The Cinema of the Swimming Pool 3034317832, 9783034317832

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword • David Trotter
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Cinema of the Swimming Pool • Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch
1 The Municipal Plunge: Silent Cinema and the Social Life of Swimming Pools • Chris O’Rourke
2 Cinematic Comedy and the Swimming Pool: Gender, Class, Coming of Age and Sexual Identity from The Philadelphia Story (1940) to Legally Blonde (2001) • Sheri Chinen Biesen
3 ‘The Anatomy of Atavism’: American Urban Modernity, Gothic Trauma and Haunted Spaces in Cat People (1942) • Alex Naylor
4
From Stadium to Street: Generations and Gentrification in Berlin Pool Scenes • Edward Saunders
5 The Artifice of Modernity: Alienation by the Pool Side in the Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni • Axel Andersson
6 The Pools of The Swimmer (1968): Exurbia, Topography, Decay • Christopher Brown
7 Atmosphère d’Eau Sauvage: Reflections on La Piscine (1969) • François Penz
8 A Dangerous Age: Deep End (1970) • Pam Hirsch
9 Staging Embarrassment in The Last Picture Show (1971) and Morvern Callar (2002) • Rose Hepworth
10 Filming the Splash: David Hockney’s Swimming Pools on Film • Monika Keska
11 The Swimming Pool as a Site of Subversion during the Spanish Transition: The Case of Pepito piscina (1978) • Clara Garavelli
12 The Aesthetics of Overflow: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) in Duration • Matilda Mroz
13 Urban Guerilla Playfare, or Skating through Empty Cinematic Pools in Dogtown and Z Boys (2001) • Micah Trippe
14
Gutta cavat lapidem: The Sonorous Politics of Lucrecia Martel’s Swimming Pools • Sophie Mayer
15 ‘The sea nymphs tested this miracle’: Water Lilies (2007) and the Origin of Coral • Emma Wilson
16 Swimming in Post-apartheid Cape Town: Sea Point Days (2009) • Piotr Cieplak
17 Cartographies of Desire: Swimming Pools and the Queer Gaze • Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

new Studies in European Cinema

The swimming pool frequently appears in film not merely as a setting but as a dynamic site where social, political, cultural and aesthetic forces converge. What is it about this space that has so fascinated filmmakers and what kinds of cinematic investigations does it encourage? This collection features essays by an eclectic, international range of film researchers. Amongst the works analysed are classics such as The Cameraman (1928), The Philadelphia Story (1940) and La Piscine (1969); cult hits such as The Swimmer (1968) and Deep End (1970); and more recent representations of the pool in Water Lilies (2007), Sea Point Days (2009) and Ausente (2011). The pool is considered as a realm where artifice meets nature, where public meets private, where sexualities morph and blend; and as a space that reconfigures the relationship between architecture and narrative, in which themes of pollution, spectacle and reflexivity find unique expression. Approaching the swimming pool from a wide range of methodological perspectives, the essays in this collection stake a claim for the enduring significance of this exciting cinematic space.

Christopher Brown is Lecturer in Filmmaking at the University of Greenwich, where he teaches film and screenwriting. His articles have appeared in publications including Film Criticism and the Quarterly Review of Film  &  Video, and he has won several awards as a screenwriter.

Brown and Hirsch (eds) The Cinema of the Swimming Pool

Nsec

Edited by Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

The Cinema of the Swimming Pool

Pam Hirsch is Lecturer in English Literature and Film History and Theory at the University of Cambridge. She is the convenor of the undergraduate course Film, Culture and Identity and teaches on the MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures. Her most recent articles have appeared in publications including Feminist Media Studies and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. ISBN 978-3-0343-1783-2

www.peterlang.com

PETER LANG

The Cinema of the Swimming Pool

NEW STUDIES IN EUROPEAN CINEMA VOL. 17 EDITED BY WENDY EVERETT & AXEL GOODBODY

Peter Lang

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Edited by Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

The Cinema of the Swimming Pool

Peter Lang

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiblio­g rafie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The cinema of the swimming pool / Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch [editors]. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-0343-1783-2 (alk. paper) 1. Swimming pools in motion pictures. I. Brown, Christopher, 1984editor of compilation. II. Hirsch, Pam, editor of compilation. PN1995.9.S88C56 2014 791.43’6579--dc23 2014008009

Cover Image: Morgunblaðið – Hrollvekjandi by Kristin Ingvarsson. Reprinted under licence. ISSN 1661-0261 ISBN 978-3-0343-1783-2 (print) ISBN 978-3-0353-0619-4 (eBook) © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2014 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

David Trotter

Foreword

xv

Acknowledgements

xix

Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

Introduction: The Cinema of the Swimming Pool

1

Chris O’Rourke

1

The Municipal Plunge: Silent Cinema and the Social Life of Swimming Pools

21

Sheri Chinen Biesen

2

Cinematic Comedy and the Swimming Pool: Gender, Class, Coming of Age and Sexual Identity from The Philadelphia Story (1940) to Legally Blonde (2001)

37

Alex Naylor

3

‘The Anatomy of Atavism’: American Urban Modernity, Gothic Trauma and Haunted Spaces in Cat People (1942)

49

Edward Saunders

4

From Stadium to Street: Generations and Gentrification in Berlin Pool Scenes

61

vi Axel Andersson

5

The Artifice of Modernity: Alienation by the Pool Side in the Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni

77

Christopher Brown

6

The Pools of The Swimmer (1968): Exurbia, Topography, Decay

89

François Penz

7

Atmosphère d’Eau Sauvage: Reflections on  La Piscine (1969)

101

Pam Hirsch

8

A Dangerous Age: Deep End (1970)

121

Rose Hepworth

9

Staging Embarrassment in The Last Picture Show (1971) and Morvern Callar (2002)

133

Monika Keska

10 Filming the Splash: David Hockney’s Swimming Pools on Film

145

Clara Garavelli

11

The Swimming Pool as a Site of Subversion during the Spanish Transition: The Case of Pepito piscina (1978)

157

Matilda Mroz

12 The Aesthetics of Overflow: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) in Duration

169

vii Micah Trippe

13

Urban Guerilla Playfare, or Skating through Empty Cinematic Pools in Dogtown and Z Boys (2001)

181

Sophie Mayer

14 Gutta cavat lapidem: The Sonorous Politics of Lucrecia Martel’s Swimming Pools

191

Emma Wilson

15

‘The sea nymphs tested this miracle’: Water Lilies (2007) and the Origin of Coral

203

Piotr Cieplak

16 Swimming in Post-apartheid Cape Town: Sea Point Days (2009)

215

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

17 Cartographies of Desire: Swimming Pools and the Queer Gaze

229

Notes on Contributors

239

Index

245

Illustrations

Where the copyright to reproduce images has been sought and obtained, this is indicated below. In all other cases, images take the form of frame grabs, the use of which, for the purpose of academic criticism and review in this collection, is considered ‘fair dealing’, following current convention.

Chapter 1 1.1

The ‘Municipal Plunge’ in Buster Keaton and Edward Sedgwick’s The Cameraman (MGM, 1928).

22

1.2

Buster Keaton in The Cameraman (MGM, dir. Edward Sedgwick, 1928).

22

1.3

Chiswick Lido in the newsreel segment Water Babies (British Pathé, 1929). Copyright: British Pathé Ltd. Permission to reproduce obtained.

27

Members of the cast of the musical revue Brighter Blackpool parade for the Topical Budget camera in Aquatic Frolics (1926). Copyright: British Film Institute.

29

Victoria Baths, Manchester, in use as a public hall, c. 1910. Copyright: Manchester Libraries. Permission to reproduce obtained.

32

Postcard advertising films at the Prince of Wales’ Hall (Kentish Town Baths), October 1906. Courtesy of Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre.

34

1.4

1.5

1.6

x

Illustrations

Chapter 2 2.1

2.2

Tracy (Katharine Hepburn) swims and remembers her yar yacht True Love in the pool in The Philadelphia Story (MGM, dir. George Cukor, 1940).

38

Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) floats and is eroticized in the pool in The Graduate (Embassy / United Artists, dir. Mike Nichols, 1967).

44

Chapter 4 4.1

4.2

Filming the diving sequence for Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) in Berlin, 1936. Copyright: International Olympic Committee / Lothar Rubelt. Permission to reproduce obtained.

64

Adam (Devid Striesow) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper) at the Badeschiff in Tom Tykwer’s Three (2010). Copyright: X Verleih AG. Permission to reproduce obtained.

73

Chapter 5 5.1

Roberto (Giorgio Negro) tells Lidia ( Jeanne Moreau) not to follow the rich socialites at the Gherardinis’ party in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961 – Nepi Film / Silver Films / Sofitedip).

85

Illustrations

xi

Chapter 6 6.1

6.2

The empty pool in The Swimmer (Columbia Pictures / Horizon Pictures / Dover Productions, dir. Frank Perry, 1968).

96

Ned (Burt Lancaster) struggles to paddle in a cold pool in The Swimmer (Columbia Pictures / Horizon Pictures / Dover Productions, dir. Frank Perry, 1968).

96

Chapter 7 7.1

7.2

7.3

7.4

Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) lying by the pool in La Piscine (Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC) / Tritone Cinematografica, dir. Jacques Deray, 1969) and Victor Olgyay diagram. Olgyay, Design With Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 16.

102

The bastide today (left) and the map of the area (on right, the arrow points to the bastide). Map data from Google Earth: Google, TerraMetrics (2014).

107

The pool’s panorama, made up of frames over Days 1 to 4, from La Piscine (Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC) / Tritone Cinematografica, dir. Jacques Deray, 1969).

107

Pool and chapel in La Piscine (Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC) / Tritone Cinematografica, dir. Jacques Deray, 1969).

111

xii

7.5

7.6

7.7

Illustrations

Long shot versus medium shot in La Piscine (Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC) / Tritone Cinematografica, dir. Jacques Deray, 1969).

111

Harry (Maurice Ronet) contemplates the pond in La Piscine (Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC) /  Tritone Cinematografica, dir. Jacques Deray, 1969).

115

Aérolande’s ‘Tore’ stools and armchair (background) and orange Brionvega radio in La Piscine (Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC) / Tritone Cinematografica, dir. Jacques Deray, 1969).

115

Chapter 8 These three stills are reproduced here with permission of Maran / COKG /  Kettledrum / Paramount / The Kobal Collection. 8.1

8.2

8.3

Susan ( Jane Asher) flirts with Mike ( John Moulder-Brown) by the pool in Deep End (Maran Film, Kettledrum Films, Bavaria Film, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970).

123

Mike ( John Moulder-Brown) is ‘out of his depth’ with a client (Diana Dors) in the private bathroom in Deep End (Maran Film, Kettledrum Films, Bavaria Film, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970).

126

Susan ( Jane Asher) in the empty swimming pool in Deep End (Maran Film, Kettledrum Films, Bavaria Film, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970).

130

Illustrations

xiii

Chapter 9 9.1

Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) feigns a confidence that she almost certainly does not quite feel. The Last Picture Show (Columbia Pictures/BBS Productions, dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1971).

142

Chapter 10 10.1

10.2

Hazan compares the canvas with sequences showing the sprays of water formed by a swimmer in A Bigger Splash (Buzzy Enterprises / Circle Associates, dir. Jack Hazan, 1973).

149

The tiles that cover the pools walls and floor form a grid, similar to that of Muybridge’s backgrounds in Making A Splash (Media Software International / Mecca Leisure, dir. Peter Greenaway, 1984).

153

Chapter 11 11.1

11.2

The establishing shots of Pepito piscina (Acuarius Films S. A. / EMSE, dir. Luis María Delgado, 1978) situate the swimming pool as the principal enclave where the deals take place.

164

Towards the end of Pepito piscina (Acuarius Films S. A. /  EMSE, dir. Luis María Delgado, 1978), the swimming pool acts as a place of punishment for the protagonist’s scams.

164

xiv

Illustrations

Chapter 12 12.1

The flooded interior of Domenico’s house in Nostalghia (Opera Film Produzione / Rai 2 / Sovinfilm, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983).

179

Chapter 13 13.1

Jay Adams in Dogtown and Z-Boys (Agi Orsi Productions / Vans Off the Wall, dir. Stacy Peralta, 2001).

190

13.2

Skater in a pool with cypress trees in Dogtown and Z-Boys (Agi Orsi Productions / Vans Off the Wall, dir. Stacy Peralta, 2001).

