Notes from Jesse Kennedy, TIE:
The film, Beach Beast, effortlessly manages to be sincere and beautiful in its humorous disrespect for the traditions of the avant-garde. In its obsession with lineage, theory and truth the avant-garde (in al its forms) has a tendency to neglect or remain hostile to the silent portion of its products. The silence and beauty inherent in its most interesting articles and remnants is made to speak, to talk in cliché's and stereotypes. The babble of explanation, meaning and intention moves detached across a surface of images and events as they actually were in their in (in)significance.
With Beach Beast the stereotypes are stretched thin, the avant-garde is enacted through scenes that reference experimental film, making it seem always arbitrary and forgetful in its self-involvement. It is more generally irreverent in its use of dialogue; nearly everything said comes across as a clichéd line from a bad movie. This humorous device of stereotypes, parallel to the exaggeration in certain gestures, keeps dialogue and meaning suspended as artifice, while the images of what is being filmed remain beautiful and transient beneath.
Beach Beast recalls the efforts of children in their imitation of the perceived adult world. Language in their mouths is always too big, it doesn't fit them anymore then their parents shoes, they use it like costume jewelry, creatively and not in search of truth. In Beach Beast language is as much an object as what is being filmed. Out of place with what is happening and insincere (as a ray of light or a laugh), it remains a part of the film (alongside any other) rather than a narrative over it or about it. The result is a kind of constellation of unfamiliar faces, places, phrases and scenarios that in it's silliness and tenderness manages to be less linear (in the sense that it captures the beauty of a moment, qualities of light, the strangeness of words) than many attempts at non-narrative film.
--Like a first date, the words are arbitrary and beautiful. A game played to facilitate the connection of different bodies, affects, shared ice cream.
--A waitress dressed as a lobster, a bad joke, a bend at the waist…homemade pie, the off-putting out-moded remnants of marketing. The recovery of capitalism's lost articles. Like Walter Benjamin's dialectical images: things out of time reveal their beauty and materiality after the ideal that worked in them has collapsed or mutated into something bigger, brighter and more blinding. --Pleasure in talking, as if we were in a movie. To hear ourselves speak the lines of b-movie stars and know it's a joke.
--Above all transience and the moment, in a world that sees and thinks in television. To know that what is given is an arbitrary fantasy; a bad dream every one's convinced is real or necessary. To not escape the dream but dream lucidly and out of synch- always a step ahead of belief. Generating images and not being generated by them, or at least taking part in their generation.