’s public space as enchanting protagonists of social narrative. In a piece from the Guardian, she flips the script and instead pursues her interviewer, “I want to know everything about you, including the size of your shoes. Hehehe!”
Autobiographical works have the mandate of being sufficiently self-aware so that “the revelation itself is purposive, intentional and not merely narcissistic or accidentally revealing,” as Jay Ruby states, and it would indeed be reductive for Varda to cast herself as curio. Luckily, the self is not a corresponsive body that answers questions, and therefore any overarching objectification of selfhood is inevitably an improvised entanglement with memory—to play with its pieces. Agnès loves puzzles, to her cinema is a puzzle, and The Beaches of Agnès is an act of gathering the borders to hint at the center, aligning the coastlines as a platform to gaze towards oceanic depths. It is not an anthropological excavation—we’re not getting to the bottom of anything—but a study of one’s own occurrences and recollections as subordinate to the bigger schematic of filmmaking.
Memories themselves are not legitimate representations of actuality, and as such, their truth is not in their capacity for portrayal, but in the distinct ways that separate fragments connect and interlock. Varda’s previous films have formed epistemological perusals of womanhood (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t), radicalism (Black Panthers), labor (The Gleaners and I), isolation (Documenteur), and the divisions between public and private (Cléo From 5 to 7)—and the primary enunciation of this varied oeuvre is to equate filmmaking as a refined iteration of thinking: that putting images, sounds, and characters together is to express thought’s tactility and kineticism. The film itself is considering something, holding to the shifting trajectories and fields of psychological space. Being above all others an art of motion, it owes itself to liberate what Erwin Panofksy called the “single and immobile eye,” giving it access to the cerebral landscape of constantly shifting centers. In this, Varda understands something about the place reality has in art; it is not to create a gleaming gallery in which a single, solitary truth is separated from the mess and chaos of the surrounding society, but to present an encapsulating slice of how each and every scenic detail—ripening, darting, and flickering in all our spaces—illuminates one another.
Standing before the sea heightens the awareness to two streamlines of time: the enormous and unfathomable geographic era, but also the measured tempo of experienced time, patterned by each crash of the wave, each swing of the fluid pendulum. Varda, eighty years old by the film’s end, utilizes that simultaneity to balance the micro and macro of her years. She collapses her biography with different scenes from her many films, emboldening some with photography, reading them with retrospection, shuffling them into the present moment of organisation. She moves from the tropical vividity of mid-revolution Cuba (“socialism and cha-cha-cha”) in photomontage, then suddenly, in a “radical climate change,” flies us to the stark black stones of winter in Noirmoutier, where she had sorted and arranged those thousands of images. “Jacques and I loved that island…,” as she grabs on to a discursion and lets it take her where it may, and then we see Demy himself, telling us what he loves—to make “calm films. Films about happiness.” Here Agnès interrupts (with the image of her and Demy sitting with a table in between them, looking at one another, still lingering): “I made a film about a different kind of happiness…” The delicious verdure and wide-mouthed sunflowers of Le Bonheur (1965) appear on the screen: “the simple story—actually, not so simple—of a little family.” In the excerpted scene, Claire and Jean-Claude Drouot, playing the parents, turn towards their two young children with the clarity of domestic bliss, as Varda pulls us in: “We all know the tender expression of parents gazing at their children.” Cut to a monochrome print of her and Demy glowing, listening attentively to the baby Mathieu Demy in his stroller; then a family portrait—Agnès, Jacques, Rosalie, Mathieu, angelic in seventies Kodachrome; then the present, the children with smile lines and looking downward at their mother’s diminutive frame with affection and, perhaps, a bit of forbearance. “My beautiful children,” she introduces us, and then unfurls the timeline once more to show us their cinematic incarnations: Rosalie in a ponytail, playing with the snow in Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964); then as a young, Botticellian woman at the end of Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977); Mathieu in a four-way split-screen, in roles from toddler to teenager. All this happens in less than five minutes. Vision: ornamented by assemblage, sculpted by thought, and led by impulse.
This filmic encyclopedia insists on not only visual but textual mutualities, finding tangents and dimensions to set down continual stepping stones towards the next moment, and this regeneration of past subjects also allows the time’s passage to elaborate its own layers of representation. An extracted scene, removed from its narrative context, carries with it all the markers of its own history and its storied traces, yet when reasserted in documentary, this doubled representation can compound meaning in the way of the ready-made artwork. One is reminded that the archive is a living structure, holding in its fluid chambers an endless sequence of alternative rationalities, all of which shift and ferment as we continue to submit new discoveries, materialities, and significations. Jacques Rancière posited montage as “the disciplining of chaos,” while asserting the need for “the mute propping up of the wall that separates artistic parataxis from the headlong collapse of materials.” Watching The Beaches of Agnès, there is a lingering feeling of other configurations, straining the hinges, trying to make their way into the film, but this detracts neither from its historiographic narrative nor from its intellectual passions. After all, no artwork is embalmed and laid to rest; nearly every single piece in Varda’s oeuvre was taken back up and fitted into the puzzle’s frame—and in fact, she will do it once again later on, going back and re-examining her life and work in Varda by Agnès (2019). Her works are complete, but not finished.