190

Chapter 17 17.1

17.2

Marco Berger explores the showers and changing rooms of swimming clubs as spaces of intimacy and sexual tension in Ausente (Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales / Oh My Gomez! Films, dir. Marco Berger, 2011).

234

Sexual tension and queer voyeurism build around the swimming pool in Sexual Tension: Volatil (Swift Productions / TLA Releasing, dir. Marco Berger and Marcelo Mónaco, 2012).

237

David Trotter King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge

Foreword

There have been swimming pools in cinema for as long as there’s been a cinema, of one kind or another, for them to be in. Like the boxing ring, the swimming pool is an arena at once brim-full of extravagant motion, of purposeful human endeavour (even when the purpose is play), and always already enframed, set apart, so that the energy on display pushes against or consciously exploits an evident limit. Both these arenas were tailor-made for one of early cinema’s defining genres, the actuality: no need for the camera to move in order to capture all the relevant action. It’s exhilarating, nonetheless, to discover from the essays in this collection just how various and how inventive are the uses to which a concrete basin full of water has been put ever since cinema reinvented itself as a narrative art in the second decade of the twentieth century: more uses, even, than those to which a roped-in canvas square has been put, although we are still more likely to speak of a ‘boxing film’ than we are of a ‘swimming pool film’, because the one tends to concern a process, the other a punctual event, or series of events. It’s remarkable what a good swimming pool will do for even the most single-mindedly generic of movies. Take The Quiller Memorandum, a routine thriller directed with considerable verve by Michael Anderson which first did the rounds in 1966. The film’s theatrical trailer featured an explosion in a garage hyperbolic enough (it would have taken out the entire neighbourhood) to captivate susceptible teenagers like me. What we got for our money was suave George Segal outwitting neo-Nazis in cold-war West Berlin. Architecture matters, in this film, and so does the history of architecture. We first meet the laconic Quiller when his British controller, Pol (Alec Guinness), invites him to share a sandwich in the stadium built

xvi

David Trotter

by Werner March for the 1936 Olympics. Pol points to the platform where ‘certain well-known personalities’ used to stand. At least the old Nazis wore uniforms, he says: the new ones are more difficult to recognize, because they look like everyone else. The drift of Harold Pinter’s screenplay, from the original novel by Adam Hall, is that appearances can be deceptive: or, rather, that they almost always are. The film’s narrative enacts (or looks as though it’s going to enact) a moral and political excavation of the Berlin of the moment, with its skyscrapers, fly-overs and bowling-alleys, its ultra-hygienic plate-glass modernism. Just about the only lead Quiller has is a ticket-stub for a municipal swimming pool, the Stadtbad Neuköln. When he finds his way there, in the first of two scenes added by Pinter, the impression is of a purposeful, even regimented, exuberance entirely consonant with the Berlin of the moment. The pool absorbs relay after relay of young men from an apparently limitless supply at the far end. The screenplay prescribes ‘Shining water and bodies’. What could be more blithely up-to-the-minute than that, more intent on a bright future? Four young men swimming competitively abreast complete a length of the pool and climb out past Quiller, conspicuous enough in his natty suit to arouse the attendant’s curiosity. A tersely polite exchange follows, as shot-reverse-shot editing creates a pattern of mirrored suspicions. Quiller even buys into the future to the extent of claiming that he’s a coach himself, back in Williamsburg, Virginia. Later, as the action hots up, Quiller returns to the Stadtbad with his ambiguous accomplice, school-teacher Inge Lindt (Senta Berger). It’s night-time, and the pool has been emptied. Without water, and the fervent activity water sustains, the place seems cavernous. We recognize it now for what it is, a bit of the old Berlin, an echoing, shell-like structure as ghost-ridden as the Olympic Stadium. Built in 1914, the Stadtbad, with its Corinthian columns and balustraded balconies, represents a Berlin older even than the Olympic Stadium. The narrative has moved forward in time in order to move backward in space, stripping off layer after layer of contemporaneity. Will Quiller, barking out the attendant’s name, summon an appropriate ghost? Are we close now to Nazism’s ultimate origin, its source in the national psyche? The film quickly lays such grandiose thoughts to rest. An empty pool does not constitute a lack, an exposure, a clarification.

Foreword

xvii

It constitutes, rather, a magical counter-world, an unreality. Water makes it possible to do what cannot be done on dry land; lack of water where water ought to be does not so much restore dry land as make it possible to do what cannot be done on or in water. School-teacher and spy climb down into the pool and amble towards the deep end. He asks her to dance. ‘We could do an underwater ballet,’ he says. In the screenplay, though not in the film, he feints a few football moves. The emptiness is magical. Stripping away the surface, the film discovers not buried truth, but another surface, another way to appear. It wasn’t the first to make such a discovery, and it won’t be the last; but the device of the swimming pool allows it to do so to memorable enough effect. Its beautifully enigmatic final scene takes place at the ultra-modernist school where Inge teaches. Quiller, still not knowing where her loyalties lie, has gone to say goodbye. Her intentness on a bright future positively glows as she shepherds the children in her care. She is all shining water, all reflection. But then so is he. Pinter’s protagonist, unlike Hall’s, is himself a con-artist, a deceiver. It takes one to know one. I don’t remember much about that explosion in the garage. But the Stadtbad Neukölln – brim-full of life, then empty beyond emptiness – has stayed with me, as filmic experience does. Essay after essay in this timely collection reflects in one way or another, and from a wide variety of perspectives, on the business of shining water and bodies. The materiality or thickness at issue here is at once that of what can happen (sensuously, socially, morally, politically) in a liminal space and that of embodied spectatorship: of a response to the image on the screen. Maurice Merleau-Ponty found in the water in a swimming pool a productive focus for thoughts about the ‘flesh of the world’ reincarnated in visual art. Where film is concerned, we might perhaps regard such fleshliness as an encouragement to re-conceptualize the oblique relation between two of the primary meanings of the term ‘medium’. A medium is the substance in which an organism lives, a milieu, or atmosphere; and it is a form of mass communication. These essays consistently invite us to relate the second meaning to the first. Their consistency is that not just of the dictates of the topic, but of a shared, collaborative approach to cinema in general.

Acknowledgements

Our first acknowledgement goes to Professor David Trotter who, in 2006, launched the interdisciplinary MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures at the University of Cambridge. Several of our contributors have been involved with this programme, to which David has over the years given generously of his energy, shrewdness and imagination. We would like to thank the University of Greenwich for contributing to the publication costs of this project, and Professor Gregory Sporton at the institution for facilitating this. We would also like to thank Newnham College at the University of Cambridge for a grant from the Senior Members’ Research Fund. Research funds at University College London and the University of Leicester further assisted some of our contributors with image reproduction costs. Laurel Plapp at Peter Lang is the commissioning editor of this book and we are very grateful for all her assistance in helping us put the collection together, and to Alessandra Anzani for overseeing the publicity material and cover matter. Many thanks to Piotr Cieplak for his input and advice, to Chris O’Rourke for commenting on a draft of our Introduction, and to Gauti Sigthorsson for helping us source our cover image. Thanks also to Desmond Hirsch for making an invaluable contribution to the organization of the manuscript. Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch February 2014

Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

Introduction: The Cinema of the Swimming Pool

The swimming pool on film has proven far more than merely a setting, instead providing a dynamic space in which a film’s central themes are played out. What is it about the pool that has so fascinated filmmakers, and what kinds of cinematic investigations does it encourage? Lynn Sherr explains the appeal of the space: Pools glisten in the sun: they illuminate a dreary yard: they play with lines and light, as the wavy reflections of sun in water animate the straight walls. Shadows and shimmering patterns make endless new designs, always in motion, as the artist David Hockney brilliantly captured in swimming-pool paintings and collages that have redefined the colour blue. Pools are pure, a simple shape that traps nature’s force for our benefit. We think differently about water when it’s made accessible.1

It is difficult to conceptualize swimming pools without thinking of David Hockney. His series of acrylic works, painted in Los Angeles in the 1960s, changed the way we look at pools, and the way filmmakers approach them. Peter Bradshaw writes that a pool ‘is always an interesting, even beautiful thing to shoot, especially an indoor pool, with its mysterious, Hockneyblue depths, and its vivid and tangy atrium light.’2 The post-Hockney pool is just one of many traditions in the filmic representation of the space, however. This collection aims to explore this rich watery heritage, encompassing a diverse range of filmmakers who have depicted the pool, working in varied cultural contexts. This introduction

1 2

Lynn Sherr, Swim: Why We Love the Water (US: Public Affairs, 2013), 105. Peter Bradshaw, ‘A bigger splash: my 10 favourite films about swimming’ The Guardian Film Blog accessed 7 July 2012. 

2

Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

offers an overview of the swimming pool’s cinematic history, outlining some of the central themes provoked by the space.

Private and Public Pools Whether a swimming pool is private or public is a central consideration in virtually every film that features one. The ‘backyard oasis’ we associate with Los Angeles, incorporated into the high-end real estate of the countless residences that have populated Hollywood movies, are iconic examples of privacy. ‘Secluded behind high walls,’ Charles Sprawson writes, ‘these Hollywood pools offer a retreat, a suspended world that induces a mood of fantasy and self-delusion in those that use them.’3 This is a vision perhaps epitomized by the pool in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), a watery grave from which the deceased Joe Gillis (William Holden) narrates, following his death at the hands of former screen goddess Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). This tradition of the Hollywood pool as a domain of suspended reality endures in more recent works such as Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, 2010). Private pools are often deployed in critiques of the idle rich, in a wide range of contexts beyond Hollywood. The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968), for instance, scrutinizes the extreme wealth, cultural phoniness and emotional superficiality of its pool owners, as investigated by Christopher Brown in his essay here. Daisy Miller (Peter Bogdanovich, 1974), an adaptation of the Henry James novella, features a scene set in a spa town in Lake Geneva, where a group of characters drink tea served on a floating tray, in silver service, and play chess on a floating board. In The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013), a wife watches as her unfaithful husband swims

3

Charles Sprawson, Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero (London: Vintage Books, 2013), 271.

Introduction

3

in their swish exercise pool. He does the front crawl but is prevented by the artificial current from going anywhere, an apt metaphor for the existential predicament of these idle Roman partygoers. A different kind of private pool is that which is accessible not just to the owners, but to a carefully vetted few. The pool in Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001) is part of the country club owned by the father of Tenoch (Diego Luna), who is able to relax there with his friend Julio (Gael García Bernal), even when the club is closed. Tenoch’s father is a corrupt government official, and pools are frequently conceived as the by-product of dodgy capitalist practice. In Fun with Dick and Jane (Ted Kotcheff, 1977), we are introduced to the titular heroine ( Jane Fonda) as she oversees the construction of their pool, which comes to signify middle-class aspiration in the face of hard economic truths; her husband Dick (George Segal) has just been made redundant. Turning to a life of crime – armed robbery – to foot their bills, Dick and Jane finish building their pool using stolen money, their behaviour an ironic ‘tribute to American ingenuity’ as the film’s tagline puts it. The representation of public or municipal pools involves its own set of dynamics, with many films conceiving the space as one that facilitates cultural mixing. However, as Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis suggest, swimming in such an environment is never an entirely ‘public’ experience, but rather one defined by the ‘intimacy and anonymity we share with complete strangers; at once both part of a communal experience, yet locked within our own private worlds’.4 This is a fine balance that is easily disrupted, perhaps explaining why the public pool is a setting ripe for social tension and clashes of subjectivity. In his essay here, Edward Saunders observes that the pool in Die Halbstarken (Georg Tressler, 1956), set in West Berlin, is policed by older authority figures, but frequented by groups of teenagers attempting to mark it as their own; a contentious public space of intergenerational conflict. Other films similarly conceive the public pool as a

4

Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis, Great Lengths: The Historic Indoor Swimming Pools of Britain (London: English Heritage, 2009), 16.

4

Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

microcosm of a society in flux. Pride (Sunu Gonera, 2007) is a historical drama about Jim Ellis (Terrence Howard), who coaches the first AfricanAmerican swimming team in a dilapidated Philadelphia recreation centre. Ellis is racially abused by a group of white students who accuse him of ‘dirtying’ their water; the pool becomes a space in which post-segregation tensions are played out. Many public pools came into being as a result of nineteenth-century campaigns to morally reform the working classes. As Pam Hirsch and Chris O’Rourke investigate in their essays, reformers sought to provide the ‘unwashed masses’ with bathing facilities, hoping to bring about a corresponding improvement in their moral hygiene. They also fretted about the risk of ‘immorality’ in these public spaces, however, and the theme of cleanliness – especially sexual purity and impurity – endures in filmic representations. Pool changing rooms have since become iconic sites of sexual transgression. As Hirsch examines, the protagonists of Deep End ( Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970) provide a variety of sexual services in the changing rooms. These are spaces in which same-sex nudity is considered legitimate, while the use of pool facilities requires no participation in team sports; one can visit alone. As a result, public pools on film have catered well to homosexual cruising and sex; in Drei (Tom Tykwer, 2010), for instance, a man has his first gay experience in a changing cubicle. Whether public or private, swimming pools are not as prevalent in all cultures, though the public bath, and its associated discourses of moral and sexual purity, retains great importance in some countries. If swimming pools are relatively rare in China, for instance, then municipal baths are common, reflected in filmic representations. In Shanghai Dreams (Wang Xiaoshuai, 2005), for example, the young Fang Honggen (Li Bin) meets the father of the girl he wishes to marry (Yao Anlian) in a Guizhou bath. Forcing them into naked, exposed proximity, the environment provides them with the privacy, ironically, to have their first candid conversation. The father is from Shanghai, having been relocated in a Third Front industrial initiative. His refusal, in the bath scene, to give his ‘pure’ daughter away to an ‘impure’ provincial boy ultimately provokes a violent and tragic sexual transgression later in the narrative.

Introduction

5

Artifice versus Nature The Californian suburbs, Daniell Cornell has argued, developed ‘as a postwar ideal, offering a terrain that provided convenient and nearby escape from the debilitating effects of urban life without the perceived dangers associated with the actual wilderness.’5 The California Modern architectural style, which gave birth to some of the most iconic swimming pool designs, sought to marry the organic principles of Frank Lloyd Wright with the minimalist strategies of Bauhaus.6 The process whereby nature was tamed in these environments was what fascinated Hockney, the way the ‘shape, colour, size and surroundings’ of Californian pools ‘were entirely adaptable to the taste and fancies of the owner.’7 In his essay here, Axel Andersson considers how Michelangelo Antonioni’s conception of modernity as ‘artifice’, evidenced in films such as Zabriskie Point (1970), can be understood as such only in relation to the genuinely natural (unlike in the work of other directors such as Federico Fellini). Antonioni situates the pool as a socio-political symbol, in relation to other water spaces he depicts, such as rivers and the sea. In dramatizing the artificiality of the pool, many films rely on contrasts with natural water spaces. In A Screaming Man (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 2010), former swimming champion Adam (Youssouf Djaoro) is a pool attendant at a Chinese-run hotel in Chad’s capital N’Djamena. When he is demoted to a security guard and his son Abdel (Diouc Koma) is offered his job, Adam is left pining for the pool. For him, it retains a symbolic and valedictory importance, though the transient western guests barely notice it. Propelled by jealousy, Adam enrolls his son to fight the rebels who are at war with government forces. Abdel is wounded, and when found by his

5 6 7

Daniell Cornell, ‘Introduction: Swimming in the American Dream’ in Daniell Cornell, ed., Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern Californian Photography, 1945–82 (Palm Springs Art Museum: Prestel & Delmonico Books, 2012), 11–15, 11. Ibid. Sprawson, Haunts of the Black Masseur, 271.

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Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

penitent father, asks to be taken to swim in a river. Adam obliges, but by the end of their perilous journey, his son has died. Abdel’s body is released into the lazily flowing river. In the natural water, far removed from the clinical and controlled environment of the hotel pool, Adam must come to terms with his complicity and guilt. Joan Didion has argued that for the west, the swimming pool is a symbol of ‘order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the Western eye’.8 Evacuated from its western context, the pool can take on a colonizing significance, as demonstrated by the construction of the Sea Point Promenade and its pools in Cape Town, a whites-only space during apartheid. In Sea Point Days (François Verster, 2008), as Piotr Cieplak observes in his essay here, the tranquil Cape Town pools are frequently juxtaposed with the untamed abandon of the ocean waves rolling in the background. The pools evidence human design and interference, whereas the ocean is beyond human control; this comes to symbolize the conflict between idealized, constructed visions of the ‘new’ South Africa, and the realities of ongoing racial and social inequality. Many pools are presented in terms of an ambiguous relationship between the natural and the artificial. Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), for instance, opens with an aerial shot of a pool, located on top of a skyscraper, in which a woman swims lengths, an audaciously artificial environment. The woman is shot dead by an assassin as she swims. The film’s central conflict between the ‘due process’ of law and order, and the ‘natural justice’ sought by Clint Eastwood’s protagonist, is affirmed when, at the very end of the film, Harry finally catches the killer outside the city limits, and shoots him. The body falls into the natural water of a lake. Does this lend credence to contemporary criticisms that the film endorsed fascist values? Or are these claims undercut by the film’s final shot, which zooms out to reveal that the lake is not, in fact, natural at all – but an old quarry that has filled with water? Though it might appear more authentic, Harry’s macho sense

8

Joan Didion, ‘Holy Water (1977)’, PBS website – Point of View – Thirst accessed 1 January 2014.

Introduction

7

of natural justice is no less man-made, no less of a cultural construct, than the pool that opened the film.

Space and Emptiness The vast majority of pools are geometric in design, generally rectangular, although organic shapes with curving edges also appear, often in American films.9 In films with exterior settings, contrasts are frequently made between the geometry of the pool architecture, and the more natural world that surrounds it. Arguing for an interdisciplinary approach to the creation of ‘atmosphere’ in La Piscine ( Jacques Deray, 1969), François Penz argues that in the pool scenes, the camera moves on a vertical axis, nominally placed in the centre of the pool, providing new angles each day in the narrative. On one day, an old chapel is revealed in one of the pool corners, hitherto kept offscreen – a historical piece of architecture that visually contrasts with the pool and encourages the audience to consider emerging tensions in the narrative, between the modern and the ancient, the hedonistic and the sacred, the transient and the permanent. Outside Hollywood, pools are rarely constructed as sets, but require location shoots, meaning that filmmakers must carefully consider how pools are to be represented in relation to the (usually nineteenth-century or modernist) architecture that surrounds them. In Alphaville (1965), Jean-Luc Godard sought to create from existing buildings a futuristic state in which love and free thought are outlawed. A memorable sequence occurs at an indoor swimming pool. Condemned men accused of ‘illogical behaviour’ 9

Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen traces the development of pool shape in relation to trends in swimming, arguing that ‘the first pools had been rectangular, in sympathy with the military drill of lap swimming’ but in the 1930s ‘the rectangle gave way to the serpentine plan, because swimming, rather than an exercise, had become a fantasy.’ Leeuwen, The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 180.

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Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

step onto a diving board, before being machine-gunned from behind, by uniformed men who resemble SS officers. A group of women perform a synchronized dive into the pool, fetching the dead bodies, applauded by the enthusiastic spectators. Godard packs the space with additional light, altering completely the intended atmosphere of the real-life leisure centre. In addition to harsh floodlighting, light stands are placed and visible at the corners of the pool, which becomes a glaringly scrutinized space. Impersonally functional and antiseptic, it evokes a terrifying logic not unlike that of a concentration camp chamber. Sometimes, pool spaces are reconfigured in the mise-en-scène of a film as it progresses. In the hit comedy Waterboys (Shinobu Yaguchi, 2001), about a gang of high school boys who take up synchronized swimming, the pool is emptied and filled at three different points in the narrative. On one occasion, it is reclaimed as a fly-fishing pond; the intruding creatures parallel the boys’ invasion of a dolphin tank at their local aquarium, where they mimic animal motions as they train. It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) features a surprising spatial reconfiguration, when student mischief results in a dance floor retracting during a high school prom, revealing a pool below. Blithely unaware, George ( James Stewart) and Mary (Donna Reed) happily dance straight into the pool. The other students follow suit, diving in en masse. This scene very literally captures adolescence as a period of metamorphosis, where even the space itself evolves from being formal and staid, to spontaneous and liberated. Depth is an important consideration in the representation of the pool space on film, and is perhaps easiest to appreciate objectively when a pool is empty, in such diverse work as The Swimmer, Deep End, Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983), and Dogtown and Z-Boys (Stacy Peralta, 2001), all investigated in this volume. The latter is a documentary about LA surfers who in the 1970s pioneered modern skateboarding in empty pools, drained as a result of water restrictions during a major period of drought. In his essay here, Micah Trippe argues that the film itself represents a nostalgic reappropriation of urban space, with the empty pools conceived as a heterotopia, in Foucault’s terms, a response to recent trends in gentrification. Edward Saunders similarly observes gentrification in Berlin, noting that the pool featured in Die Halbstarken has since been emptied and now serves as a trendy club venue.

Introduction

9

As this suggests, empty pools have great symbolic potential, which sometimes extends to Hollywood itself. ‘The water is running out of the swimming pools all over Beverly Hills,’ remarked the writer-director Mel Shavelson in 1971, referring to a film industry faced with high unemployment and shrinking markets ‘and chances are we shall not see them filled again in our lifetime.’10 Aside from acting as symbols of Hollywood malaise, empty pools have also served as cinemas. As Chris O’Rourke discovers, municipal pools in London, drained for the winter period, served as pop-up venues in the silent era. But why dispense with the water at all? Recent additions of the Reykjavík Film Festival, for instance, have featured a SwimIn-Cinema, where audiences watch movies on a temporary screen whilst relaxing in the water. One appeal of reconfigured pools on film, whether emptied or altered in other ways, is that they are subjected to elements – encroaching soil and mud, dirty rainwater, erosion by wind – that viewers do not normally associate with the space, elements that render a familiar setting unfamiliar. In Sam Peckinpah’s final film The Osterman Weekend (1983), the pool is initially the focus of a critique of middle-class values, but later becomes the centrepiece of an action sequence. Flammable liquid leaks into the water, a cigarette lighter is thrown; this may be the only swimming pool in film history to catch fire.

Reflexivity, Time and Trauma Pool depth is difficult to perceive accurately from above the surface of the water, due to reflections and refraction, whereby light waves change direction at the waterline. The resulting optical illusion makes the pool a potent domain for self-reflexive investigations of fiction itself. This is

10

cit. John Cutts, ‘Long Shot: an occasional Hollywood column’, Films and Filming 18/3 (1971), 26.

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Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

evidenced in work such as Swimming Pool (François Ozon, 2003) and Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar, 2004), both of which utilize pools to help investigate characters who, it emerges, may to one degree or another have been imagined, invented, or merged. The shot in Almodóvar’s film of Ángel (Gael García Bernal) standing submerged in a pool, filmed from above the waterline, is a refracted image that encapsulates film’s querying of objective perception in storytelling. Do we experience time differently underwater? The reflective, refractive nature of the pool space further suggests, along lines derived from Henri Bergson and revised by Gilles Deleuze, that it can be a particularly effective environment for filmmakers to investigate concepts of relativity in time and duration. In her essay on Nostalghia, Matilda Mroz examines how the pool space, its elements and its cinematic rendering recur in the film. This spatial ‘overflowing’ of the pool water resonates with Tarkovsky’s vision of duration, in which past, present, and future coexist and flow into one another. A rather different vision of temporality is the imagining of the pool as a domain in which repressed history resurfaces. Alex Naylor examines the pool scene in the horror film Cat People ( Jacques Tourneur, 1942), which stages a conflict between the protagonist’s traumatized, uncanny body, which cannot escape the European past, and a healthy American body, free of history. If swimming pools can be spaces in which trauma resurfaces, they can also be depicted as spaces for therapy. In pools, our ability to perceive sound diminishes, and the meditative possibilities of swimming are further enhanced with the effect of the colour blue. The cones and rods in our eyes, the photoreceptors of the retina, perceive blue or violet as less bright than yellow or red, which in turn affects the way the brain processes our experience of colour.11 Consequently, physiologists have long observed that blue light has a calming effect on their patients, and have used it in

11

See Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (London: Arrow Books, 2011).