“It is an art that cannot live by looking back over the past and chewing over the nostalgic memories of an age gone by,” Alexandre Astruc said of cinema. “Already it is looking to the future, for the future, in the cinema as elsewhere, is the only thing that matters.” Every film is made for an audience living in the future, and what allows autobiography to transcend the timely constraints of egoism is the telling of one’s life around the great mystery of living—such is what keeps the future wanting. This is perhaps why, as Varda claims in the film, if we opened her up, we’d find beaches: the demarcation between the foothold and the deluge. In one scene, she is lying in the sand, sticking the photographs of her childhood into that soft ground. To situate her reminiscence there, wedged amidst all these very fine grains that had once been momentous stones, is a statement: this is what I have lived, but also this is what has been returned to me—what has been unearthed by the receding tide. She takes an image of herself as a young girl out of its frame, and behind it is a mirror, reflecting her face, her eight decades. The sea is crashing just behind, keeping count for her in its infinite way, lining up her gone seasons with ours in the present, singing it all into that ongoing music.
III. Resurrections
In an old Chinook story, two men, Coyote and Eagle, set out to retrieve their families from the realm of the dead. Arriving at the water’s edge, they find the house where, every night, hundreds of deceased men, women, and children gather to watch an old woman swallow the moon. After their loved ones amongst the crowd, Coyote and Eagle plan to kill the old woman. After the deed is done, Coyote swallows the moon that night in her stead, while Eagle places a box, filled with leaves and grasses, in the doorway. When the dead go to leave the house, they walk straight into the box, and when they’ve all entered, Eagle seals it. The two men then set off homeward, on a journey that would take six nights. On the fourth night, Coyote hears the voice of his wife from inside the box. Moved, he asks Eagle to hand it over. Though Eagle initially refuses, Coyote continues to plead, and on the last day of their travels, with the sun directly above, Eagle finally relinquishes the box to Coyote. They continue on, and when Eagle disappears momentarily around the curve of a hill, Coyote immediately opens the mouth of the box, hoping to release his wife. As soon as the first crack of light enters the sealed container, the dead, every single one, rush out in a force so violent that Coyote is thrown to the ground. They rise to the air in a crowd, floating away. Now they are gone forever, Eagle, having hurried back, says. We’ll never find them again. They’ve gone to join the moon.
What the West knows as the Orpheus myth appears in iterations all over the world, in varying colors but the same pattern: a grief, a pursuit, a brief return, then an eternal loss. Which is to say that despite the ancient knowledge of certain unredeemable absences, there occurs moments in humanity’s consciousness, time and time again, that splits this certainty for an elemental opening of hope, holding an absolute unreality in tantalizing closeness.
There is no magic directly at work in Sky Hopinka’s Małni—Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore, but something suspended and transitory interpenetrates his simmering, contemplative depictions of the Pacific Northwest’s wet greenery, the ocean’s wide and graceful folds, the curving roads and mossy forest paths. It is a slow film, and a careful one, aware of the fragility and tempestuousness embedded in relationships—whether between two people, the earth and the cosmos, or the individual and the unseen forces. Hopinka hesitates to interrupt such conveyances. In its essence, the film centers around Indigenous legacies and ancestral cycles—how historical and inherited violences have corroded traditional measures of balance—but it resists dwelling on horrors or survivalist attitudes, opting instead to linger in the immediate middle of going-on-despite. And all the while, the phantasmagoric is seeping through Thad Kellstadt’s sonorous, oscillating score; being described along mythic narrations delivered in the Chinook Wawa; and rifting amidst the silences that the film’s two main subjects, Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier, do not rush to fill.
On the west coast, the Pacific has everything to say, and Małni employs it for its innate drama and grandeur, but also casts it by the formations of Indigenous knowledge: as a route, a connective tissue, and a sacred site. As Mercier arrives on the shores of an island in a canoe, the voiceover echoes over the scene in a wash: “Hello. These are the Chinook canoe people and we’re happy to land here. I’m sorry. We’ve traveled a little way to arrive here… As always, we respect you and we know you respect the old ways. As such, you work to bring all the canoe people here. We raise our hands and say, ‘Please let us travel safely inland, over in to your good land.’” Heralding the gleaming sands in greeting, this address dedicates the ocean as witness, as the lasting guardian of days old and new, as a repository for lost things.
Both Sahme and Mercier are expecting children, and as the camera lingers on the former’s hands tracing the changing shape of her body, or the latter’s face as he sings an inherited song in the dark, the compass needle trembles between possibility and destiny. It is certain that things will change, but there is no assurance as to what gets passed on—if certain aspects are doomed to repeat and echo, or if the momentous shift of birth can sever the most devastating binds. In explicating our experience of unsettledness, Freud said: “Let us take the uncanny associated with the omnipotence of thoughts, with the prompt fulfillment of wishes, with secret injurious powers and with the return of the dead… Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thoughts; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation.”