Introduction

11

therapy. Artists have always intuited this.12 In Three Colours Blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1993), the pool is a site of mourning after Julie ( Juliette Binoche) loses her husband and daughter in a car crash. The film is punctuated by scenes set in an empty pool, lit in calming blue hues. In the last of these scenes, a sex-worker Julie has befriended finds her and embraces her. A group of children dive into the pool for a swimming lesson, brightly dressed in white and red, a sign that Julie is beginning to move through the grief process, and signaling the subsequent installments in the trilogy. Ivans Xtc. (Bernard Rose, 2002) tells the story of film agent Ivan Beckman (Danny Huston), who has to come to terms with his own death after he is diagnosed with lung cancer. With a reference to Sunset Boulevard, Ivan enunciates his own story. He repairs to the pool bar of his Los Angeles club, ordinarily a signifier of luxurious life style. But reflecting his disease, the pool seems to have turned malevolent: ‘Instead of the customary deep blue it appears to be an aggressive turquoise.’13 A subtle change in the colour tone signals malaise; other films utilize variations and contrasts in colour to more upbeat effect. Monika Keska’s essay in this collection explores the ways in which filmmakers such as Almodóvar and Peter Greenaway have drawn inspiration from Hockney’s swimming pool series. In Bad Education, Almodóvar recreates the Technicolor hues of Hockney’s work in a series of tableaux vivants, contrasting the aquamarine of the pool with bright reds of the beach chairs and ochre tones of the façade of the house. The appearance of the colour red in a blue pool is often associated with trauma. The contrast between the two colours is frequently the result of a pool murder; having blood leak from dead bodies into colour-treated water heightens the tension in horror films such as Swimfan ( John Polson, 2002), in which a murderous female teenager stalks a high school swimming champion. The Pool (Boris Sychowski, 2001) is a slasher movie in 12 13

See John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning form Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012). Edward Dimendberg, ‘Tolstoy in Los Angeles: ivans xtc.’, in Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson, eds, Cities in Transition: the Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (London and New York: Wallflower, 2008), 216–25, 220.

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Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

which a group of Prague students break into a swimming pool complex at night, to celebrate their graduation. Little do they realize a sadistic killer, wearing a skull mask and armed with a machete, is amongst them. The slaughter soon begins, with the tongue-in-cheek thrills stretching to a death by waterslide, the gushing torrents and crimson plunge pool almost abstract in their expressionism.

Pollution Unlike other water spaces, pools are kept chemically clean with chlorine, and filmmakers have frequently exploited the dramatic potential of pollution. Many films take as their cue an object that incongruously intrudes in the pool, sparking a fear of contagion, often conceived in cultural terms. In Bone (Larry Cohen, 1972), a dead rat clogs up the filter of a Beverly Hills pool, repulsing the resident white couple. Reality, defined in rather Naturalist terms of dead matter and disintegration, infiltrates – literally – their pristinely artificial existence. The rat is removed from the pool by Bone (Yaphet Kotto), a black character who proceeds to terrorize the couple, lending ironic racial overtones to their paranoid fear of contamination. In the macabre drama Confessions (Tetsuya Nakashima, 2010), the dead body of a young girl floats in a high school pool, murdered by two schoolboys. Their teacher Yuko Moriguchi (Takako Matsu), also the girl’s mother, takes revenge by injecting HIV-infected blood into their milk cartons. The pool with its intruding body is likened to a milk carton with intruding blood; both bespeak deliberate, immoral acts of pollution, which the film arguably links to discourses surrounding nuclear radiation contamination. Dead bodies have polluted pools in numerous films including Sunset Boulevard, Deep End, La Piscine, Swimming Pool and Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955), to name but a few. Dick Hebidge, who has argued for the pool as ‘a space of abjection – of death and murk and dissolution,’ links the pool in Sunset Boulevard, with its intruding dead

Introduction

13

matter, to the film’s wider interest in sewers, in the dynamics of hydrology and waste disposal.14 Sophie Mayer argues in her essay here that the pool in The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008), polluted by animal waste, becomes a site in which class, racial and sexual relations are challenged. This reflects how, in Martel’s films, swimming pools mark a literal and metaphorical privatization, the European and bourgeois appropriation of natural resources and cultural meaning from indigenous and agrarian communities in Argentina. When Candita (Inés Efron) braves the pool, her vulnerability while swimming is paralleled by her risky relationship with an indigenous girlfriend, crossing a dual class taboo against pollution. Intruding matter is frequently associated with authenticity, with the revelation of truth, whilst pristine pool water serves as a symbol of artifice and falsehood. A pool is ultimately a ‘hole’, Hebidge reminds us, and as such, serves as a ‘powerful magnet for uninvited foreign matter dropped in from above and as the portal through which unwelcome buried truths come bobbing to the surface unannounced.’15 These themes are central to Y Tu Mamá También. Early on in the film, Julio and Tenoch masturbate into the country club pool, their semen shown dissolving into the water. The implications of this pollution are at this point ambiguous. Does it celebrate the life, the vitality of their friendship? Or does the pool instead provide a convenient receptacle for their displaced desire for one another? Once the pair head on a road trip out of the city, their friendship begins to fall apart, most decisively, after Julio admits to having slept with Tenoch’s girlfriend. He announces this in a dilapidated hotel pool, covered in a mushy layer of fallen leaves. The dead leaves symbolize the decay of their friendship; though, as the pair swim nude under the rotting layer, this pool facilitates more overt homoerotic possibilities between the two.

14 15

Dick Hebidge, ‘Swimming … Floating … Sinking … Drowning’ in Daniell Cornell, ed., Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern Californian Photography, 1945–82 (Palm Springs Art Museum: Prestel & Delmonico Books, 2012), 192–201, 192, 194. Hebidge, ‘Swimming’, 193.

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Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

The pools in Y Tu Mamá También are shown to be literally or figuratively stagnant – signifying the hypocrisy of the political classes, or the neglect of provincial poverty – and are contrasted with the raw beauty of the beach their companion Luisa (Maribel Verdú) is eager to visit. Most movingly, Luisa is suffering from a different type of contagion, which she disguises from the others – terminal cancer, which will claim her life, the narrator tells us, one month after the events of the film. Yet in contrast to Julio and Tenoch, with their repressed, macho play-acting, it is she who is associated with an authentic vitality, last seen diving into the waves, her final words – ‘Life is like the surf. So give yourself away like the sea.’

Spectacle, Stardom and Competition Hollywood’s movie industry contributed to the popularity of swimming pools, which were understood to reflect the glamorous celebrity lifestyles represented by aquatic stars such as Esther Williams.16 Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen remarks that Hollywood, in manufacturing dream lifestyles during the 1930s Depression, ‘doused its merchandise with generous quantities of water’, making it difficult to imagine films such as Palmy Days (A. Edward Sutherland, 1931) and The Kid From Spain (Leo McCarey, 1932) ‘without scenes of water-rich estates and luxurious swimming pools.’17 In films such as Footlight Parade (1933), Busby Berkeley, an acclaimed master of spectacle, exploited the extra dimension provided by water when framing his set pieces. The camera could hover above the kaleidoscopic patterns made by synchronized swimmers in the pool, but could also dive below the meniscus and invite the viewer into the depths of the water; during the famous

16 17

See Daniell Cornell, ‘Exposed Desires: Poolside Reflections on Celebrity’, in Daniell Cornell, ed., Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern Californian Photography, 1945–82 (Palm Springs Art Museum: Prestel & Delmonico Books, 2012), 16–27. Van Leeuwen, The Springboard in the Pond, 156.

Introduction

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nine-minute extravaganza ‘By a Waterfall’, beautiful smiling girls were displayed both above and below the water. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, as swimsuits became increasingly revealing, publicity stills could showcase the bodies of film stars and eroticize their image. In her essay here, Sheri Chinen Biesen observes how, in The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940), the pool is used to display Katherine Hepburn’s athletic body in a tight wet suit. Nearly thirty years later, The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) fetishizes Dustin Hoffman’s bronzed body, as his character Benjamin Braddock floats and tans on a sun lounger in a pool. Pool scenes have endured as a domain to represent the spectacle of the Hollywood star’s body. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982) features a fairly standardized staging of nubile bodies in its pool scene. Stacy ( Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her friend Linda (Phoebe Cates) are sitting next to a pool, and Linda, the more sexually experienced of the two, attracts the attention of Stacy’s brother Brad ( Judge Reinhold). He masturbates in the bathroom and is mortified when she walks in. National Lampoon’s Vacation (Harold Ramis, 1983) is a comic road movie in which Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) takes his family on a trip to the Walley World Fun Park in California. Every possible disaster ensues, putting strain on his marriage. Following a quarrel, Clark ends up swimming naked in a motel pool with a beautiful blonde. He is caught by his wife, but – as this is a comedy – she joins in. The James Bond series provides an interesting index of the evolution of pool spectacle. Pools in the sixties and seventies tended to be either the languid domain of bikini-clad Bond girls, or the hazardous receptacles of sharks, piranhas and crocodiles. Or both: in You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert, 1967) the villainous seductress Helga Brandt (Karin Dor) is plunged into a piranha pool and eaten, after she outlives her usefulness to Roald Dahl’s increasingly convoluted script. Golden Eye (Martin Campbell, 1995), emerging post-AIDS awareness, marked a departure of sorts, as a half-naked Pierce Brosnan steps out of a St Petersburg pool, fair game for Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), who treats him to a steamy S&M session in the changing area. As she resolves to strangle him with her thighs, Bond reminds the femme fatale that he only practices safe sex. More recently, a scene set in a Macau hotel pool in Skyfall (2012) offers audiences the

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Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

opportunity to ogle not the Bond girls, but the torso of Daniel Craig, a much-discussed shift in the nature of the gaze solicited by the series. If pools have been used to cultivate star success, then they have also required a wearying, interminable level of performance. Daniell Cornell has described how, for some Hollywood stars, pool photography signalled the intrusion of public performance into the domestic sphere. He remarks that Bill Anderson’s photograph of Alan Ladd and his wife seated by their pool, which ‘supposedly presents the private life of a Hollywood celebrity enjoying an unguarded moment at home’ was in fact ‘starkly at odds with the rumours that circulated regularly regarding Ladd’s sexuality.’18 The semifictionalized, mud-raking Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest (Frank Perry, 1981) links the desperate attempts of Crawford (Faye Dunaway) to retain her star status to sports competitions in the pool. Crawford’s pool is emblematic of what Richard Dyer refers to as the ‘conspicuous consumption’ associated with stardom.19 But hidden from the public eye, the star’s behaviour is perverse. She torments her young daughter beyond endurance, in one scene challenging her to a race in the pool and repeatedly outmatching her. Crawford’s dominance pathetically confirmed, she joyfully exclaims ‘You lost again!’ The bitterness of losing at the level of competitive swimming was captured by Tracey Moffat at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. She took photographs of the competitors who had just missed a medal by coming fourth, capturing ‘swimmers still in the pool, their bitter tears mixed with chlorinated water’.20 This description reminds us of the ‘liquidity’ of the human body, the potential of swimmers’ bodies to transform during training, as they gain huge shoulders and arms, and exaggerated hand and foot muscles. Flexible and often double-jointed, they shave their body hair to avoid drag, becoming sleek. This almost superhuman athleticism is seen in Children of Glory (Krisztina Goda, 2006), a historical drama that recreates

18 19 20

Cornell, ‘Exposed Desires’, 20. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 38–9. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 93.

Introduction

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the contest between the Hungarian and Russian water polo teams at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, an infamously bloody contest which displaced the Hungarian Uprising into the pool space. By contrast, the documentary Men Who Swim (Dylan Williams, 2010) features a very ordinary group of men. Train conductors, food buyers, archivists and teachers by day, they channel Esther Williams in the evening, as Sweden’s all-male synchronized swim team.

Sexuality, Metamorphosis and Shame Many films move away from eroticized depictions of pool spectacle, either critiquing these forms or offering new ones. Cousin, Cousine ( Jean-Charles Tacchella, 1975) is about two cousin-in-laws, Ludovic (Victor Lanoux) and Marthe (Marie-Christine Barrault), who both have unfaithful spouses. As their friendship develops, there is an important scene in which they visit the swimming pool that Marthe used to frequent as a child. As they lie together on the poolside, they resolve to be friends forever, but not to sleep together. Although this resolve does not last, a childlike innocence remains as they commence an affair; the pool scene is echoed in scenes of them playing together in a bath. It is striking just how many pool films articulate dynamics of transition such as these. As environments blurring conventional distinctions between land and water, nature and artifice, purity and impurity, swimming pools are transitional, liminal spaces. The pool is, furthermore, often depicted as a space in which conventional distinctions between heterosexual and homosexual desire become blurred. Pool films are ubiquitous in gay cinema, and in his essay here, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns argues that the public pool is an ideal arena for ‘furtive’ gazing, with Ausente (Marco Berger, 2011) encouraging cinematic forms that attempt to replicate these queer viewing structures. Dynamics such as these operate in private pools, too, though gazes might be less furtive. Hockney’s painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), shows a clothed man standing by a private pool, openly admiring

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a male swimmer. Heat, produced in the same year by Andy Warhol and directed by Paul Morrissey, recreates this homoerotic scene, but instead adopts the artist’s perspective, as the camera gazes down at the submerged form of Joe Dallesandro. In Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973) the private pool acts as a signifier of opulence and unnecessary luxury, yet it is also a space where the rules of Senegalese society can be suspended, at least temporarily; the flamboyant and comical Charlie (Ousseynou Diop) flirtatiously circles his pool in a pedalo, perhaps the first representation of a homosexual character in an African film. Several of the essays here conceive pools as places in which sexual identity becomes fluid, like the water in which the protagonists swim; it is a space of bodily and sexual metamorphosis. Growing up, the uncertain progress from adolescence to adulthood in itself amounts to a kind of metamorphosis, a theme Emma Wilson develops in her essay on Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, 2007). The French title Naissance des pieuvres translates as ‘Birth of octopi’, an analogy Sciamma likens to ‘the birth of a monster inside you, in your stomach, which you didn’t see coming and which grows really fast. It’s desire, jealousy, spreading its ink, its tentacles’.21 As they grow up, the girls’ ability to accept a heteronormative version of femininity is tested, and a rich mise-en-scène emphasizes the desperate working of their legs underwater, contrasted with the smiling serenity of their appearance above the water. Filmmakers have taken great interest in the waterline. As Leanne Shapton puts it, calling to mind the startling images from Jean Vigo’s Taris (1931): ‘What falls below the water’s surface is free of our usual grasp of physics … The body, immersed, feels amplified, heavier and lighter at the same time. Weightless yet stronger.’22 Above the water, bodies in pools are exposed, which can result in feelings of shame, a phenomenon that can be curiously intersubjective, as Tarja Laine explains with reference to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick:

21 22

cit. Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 225. Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (New York and London: Penguin Books, 2012), 189.

Introduction

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One of the strangest features of shame is the way in which someone else’s humiliation that seemingly has nothing to do with another individual, can so easily enter him or her. Shame is simultaneously contagious and isolating.23

Rose Hepworth, in her essay here, draws on these theorizations in her analysis of Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002), in which a girl is humiliated in a swimming pool scene, revealing her breasts when she is made to swap bathing suits as part of an enforced game; witnessing this, the eponymous protagonist (Samantha Morton) experiences shame, too. James Gilligan’s study of men in prison reveals a central precondition for committing violence is the presence of overwhelming shame, which stimulates violent impulses towards the person in whose eyes one feels shamed.24 Accounting for the unexpected outburst of violence in Deep End, Pam Hirsch, in her essay, investigates how Mike ( John Moulder-Brown) feels shame following his first sexual experience. Shame is not always depicted in negative terms, as Clara Garavelli demonstrates in her essay on Pepito piscina (Luis María Delgado, 1978). The central character (Fernando Esteso) has a short, chubby, hairy body. The pool becomes an arena in which he is mocked and shamed, but this is partly seen as positive, as it assists in the deconstruction of an outdated macho myth. The film belongs to the destape genre, which literally refers to the ‘uncovering’ of the body, but takes on greater resonance in the postFranco period of transition to democracy. Dynamics of uncovering and concealment in the pool are utilized more broadly in comedy. In All These Women (Ingmar Bergman, 1964), Cornelius ( Jarl Kulle) hides in a swimming pool in order to overhear the poolside gossip about the cellist whose biography he is writing. In Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998), Herman Blume (Bill Murray) hides from his ghastly family in his pool. He knocks back a

23 24

Tarja Laine, Shame and Desire: Emotion, Intersubjectivity, Cinema (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007), 90, referencing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 37. James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on Our Deadliest Epidemic (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000), 113–14.

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large scotch before dive-bombing into the water, in which he proceeds to hang, suspended. *** This is the first film studies collection to focus on the space of the swimming pool and to fully investigate its cinematic possibilities. Our contributors are internationally based and represent several nationalities; the editors have not attempted to impose any particular style or approach, other than to encourage the close analysis of case studies. The following essays offer close readings of films from Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, the UK, the USA and the former USSR. Pooling our resources, we hope to have staked a claim for the significance of the swimming pool as a dynamic and exciting cinematic space.

Chris O’Rourke

1

The Municipal Plunge: Silent Cinema and the Social Life of Swimming Pools

In Buster Keaton’s feature film The Cameraman (co-directed with Edward Sedgwick, 1928), Keaton’s character goes on a date with Sally, a secretary at MGM’s newsreel division, at the Municipal Plunge. The pool, filmed on location at the Venice Plunge in Los Angeles, differs in style and ambience from the majority of pools on display in Hollywood movies and from star publicity of the era. It’s a far cry, for instance, from the private swimming pool in the grounds of Keaton’s Tuscan-style villa in Beverley Hills: an oval pool reached by solemn stone steps, which would later be used to signify the height of Hollywood glamour in A Star Is Born (William A. Wellman, 1937).1 The pool that Buster and Sally visit is impressively grand, to be sure, but it is also hectic, inescapably public and, this being slapstick, packed with potential obstacles (Figure 1.1). For Buster, these obstacles range from the overcrowded changing rooms, where finding space to undress becomes a test of acrobatic skill, to the groups of hyper-masculine young men jockeying for Sally’s attention. The scene culminates in an impromptu display of ‘real fancy diving’ off the highest board in the pool. After performing a spectacular belly flop into the water, Buster emerges some moments later gasping for breath and minus his bathing suit (Figure 1.2). In a sense, Keaton gets off lightly. In his earlier two-reeler Hard Luck (1921), his character dives head first into, and straight through, some 1

Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen, The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool (Chicago: MIT Press, 1998), 201. Information on the Venice Plunge comes from John Bengston, ‘Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman’, Silent Locations blog accessed 30 October 2013.

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Figure 1.1 The ‘Municipal Plunge’ in Buster Keaton and Edward Sedgwick’s The Cameraman (MGM, 1928).

Figure 1.2 Buster Keaton in The Cameraman (MGM, dir. Edward Sedgwick, 1928).

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poolside brickwork; in The Electric House (1922), he gets washed away with the pool water. The problem posed by the pool in The Cameraman, though, isn’t physical, but social. How will the suddenly naked Buster get out of the water without attracting unwanted attention from his fellow bathers, and without risking further embarrassment in front of his date? The situation becomes more urgent when Sally, who is eager to leave for the beach, looks poised to switch her affections to a handsome stranger waiting in the wings. Buster’s improvised solution involves stealing sharklike through the water to poach the lower half of a middle-aged woman’s voluminous swimming costume, in which he is able to make an escape. The sequence as a whole presents a vivid, if slightly nightmarish, picture of the public swimming pool as a lively and sometimes overbearingly communal space. Using Buster’s high dive as a departure point, this chapter continues Keaton’s exploration of the public pool’s status as a social institution during the silent film period. The intention is to shift the spotlight away from Hollywood’s habitual image of the secluded Beverley Hills pool and to direct it at the less celebrated, but no less interesting, cinematic territory of the Municipal Plunge and its equivalents. For the sake of space, my focus is limited to silent-era Britain. The first half of the chapter sketches the British context for the emergence of public baths, looking at examples of baths as locations, and public bathing as a subject, in early film. The second part of the chapter examines the public swimming bath as a location for cinema in a different sense, as a venue for early moving-picture exhibition. From both perspectives, I argue, the turn-of-the-century public pool stands at the intersection of film and a larger social world.

From Social Duty to Public Spectacle Although communal swimming is not a new phenomenon, the origins of the modern public swimming pool in Britain date from the mid-nineteenth century. With a rising urban population, public baths were seen as one way to tackle the threat of disease and to improve the quality of life for the

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‘Great Unwashed’, or inner city poor.2 From the 1840s, sanitary reformers campaigned to create affordable public baths in London and other densely populated areas. The Public Baths and Wash-houses Acts of 1846 and 1847 were especially important in allowing parishes and town councils to build their own bathing and laundry facilities out of money borrowed from the local Poor Rate.3 At stake in this legislation were more than simply clean bodies and clean clothes. Making the case for the first Public Baths and Wash-houses Bill in Parliament, the Bishop of London insisted on the correlation between personal hygiene and spiritual cleanliness, arguing that public baths would enhance ‘the moral as well as physical welfare of the humbler classes of the population’.4 Over the following decades, public baths soon spread to towns and cities across the United Kingdom, so that by 1914 there were a total of 343 baths run by municipal authorities, including 80 open-air pools.5 Prior to this, bathing in public had been seen as a largely cultural activity. In the eighteenth century, it was associated with upper class privilege and with the sensuous and downright seedy atmosphere of the brothel.6 However, in the prevailing nineteenth-century political climate of sanitary and moral reform, bathing in public was re-imagined as a social duty necessary to ensure the public health of the realm. This was especially true by the turn of the twentieth century, when the acceptance of germ theory focussed attention on the threat of infection posed by unwashed bodies.7 Yet, despite the emphasis on hygiene, public baths could still serve 2

3 4 5 6 7

Sally Sheard, ‘Profit Is a Dirty Word: The Development of Public Baths and Washhouses in Britain, 1847–1915’, Social History of Medicine 13/1 (2000), 63–86; Michael Sigsworth and Michael Worboys, ‘The Public’s View of Public Health in MidVictorian Britain’, Urban History 21/2 (1994), 237–50. Marilyn Thornton Williams, Washing ‘the Great Unwashed’: Public Baths in Urban America, 1840–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991). Sheard, ‘Profit Is a Dirty Word’, 66. Quoted in Sheard, ‘Profit Is a Dirty Word’, 67. Figures are taken from Agnes Campbell, Report on Public Baths and Wash-Houses in the United Kingdom (Edinburgh: Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1918). Sheard, ‘Profit Is a Dirty Word’, 65–6. Williams, Washing ‘the Great Unwashed’.

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an additional function as recreational and social spaces. Sally Sheard has shown that a renewed wave of investment in public baths in Liverpool in the 1870s and 1880s favoured larger ‘plunge ponds’ (what we would now call swimming pools) over ‘slipper’ baths designed for individual bathing, thereby acknowledging the demand for more accessible and affordable leisure activities.8 In 1878, new legislation allowed municipal authorities to raise money for indoor pools specifically designed for swimming. From this point, swimming became a popular pastime at all levels of British society, giving rise to local and national clubs and eventually to international bodies to regulate swimming as a competitive sport.9 Emerging in the 1890s, the cinema was in a position to capture public swimming pools in full stroke, as it were, as spaces of popular recreation and associational culture. Given the necessity for a strong source of light to expose film stock, photography within pools was not always possible, although swimming itself was a popular subject for early filmmakers. One of the few surviving film records of a Victorian pool in action is the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s Water Polo – Worthing Swimming Club (1898), filmed in Worthing Baths. Versions of water polo had been played since the 1870s, with a national water polo championship established the following decade.10 Here, William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson recorded what a programme described as ‘a game between two expert English teams from go-off to the making of a goal’.11 The same source also singled out for the praise the fine ‘photographic effects as the men splash through the water’. In the remaining fragment, the camera catches an apparently spontaneous moment in which a man is ejected from the large crowd of spectators

8 9 10 11

Sheard, ‘Profit Is a Dirty Word’, 76. Christopher Love, A Social History of Swimming in England, 1800–1918: Splashing in the Serpentine (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 7. Christopher Love, ‘An Overview of the Development of Swimming in England, c. 1750–1918’, International Journal of the History of Sport 24/5 (2007), 568–85, 578–9. Palace Theatre programme 27 June 1898, quoted in Richard Brown and Barry Anthony, A Victorian Film Enterprise: The History of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1897–1915 (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1999), 253.