In filmic representation, however, these “old beliefs” do not remain supine in the subconscious, but are assimilated into the shared world via traded tales and vivid psychogeographies, despite all of modernity’s attempts to banish and suppress them. Psychoanalytic theory portions these specters as the source of one’s alienation and estrangement, but Małni posits a contrary position, taken up by those who have already experienced the most radical alienation and estrangement in the form of intergenerational traumas: that the hauntings of the old world deflect the “civilizing” strategies of the colonial, and beckon towards the more unifying experience of reconnecting oneself with a lost, violated history. “You are the grandchild of great love, and you’re the grandchild of great violence,” Hopinka writes in an essay, repeating the words that were spoken to him in the wake of a splintered family tree.
A necessary condition of resistance is to integrate multiple origins into one’s perspective, to interact with the painful pictures of the past as it can be materialized in the present—thereby turning it into a subject that is neither fixed, autonomous, nor invulnerable from change. By never specifically articulating the personal narratives of either Sahme or Mercier, Hopinka only allows the audience to draw deductions based on what they choose to reveal to us in the cinematic instant, thereby figuring a relationship with history in which it can still be encountered anew, and opening up the avenue of reciprocity: insofar as we are affected, we are also able to affect. Walter Benjamin wrote that: “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.” This now is where Małni seeks its reincarnations and reclamations.
Alternating with this human lineage, Małni also erects another kind of vital existence in its discernment of indigenous phenomenology. To apply a hegemonic logic and to extricate ourselves from purportedly “backwards” ways of living, there remains a resistance in contemporary thinking towards nature’s unknowability; magic is divested from it by the linguistic turn of “supernatural.” Yet, as autochthonic ways of living have increasingly returned to the forefront in the era of climate devastation, one must also reconsider its notions of the purportedly supernatural as embedded within nature, that the otherworldly is implicated in our world, that the awe we had reserved for divinity could in fact be applied onto the sublime operations of the biosphere. When Sahme steps fully clothed into a waterfall, letting it wash over her body and through the growing form of her unborn child, it is an act of deep reverence, denoting an awareness for the imperceptible ways that other intelligences may work themselves upon us.
Lingering, Hopinka’s camera stays on the long slick ropes of moss, the glowing red-orange crumbles of a fallen tree, the way droplets play off of the cliffside’s small tributaries. He aims a periscope towards the knife-edge of the waters and slowly zooms into the ragged caverns of metamorphic stone. He pans across the lime and emerald shades of the forest, all in blur. Just hue. There is an adulation for these matrixed textures, with the intent to hone our looking and our attention back towards the raw vivacity of those patterns and sensations—to expose the open realm of natural circulation that we’ve forced into hiding. Close-ups, in cinema, have been well-utilised for emotional purposes, achieving a peering-in that the human eye cannot accomplish, and extending the visual field to give the spectator a view into the direct soul of things, a way of reading minds. This unspeaking visuality of Małni guides us by keeping the human narratives respectfully oblique and powerfully undeclared, while inviting us to see the interior of the environmental throughline. Moving along the contours of this ancient language, these images warn with their profound, unifying beauty against domestication and insatiable harvests, carving out the sentience of place in a collective story—the only story that we have in common with the nonhuman. It is another declaration of that strange, nagging hope: if humankind can never redeem itself by resuscitating the world that we have destroyed, we are still able to reach it in such immediate moments. In envelopes of the forests, of the seas, it is still sending us messages.
*
The spaces we visit have the power to dissolve the singularity of our lives—to allow the incorporation of different times, social beings, and definitions. The sea lends itself to this multiplicity, but it also gifts us the clearest of reflections. Decipher your gaze. If you look upon the sea with anger, you will see a boiling, unfettered concoction of bitter salt. If you look upon it with joy, you will see a celebratory, invigorating invitation. Where land turns into water is thereby a fantasy theatre, a Foucauldian heterotopia that can simultaneously reflect and subvert, to both offer and retract visions and ideas, to allow entrance into the unreal. Even the real sea is not the sea that we know—the sea that is Darwazah’s liberty, Varda’s heart, and Hopinka’s custodian. What has been given to us through the oceanic message is an inviolable museum of images, and that is why filmmakers—those makers, founders, and interrogators of images—will always come to seek its profundity, its point of contact between worlds.
Meanwhile, the waters do not settle for any human composition. The poet Gerald Stern wrote: “Lucky there is an ocean to come to. / Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.” Such judgment enters us into the sensuous world of the overlap, of tumbling color, of lunar pull, of envelopment, of shapeshifting, all open to observation while calling back to a primordial featurelessness. One arrives at the shores full of wanting, and always finds something beckoning there.