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into the water. What begins as a sporting actuality thus ends as a comic skit. For audiences at London’s Palace Theatre, where the film was premiered alongside scenes of the Grand Prix de Paris and the Spanish-American War, it may have also offered spectators a rare glimpse into working-class leisure time.12 The spectacle of public bathing also featured in the Mitchell and Kenyon company’s Tynemouth Swimming Gala in the Haven (1901), filmed during a tour of the North East. This captured the events of the Annual Tynemouth Amateur Swimming Club’s Gala on 31 August, and was exhibited shortly afterwards at a local variety theatre.13 The surviving footage shows a comic swimming race, in which the contestants compete fully dressed, wearing top hats and carrying umbrellas, as the camera pans alongside them. The race is followed by scenes of men diving into the open waters. Later newsreel and cine-magazine films would similarly delight in scenes of diving bodies – in, for instance, British Pathé’s Swimming Baths (1917) and New Bathing Pool (1925). As an added novelty, diving footage was often manipulated through reversing or slowing the action, as seen in Pathé’s playful newsreel segment Water Babies (1929), which reported on the daily bustle at the open-air Chiswick Lido. In this instance, slow-motion diving scenes served the double purpose of showing off the contours of swimmers’ bodies and the technical capabilities of the medium (Figure 1.3). As these early films suggest, by the turn of the century, swimming pools were not only spaces of healthful recreation but also arenas for public performance. Competitive swimming and water polo had developed in the nineteenth century as spectator sports, and from the 1900s baths were increasingly designed with an audience in mind. Plans for new public baths at Haggerston, Battersea, Finsbury and Leicester included galleries overlooking the main pool, which, as the architect Alfred Cross explained, could be ‘well adapted for the suitable accommodation of a large number

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‘The Palace Theatre’, Morning Post (23 June 1898). David Williams, ‘Mitchell and Kenyon in the North East’, in Vanessa Toulmin, Patrick Russell and Simon Popple, eds, The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film (London: BFI, 2004), 83–92, 86.

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Figure 1.3 Chiswick Lido in the newsreel segment Water Babies (British Pathé, 1929). Copyright: British Pathé Ltd. Permission to reproduce obtained.

of persons’.14 Contemporary descriptions of public baths comment on the wide popularity of swimming events. A contributor to George R. Sims’ Living London series in 1902 reported that the weekly meetings of the Ravensbourne swimming club at Westminster Baths drew ‘crowds of spectators’, while the annual displays held at the outdoor Highgate Ponds by the Life-saving Society each summer were said to attract as many as 30,000 people.15 14 15

Alfred W. S. Cross, Public Baths and Wash-Houses: A Treatise on Their Planning, Design, Arrangement, and Fitting (London: Batsford, 1906), 12. I. Brooke-Alder, ‘London’s Wash-houses and Baths’, in George R. Sims, ed., Living London, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1902), 364–71, 368–9.

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In some instances, the performative aspect of swimming pools could be problematic. Women’s swimming galas, in particular, raised questions about what constituted decent bathing attire and about the propriety of allowing women to swim in front of a mixed – that is, male and female – audience. As Catherine Horwood points out (and as Keaton’s disrobed cameraman well knew), the spread of public bathing ‘inevitably stirred up the murky waters of sexuality’.16 For this reason, before the 1920s, local authorities in Britain were reluctant to allow mixed bathing, and those that did were strict about policing swimmers’ behaviour. Regulations for mixed bathing at Withington Baths in Manchester insisted that bathers were supervised by a superintendent and matron, that they wear darkcoloured swimsuits and that they spend minimal time out of the water between pool and changing room.17 It was only in the 1920s that British attitudes towards mixed bathing in public softened. This was partly an effect of the increasing enthusiasm for beach holidays and the importance of bathing in the sea to the postwar cult of health and efficiency. By the 1930s, open-air swimming pools, or lidos, would become integrated into heterosocial leisure and dating practices. These new, less class-conscious spaces (with only a single pool to serve all patrons) provided an arena for families to enjoy days out and for young people to meet, sunbathe and window-shop for new relationships.18 In 1931, Eric Gill, discussing the fashion for more revealing, shape-hugging styles of swimwear, could state that ‘bathing in public places is not primarily swimming – it is primarily a social gathering’.19

16 17 18

19

Catherine Horwood, ‘“Girls Who Arouse Dangerous Passions”: Women and Bathing, 1900–39’, Women’s History Review 9/4 (2000), 653–73, 655. Quoted in Campbell, Report on Public Baths, 70–1. Janet Smith, Liquid Assets: The Lidos and Open Air Swimming Pools of Britain (London: English Heritage, 2005), 19–21; Alicia Pivaro, ‘The Lido – A Social and Historical Background’, in Alan Powers, ed., Farewell My Lido: A Thirties Society Report (London: Thirties Society, 1991), 2–5; Horwood, ‘Girls Who Arouse Dangerous Passions’, 659–60, 663. Eric Gill, Clothes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931); quoted in Horwood, ‘Girls Who Arouse Dangerous Passions’, 667.

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For many British cinemagoers watching The Cameraman at the end of the 1920s, Keaton’s comic exploration of the pleasures and pitfalls of mixed bathing as a social activity would have been a taste of things to come. Filmed just a few years earlier at the South Shore Baths in Blackpool, the Topical Budget newsreel item Aquatic Frolics (1926) provides an evocative record of changing sensibilities. Beginning with a parade of ‘bathing beauties’ borrowed from a summertime musical revue, the film’s purpose seems to be little more than to celebrate the public pool as a place of leisure, frivolity and visual spectacle (Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4 Members of the cast of the musical revue Brighter Blackpool parade for the Topical Budget camera in Aquatic Frolics (1926). Copyright: British Film Institute.

Swimming Pool ‘Cinemas’ Even before the 1920s, though, swimming pools already formed part of everyday social lives in Britain in important ways. They were significant not only as places to swim or watch others swim, but also as venues for a

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variety of public entertainments. The 1878 amendments to the Baths and Wash-houses Act that allowed municipal authorities to invest in ‘plunge ponds’ also made provision for these pools to be shut during the winter months, when the cost of heating water became too onerous. Between November and March each year, swimming pools could be drained, covered over with temporary flooring and hired out for purposes of ‘healthful recreation and exercise’. Events involving music and dancing were initially prohibited, but further changes to the law in 1896 and 1899 revoked this ban, first for London and then for the rest of England and Wales.20 What these changes meant in practice was that new and sizeable winter entertainment venues sprang up in towns and cities across the country. Local authorities already in possession of pools quickly took advantage of the new laws and repurposed their premises for dances, music recitals and balls. The practice of adapting swimming pool premises for public entertainments continued up to and beyond the First World War. Agnes Campbell’s 1913–14 survey of baths and wash-houses, carried out on behalf of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, gives an overview of the various alternative uses to which public baths were put. Campbell found that nearly a quarter (76) of the 343 baths surveyed were converted to public halls for the winter. Baths in Birmingham were leased free of charge to the city’s Social Institutes Committee, who used them as social clubs; baths in Kensington and Leyton were used as rifle ranges; the Reginald Street baths in Derby had a second life as a roller skating rink; and dozens of authorities elsewhere hired out their baths for use as badminton courts, gyms, concert rooms or dance halls. Campbell’s survey also found that many baths were being used to host regular ‘cinematograph entertainments’.21 Given the range of venues for early cinema, the use of converted swimming pools as places to screen films is not all that surprising. Before, and even after, the rise of permanent and purpose-built cinemas in the late 1900s, films were shown in venues including fairgrounds, variety theatres and town

20 21

Love, A Social History of Swimming in England, 58. Campbell, Report on Public Baths, 66.

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halls.22 As temporary public halls, swimming pools offered themselves up as additional screening spaces, slotting into the growing network of itinerant film exhibition. Evidence about the shows that took place in these early swimming pool ‘cinemas’ suggests that independent or occasional exhibitors who presented films as part of a variety programme one evening might perform to crowds at a swimming pool hall the next. To give one example, during the winter season of 1899–1900 Lambeth Public Baths hosted regular film shows given by David Devant. As a magician, Devant was a star attraction with the Maskelyne and Cooke company at London’s Egyptian Hall. He was also an early independent exhibitor of moving pictures, who introduced films onto the Egyptian Hall’s programme in 1896. Soon, he began to give film shows in private houses and toured his act, including moving pictures, around the country.23 Devant presented his first film show at the Lambeth Public Baths in the 1899–1900 season in mid-November at the invitation of the National Sunday League, who had leased the space for the winter. At the start of December, he took his show elsewhere, giving a ‘Special Exhibition of Animated Photographs’ at Croydon Town Hall as part of a programme of music and song. The following night, he was back presenting a selection of films alongside his ‘Marvellous Magical Problems’ at the Egyptian Hall. A fortnight later, he presented another show of animated pictures in Lambeth.24 Devant’s flexible working practice reflects the fluidity with which the new technology of the cinematograph could be repurposed for multiple 22 23 24

See, for instance, Nicholas Hiley, ‘“Nothing More than a ‘Craze’”: Cinema Building in Britain from 1909 to 1914’, in Andrew Higson, ed., Young and Innocent?: The Cinema in Britain 1896–1930 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 111–27. John Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1976), 117–22; David Devant, My Magic Life (London: Hutchinson, 1931), 70–4. This snapshot draws on the details given in ‘Meetings and Lectures To-day’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (3 December 1899); ‘Exhibitions, Amusements, etc.’, London Standard (4 December 1899); letter from Henry J. Smith to London County Council Theatres and Music Halls Committee (19 November 1899); and an inspection report of the London County Council Fire Officer (17 December 1899), London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/MIN/10,839.

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venues and different audiences. His activities also indicate the continuity between the variety theatre, the town hall and the converted baths as spaces for public entertainment and for film shows in particular. As contemporary plans and illustrations show, the ‘plunge ponds’ themselves were carefully covered over so that their surroundings more or less resembled any other municipal hall (Figure 1.5). But, for early audiences, the view of cinema from the swimming pool would have differed subtly, not only by virtue of being housed in a familiar location made strange, but also because of the peculiar institutional arrangements surrounding the entertainments put on at public baths. As the example of Devant’s shows at the Lambeth Baths suggests, the National Sunday League and other groups dedicated to providing Britain’s workers with wholesome leisure alternatives to the pub, were among the main sponsors of these temporary cinema shows. Surviving

Figure 1.5 Victoria Baths, Manchester, in use as a public hall, c. 1910. Copyright: Manchester Libraries. Permission to reproduce obtained.

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records of the films shown at swimming pool halls present a preponderance of religious and imperial themes, including ‘Living Pictures of India’ (shown at the Caledonian Road Baths), a screening of The Photo Drama of Creation (at Lambeth) and a patriotic display of British naval life (at the Kentish Town Public Baths, see Figure 1.6).25 There were, it transpires, legal and financial reasons for this state of affairs. The same legislation that allowed baths to be rented out for entertainment purposes during the winter months also stipulated that authorities could only lease their premises occasionally and that no money should change hands at the door. This interpretation of the law was later confirmed in the London courts.26 The ban on leasing baths for regular, fee-charging cinema shows effectively ruled out the use of swimming pools as commercially viable film venues. Instead, as exhibition spaces, they became the domain of charitable groups and civic-minded individuals, who saw the cinema overwhelmingly as a tool for instruction and edification, rather than simply a source of amusement. Early film exhibitors may have moved between variety theatres and public baths with relative ease, but shows at the latter tended to be framed for their audiences as exercises in social and moral uplift. Looking back, the use of public baths as temporary educational film venues was appropriate, given the ethos of public hygiene and rational recreation that had given rise to these buildings in the first place. Whether bathing, swimming, washing their clothes, participating in sporting events or attending entertainments, the people who made use of public baths were, in the eyes of municipal authorities, improving their lot and the health of the British Empire. Just as public bathing had been proposed as a way

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Letter from the Vicar of Christ Church to the LCC Theatres and Music Halls Committee (18 October 1905), LMA, LCC/MIN/10,903; minutes of the LCC Theatres and Music Halls Committee meeting (21 October 1914), LMA, LCC/ MIN/10,735, 869; postcard for ‘The King’s Service’ (15 October 1906), Kentish Town Public Baths, Camden Local Studies Centre, 46.292. ‘Court of Appeal: Cinematograph Pictures at Public Baths’, The Times (27 April 1915).

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Figure 1.6 Postcard advertising films at the Prince of Wales’ Hall (Kentish Town Baths), October 1906. Courtesy of Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre.

of cleansing the urban populace, and just as recreational swimming was increasingly seen as a way of nurturing ‘a great race’ of athletes (according to one proponent), the cinematograph could also be used to further the

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interests of King and country.27 Yet, by providing one of the early homes for cinema during its formative years, public baths may have unwittingly helped to nurture a form of entertainment that many people regarded as physically and morally dubious. As Vanessa Toulmin has argued, film screenings in public halls by itinerant exhibitors like Devant were vital in fashioning an audience for cinema as a form of mass entertainment. In some cases, this style of ‘town hall’ exhibition even led to semi-permanent film shows that predated, and in important ways anticipated, the advent of dedicated cinemas in the years to come.28

Conclusion The cinema of the public swimming pool has its roots in some of the earliest projected moving pictures. The glimpses of public bathing in silent comedies, actualities and newsreel films serve as records of the importance of the public pool as a place in which people could meet and socialize as well as swim. The practice of repurposing swimming baths for film exhibition provides further evidence of the pool’s increasing associations with spectacle and entertainment, as well as offering a reminder of the variety of venues in which early cinema found its audience. Early films of public baths also highlight both the cinema’s and the swimming pool’s historic importance as spaces of collective memory. Sifted from the archive, these films open onto an early twentieth-century world of communal leisure time that has otherwise receded from view. Defending the need to preserve public baths from demolition or redevelopment, Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis have reflected on the power of place that 27 28

Archibald Sinclair, ‘Swimming as a National Exercise’, Physical Culture 1/2 (1989), 137–9, 139; quoted in Love, A Social History of Swimming in England, 133. Vanessa Toulmin, ‘Cuckoo in the Nest: Edwardian Itinerant Exhibition Practices and the Transition to Cinema in the United Kingdom from 1901 to 1906’, Moving Image 10/1 (2010), 52–79.

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public pools exert. As buildings, pools are especially powerful, they suggest, ‘because everyone has, at one time or another in their lives, had the experience of swimming in a public pool, almost everyone has a view to express or a memory to share, be it warming or chilling, happy or (often) humiliating’ – scenarios that have been dramatized many times over since Keaton’s high-dive in The Cameraman.29 Offering an explanation of why pools are so prone to collecting memories in this way, the authors observe that, when swimming in public, we are particularly exposed at the same time as being more-or-less submerged: ‘intimacy and anonymity we share with complete strangers; at once both part of a communal experience, yet locked within our own private worlds’.30 This curious mix of intimacy and anonymity, sociability and seclusion, continues to inform cinematic treatments of the pool as a location. It also feels like a good description of one of the central experiences of filmgoing.

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Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis, Great Lengths: The Historic Indoor Swimming Pools of Britain (London: English Heritage, 2009), 15. Gordon and Inglis, Great Lengths, 16.

Sheri Chinen Biesen

2 Cinematic Comedy and the Swimming Pool: Gender, Class, Coming of Age and Sexual Identity from The Philadelphia Story (1940) to Legally Blonde (2001)

‘Let’s have a quick swim … I always swam after parties.’ —Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story

The swimming pool played a vital role in cinematic depictions of gender, class, ‘coming of age’ and sexual identity in Hollywood comedies from the classical studio system to the post-classical era. I will investigate how filmic images of the swimming pool provide a site where social, cultural and aesthetic forces converge to reveal critical aspects of gender distress, class critique and sexual awareness in The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940), The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) and Legally Blonde (Robert Luketic, 2001). Relatively young, naïve, wealthy and educated protagonists in each of these comedies grapple with identity crises as they explore their sexuality. They achieve understanding after plunging into a pool to contemplate their fate and future. The Philadelphia Story was a cinematic comeback for Katharine Hepburn after being labeled ‘box-office poison’ as an independent female star.1 Behind the scenes Hepburn wielded considerable clout in acquiring the film rights to the Broadway play of the same name and ensuring that

1

In 1938–9, theatre owner Harry Brandt labeled Hepburn ‘box-office poison’ after a series of flops. ‘The New Pictures’, Time, 20 January 1941, 77–8, 77.

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she was the star of MGM’s film directed by George Cukor. Hepburn’s character Tracy Lord’s iconic plunges into the swimming pool on her estate are assumed by the men she is romantically involved with to speak volumes about her character, wealth and ‘virtue’. As she dives in and swims, she debates social class and examines her sexual identity with ex-husband C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) and with Macauley ‘Mike’ Connor ( James Stewart), to whom she is attracted. Moreover, like many representations of swimming pools in motion picture comedies, the visceral, reflective expanse of water and human recreation also functions to connote love, sexual intimacy and phallic desires as she watches ‘The True Love’ miniature yacht sail across the pool, remembers her relationship with Dexter and ponders whether she was ‘yar’ (Figure 2.1). Describing ‘The True Love’, she explains that ‘yar’ means ‘easy to handle, quick to the

Figure 2.1 Tracy (Katharine Hepburn) swims and remembers her yar yacht True Love in the pool in The Philadelphia Story (MGM, dir. George Cukor, 1940).

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helm, fast, bright’. Her late night swim with Mike suggests to her uptight, social-climbing fiancé, George Kittredge ( John Howard) that she is wild and sexually promiscuous. In the end, her swim in the pool disrupts her wedding and she reunites with Dexter, with whom she frequently swam. Ironically, the swimming pool on Tracy Lord’s estate is not shown very often in the film, but is repeatedly referenced. Moreover, her swimming pool is the key site of suggestive sexual exploration in The Philadelphia Story. In this romantic comedy, the swimming pool is central to the theme of Hepburn’s wealthy heiress being a cold, detached ‘goddess’ rather than a warm, compassionate ‘human being’. Upon seeing Lord’s swimming pool, Stewart’s working class poet reporter, Mike, marvels at its opulent splendor and perfection, as he admires Hepburn’s affluent heroine. However, Tracy Lord takes the extravagance and beautiful excess of her swimming pool for granted. Connoting sexual activity, she invites him to take a swim with her. When Lord’s ex-husband Dexter shows up, he chastises Tracy for her lack of humane compassion towards his alcoholism and sexual desire for her, calling her a ‘goddess’ and suggesting her frigidity. Appalled at his assault on her sexual identity, she plunges in a beautiful phallic dive into the swimming pool, becoming very much a slender, athletic, sexualized romantic heroine objectified in her tight, wet bathing suit—and in the power of her perfect descent slicing the marble calm of the water at the pool’s surface. Hepburn was known for her strong masculine athleticism, which contributed to her independent androgynous female persona (for example, she dresses as a boy and jumps into the ocean to rescue a drowning woman in Sylvia Scarlett while co-star Cary Grant is oblivious on shore.) As Christine Holmlund argues, ‘Images of muscular women … are disconcerting, even threatening. They disrupt the equation of men with strength and women with weakness that underpins gender roles and power relations, and that has by now come to seem familiar and comforting (though perhaps in different ways) to both men and women’.2

2

Christine Holmlund, ‘Visual Difference and Flex Appeal’, in Susan Birrell and Cheryl Cole, eds, Women, Sport, and Culture (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1994), 299–313, 302.

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Moreover, in The Philadelphia Story Hepburn submerges deep beneath the water as she dives and swims across the pool, suggesting that her character Tracy has depth and sexuality. Later, Mike further sexualizes and humanizes Tracy by explaining that she is not cold and inhumane, but is rather on fire and has smoldering ‘magnificence’ of ‘hearth fires and holocausts’ deep within her as they run off for a late night swim and he passionately kisses her in a drunken sexual exploration on the night before her wedding. The fact that Stewart carries Hepburn wet and partially undressed in her bare legs and robe singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ suggests illicit sex following their inebriated plunge into the water in the wee hours of the night. In compliance with motion picture Production Code censorship, Mike insists that an exhilarating swim and a passionate kiss was all that occurred, but abundant sexual intimacy is suggested and is assumed, which breaks up her engagement, allowing her to remarry Dexter and look forward to many enjoyable swims with him and their ‘True Love’ yacht in the future as she realizes her sexual identity after their dip in the pool. Yet neither Dexter, Mike nor her fiancé are shown swimming. As seen in The Philadelphia Story, The Graduate and Legally Blonde, Hollywood comedies often featured a dominant, active female versus a comparatively passive male. However, strong, irreverent women in romantic comedies are frequently tamed or repressed by a culminating union of the heterosexual couple to reaffirm the status quo. As Kathleen Rowe asserts in The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, romantic comedy ‘tolerates, and even encourages, its heroine’s short-lived rebellion because that rebellion ultimately serves the interest of the hero’ by way of activating laughter to cover up the ‘costs of a woman’s acceptance of her proper place in patriarchy’ and serving to ‘tie a woman’s rebellion to her acceptance or refusal of the terms of heterosexuality … teaching that a woman’s lot under patriarchy is to suffer but making that suffering pleasurable’.3 In addition, not only is the swimming pool a unique cinematic space for sexual exploration by women and men in these ‘battle of the sexes’ comedies

3

Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 112.

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which amplify phallic connotation and re-evaluation of their intimate relationships, but further these visceral bodies of water also depict issues of social class and economic considerations as the swimming pool itself functions as a material commodity, as evident in The Philadelphia Story, The Graduate and Legally Blonde. Catherine Williamson notes in ‘Swimming Pools, Movie Stars: The Celebrity Body in the Post-War Marketplace’ that ‘languorous swimming scenes offered an excellent opportunity to display the female body in various stages of undress while the wholesomeness of the narrative deflected any possible reprisals from’ the censorship of the ‘Breen office’.4 Moreover, the ‘backyard’ swimming pool ‘craze’ depicted on screen eventually paralleled upwardly mobile postwar consumerism moving beyond opulent mansions of rich and famous socialites and celebrities to epitomize social-climbing upper-middle-class leisure because ‘the commodified body of water represent[s] elaborate “engineerings” of organic entities in the service of capitalism’. Williamson further suggests that swimming pools ‘celebrate the triumph of culture over nature—the establishment of a system of control over organic entities—while continuing to fetishize the “naturalness” of the female body or outdoor recreation’.5 As sexuality and the body is fetishized and sexual identity is deconstructed, the swimming pool is used as a site of sexual and material fantasy in romantic comedies. In both comedies, The Graduate and Legally Blonde, the swimming pool thematically utilizes colour to provide fascinating “coming of age” and sexual awareness transcending an existential crisis of identity. In each film a young protagonist’s swim in the pool functions as a revealing rite of passage where they explore possibilities beyond their conventional upper middleclass comfort zone. Protagonists in both The Graduate and Legally Blonde are just finishing college and contemplating their future while reexamining their sexual identity and their parents’ affluent lifestyle and expectations. The swimming pool plays a key role in these

4 5

Catherine Williamson cites Esther Williams as an example in ‘Swimming Pools, Movie Stars: The Celebrity Body in the Post-War Marketplace’, Camera Obscura, 38 (1996), 4–28, 5. Williamson, ‘Swimming Pools, Movie Stars’, 6.

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life-changing individual sexual explorations in these comedies. In fact, The Graduate is notable as a dark, existential black comedy that conveyed its antihero’s social alienation with which a growing late 1960s youth ‘counterculture’ could identify. Unlike the monochromatic swimming pools in black and white films such as The Philadelphia Story, the gorgeous turquoise hue of the swimming pool is a stunning symbol of protagonist Benjamin Braddock’s emotional inner life in The Graduate and his profound quest to understand his sexual identity. The translucent aquatic blue colour of the swimming pool is juxtaposed with phallic shots of him floating in the water as he loses his virginity superimposed with his fantasizes about having sex in a hotel room. The pool symbolizes sex (which isn’t shown). In The Graduate Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) struggles with his parents’ constraining social and material career expectations and rebels against their suffocating control to discover his sexuality—subjectively revealed to simulate his point of view as he is pushed (in a scuba suit) into their pool and forced to sit at the bottom. Paradoxically, although his visceral, sensory plunge into the watery expanse of the swimming pool potentially connotes sexual liberation in The Graduate, initially, when his parents constrain him and insist that he wear a scuba diving suit with a mask and oxygen tank to impress their friends, then shove him back underwater and prevent him from surfacing for air, the swimming pool becomes a container of entrapment. He sits in existential despair, alienated on the floor of its depths. Director Mike Nichols captures Benjamin’s entrapment with subjective, claustrophobic point-ofview shots through his scuba mask with sounds of his heavy breathing and underwater camera work of his parents pushing him beneath the surface in a suffocating sequence where, despite his oxygen tank, he is desperate for air and freedom as the camera pulls back in a slow reverse zoom to a wide shot to reveal his confined isolation under the water. As he breaks free of their familial and societal constraints, Benjamin abandons his cumbersome scuba suit and dives in a phallic plunge into the swimming pool discovering his sexuality. He swims deep beneath the surface as impressive underwater cinematography captures the visceral ‘feel’ of the blue water against his bare skin. He then catapults out of the

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water and floats on the reflective surface of the pool reimagining his illicit sexual affair with attractive older neighbor Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the wife of his father’s law partner. His parents repeatedly have swimming pool parties. Indeed, as seen in The Philadelphia Story, much of the action and sexual identity in Nichols’ The Graduate revolves around the aquatic expanse of the swimming pool. Its underwater reflections light Benjamin’s face in his bedroom window. Signifying his sexual rite of passage and exploration of sexual identity, in dream-like stream-of-consciousness fashion an extended musical montage to Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ and ‘April Come She Will’ centers on Benjamin’s sexual transformation and erotic awakening as he floats and dives into the swimming pool with elliptical match cuts of him plunging out of the water to his raft and landing in bed atop Mrs Robinson. Shots of the water glistening against his skin as he lies on a raft floating wet in the pool soaking in the sunshine convey Benjamin’s sexual fantasies as his father asks him what he is doing with his life and pressures him to go to graduate school or pursue a career. In The Graduate Benjamin is sexually dominated by an older woman; as he floats in the pool there is no dialogue or communication in his sexual fantasies. His effort at conversation with Mrs Robinson ends in failure, but his blissful sexual reverie is conveyed by his contentment either floating or diving into the swimming pool. When his father berates him and demands to know what he is doing, Benjamin answers, ‘Well, I would say I’m just drifting here in the pool’. When his father asks why, Benjamin replies, ‘Well, it’s very comfortable just to drift here’. The swimming pool functions as an allegory for his life. Moreover, like Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, Hoffman’s character in The Graduate is sexualized, and his near-naked bronzed body fetishized, as he floats and tans in the swimming pool, the sun mirroring the erotic reflection of the water against his skin, as he considers his sexual and intellectual rite of passage upon losing his virginity. In an effort to control him, show off material wealth to their friends, and pressure him to date Mrs Robinson’s daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross), his parents surround him and swim like sharks circling him in the pool as he floats. They suggest having another swimming party.

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Benjamin transforms from awkward and nerdy to a sexual object of the cinematic gaze soaked in the water of the pool. Ironically, neither of Benjamin’s female objects of desire (Mrs Robinson, Elaine) are shown swimming in the pool. Rather, it is Hoffman’s bare male body that is eroticized in the water (Figure 2.2).6 Sensual turquoise aquatic shots and Benjamin’s lingering hallucinations in the swimming pool are a recurrent visual motif in The Graduate. Much of the action incorporates images of the pool and its mirror reflections of the water.

Figure 2.2 Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) floats and is eroticized in the pool in The Graduate (Embassy/United Artists, dir. Mike Nichols, 1967).

In fact, other artificial bodies of water are shot to resemble a swimming pool in The Graduate. The promotional trailer for The Graduate opens with a close up shot of Benjamin near a clear aqua blue expanse of water that appears to be his swimming pool which zooms out to instead reveal a fountain on the university campus (shot at the University of Southern California to simulate the University of California at Berkeley campus). As 6

Benjamin’s sexualization in the pool as he re-examines his sexual identity seems to re-imagine Laura Mulvey’s ‘gaze’ in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen (1975) 6–18, 11. A swimming pool party also represents a sexual rite of passage for child prodigies in Real Genius, directed by a woman, Martha Coolidge, and an existential conflict of identity in Breaking Bad.

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the film begins and Bancroft’s alluring spider woman Mrs Robinson pursues and attempts to seduce Benjamin in his bedroom, the scene is filmed through the water and glass container of his aquarium fish tank, suggesting the underwater erotic connotation of his swimming pool, his conflicted sexual identity, and also his entrapment. Like The Philadelphia Story and Legally Blonde, the juxtaposition of the swimming pool’s glistening water with the film’s action in The Graduate sexualizes its characters. However, while the shimmering expanse of the water sensualizes male and female characters splashing and wet in their swimming pools in the comedies The Philadelphia Story, The Graduate and Legally Blonde, stereotypical gender roles prevail regarding societal expectations of these men and women despite their aquatic proclivities. In particular, women (played by Hepburn, Bancroft, Ross, Reese Witherspoon) are each expected to be content to be beautiful, to partner with and marry a well-to-do man, and live in a wealthy household where they can enjoy their life of leisure by the swimming pool rather than pursue ambitious dreams, despite their intelligence or education. Thus, they are implicitly regarded and objectified in relation to their sexuality, which, as Hepburn and Witherspoon illustrate, is enhanced by their alluring plunges into the swimming pool. Yet for Benjamin in The Graduate, his life of aquatic leisure and sexual/ intellectual rite of passage is considered to be ‘floating’ and ‘drifting’ aimlessly without purpose, and he is expected to be more ambitious, career minded and goal-oriented, rather than a ‘young man’ who is assumed to be slacking or shirking his responsibility to work. In stark contrast, women in The Philadelphia Story and Legally Blonde are chastised (by parents and lovers) for being ambitious and independent as they swim in their respective pools. Following the footsteps of her mother Mrs Robinson, whose identity (and name) is associated with being a married housewife, in The Graduate Elaine is even pulled out of school to get married rather than allowed to finish her education at Berkeley. Similarly, a swimming pool represents a sexual/intellectual rite of passage in Legally Blonde where rich girl Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) swims across the pool in her sparkling sequined bikini as parents try to discourage her from pursuing study at Harvard Law School. Her mom pleads,

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‘Honey, you were first runner up at the Miss Hawaiian Tropics contest. Why are you going to throw all that away?’ Finally, like Nichols’ extended Simon and Garfunkel musical montage in The Graduate, Witherspoon’s suggestive swim in the pool in Legally Blonde becomes a film-within-a-film for her college admissions video (‘directed by a Coppola’) to the astounded Harvard admissions committee of stuffy old white males. Breaking the ‘fourth wall’, directly addressing the camera, Elle speaks to her parents and the committee appealing for their acceptance of her desire to pursue her ambitious dream of attending Harvard Law School. She sits in the water soaking in the gorgeous, translucent aquatic blue of the swimming pool signifying her material wealth, living in the affluent community of Bel Air surrounded by movie stars (‘across the street from [television producer] Aaron Spelling’), and the indulgent Southern California lifestyle of sunshine and decadent leisure by the pool. Her gender identity as a desirable blonde woman is heightened by the glittering sequins of her wet string bikini and golden skin reflecting turquoise waves as she plunges into its expanse, swims on a raft recounting soap opera intrigue (as her alluring blonde friend kicks her leg up out of the water), and lounges in the bubbling jet stream of the Jacuzzi spa. Elle recalls to her ex-lover how they spent four hours together in the hot tub after Winter Formal, connoting racy sex with the pool’s aquatic depths. Regardless of her intellectual ability, she is not ashamed of her sexuality, her sequined bikini or her swimming pool. Yet despite her perfect grades and stellar test scores, she is marginalized and dismissed as a ‘fashion merchandising major’ at CULA (even by her female faculty advisor) merely because she is a beautiful blonde woman who is stereotyped as a shallow ‘bimbo’ or erotic ‘dumb blonde’ who swims scantily attired in a pool. The uptight, class-conscious older men on the Harvard Law committee are titillated by her wet, sexual allure in the swimming pool. They fetishize her erotic appeal, contemplating her ‘faux-fur line of panties’ she designed for her sorority charity project before considering her admission. When she arrives, students yell, ‘Hey, look, check out Malibu Barbie!’ Ironically, she initially seeks an education at Harvard Law School not because she is an intellectual, but rather to pursue her opportunistic (and sexist misogynist) ex-boyfriend who has dumped her for a preppy East Coast girl.

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Moreover, she is sexually harassed both by other students and also by her lecherous professor/employer who attempts to exploit and seduce her once she arrives. As she glistens in the water of her swimming pool, she tells her parents, ‘Going to Harvard is the only way I’m going to get the love of my life back’. As they sip martinis by the side of the pool, her father dismisses her ambitions and replies, ‘Oh, sweetheart, you don’t need law school. Law school is for people who are boring and ugly and serious. And you, button, are none of those things’. Like Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, in Legally Blonde Elle discovers her self-confidence, intellectual ability and feminist sexual independence and she realizes her full adult potential … before getting married. However, she does pursue her career aspirations. As in The Philadelphia Story, none of the men are shown swimming in Legally Blonde.7 Ultimately, cinematic incarnations of the swimming pool in comedies The Philadelphia Story, The Graduate and Legally Blonde illustrate issues of gender, sexuality and social class to reveal how its translucent aquatic expanse transcends material wealth and enables an existential exploration of identity and personal rite of passage that moves from stifling sexual objectification to awareness, liberation and feminist critique. In these films, the water reflects the protagonists’ inner desires as they swim, dive, float or submerge to experience the pool’s visceral depths beneath its shimmering surface.

7

Legally Blonde was shot in Los Angeles (USC, CalTech, UCLA) and London (Dulwich College) in the UK.

Alex Naylor

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‘The Anatomy of Atavism’: American Urban Modernity, Gothic Trauma and Haunted Spaces in Cat People (1942)

Cat People ( Jacques Tourneur, 1942) opens with an epigraph, an extract from a fictional psychoanalytic text credited to the film’s oily, patientseducing psychoanalyst Dr Judd: Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world consciousness. ‘The Anatomy of Atavism – Dr Louis Judd’

This suggestion that specific cultures are atavistic, ‘depressions in the world consciousness’, fades out to the film’s main character, the Serbian émigré and fashion illustrator Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), in modern New York. Atavism is Irena’s problem, and the film configures it as a form of traumatic memory. Haunted by the Gothic history of her home village, she is obsessively fearful that she has inherited a strain of monstrosity which causes village women to transform into panthers when sexually aroused. Throughout the film, other characters, particularly Irena’s oblivious American husband Oliver (Kent Smith), counsel her to forget. ‘I’ve fled from the past’, she confides to him, from ‘evil things’ he ‘could never know or understand’. He advises her that this history is ‘nothing to do with you, really. You’re Irena […] you’re here in America […] you’re so normal you’re even in love with me […] Oliver Reed […] a good, plain Americano.’ But Irena will fail to become either ‘normal’ or American. Appropriately, this is a film made by European émigrés. Val Lewton, the head producer of RKO’s horror unit, himself came from a family of

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Russian Jews who had emigrated to the USA.1 Director Jacques Tourneur made his first four films in France before moving to Hollywood in 1935.2 Simone Simon, who played Irena, returned to Hollywood from France after the outbreak of war. Early in the film’s development, Irena herself was intended early in the film’s development to be explicitly ‘a refugee from Nazi invasion’.3 In Lewton’s first story treatment, a Panzer division invades Irena’s Serbian village. By night the villagers transform into huge were-cats and savage their occupiers. Irena flees to New York, taking the curse of her people with her.4 In the final film, although the war is not mentioned, Irena’s motivations for leaving Serbia are still to escape a traumatic cultural past. Mark Jancovich comments that horror films of the 1940s are often marked by ‘very real uncertainties about the outcome of the war … [a period] in which the social world could not be easily read and outcomes could not be easily predicted […] Illegibility became a central concern, and fog became a central image’.5 Alexander Nemerov argues more specifically that the Second World War, never mentioned in RKO’s horror films, nevertheless haunts them like the unit’s famous unseen monsters and that their wordless moments of sadness, terror and mourning spoke to home front audiences.6 Lewton himself was profoundly pessimistic about the war, commenting that it was an atavistic ‘return to barbarism […] the savage

1 2 3 4 5 6

Edmund Bansak, Fearing the Dark: the Val Lewton Career (London: McFarland, 1995), 9–13. Val Lewton: the Man in the Shadows (USA, 2007, dir. Kent Jones). Joel E. Siegel, ‘Tourneur Remembers: recollections as told to Joel E. Siegel’, Cinefantastique, 2/4 ( July 1973), 24–5; 24. Kim Newman, Cat People (London: BFI, 1999), 19. George Turner, ‘The Exquisite Evil of Cat People’, in The Cinema of Adventure, Romance and Terror (Los Angeles: ASC, 1989), 233–43. Mark Jancovich, ‘Pale Shadows: Narrative Hierarchies in the Historiography of 1940s Horror’, in Lincoln Geraghty, Mark Jancovich ed., The shifting definitions of genre: essays on labeling films, television shows and media (McFarland, 2008), 28–9. Alexander Nemerov, Icons of grief: Val Lewton’s home front pictures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1.

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wars that mark the end of a cycle of civilisation’, and on another occasion in 1940, ‘it seems like the end of the world.’7 RKO’s 1940s horror production unit shifted the sites of cinematic horror, from the imaginative European folkloric past colonized by Universal’s horror films, to a contemporary urban American present. The RKO horror style emerged fully formed and highly successful in Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur in 1942. It emphasized unseen, uncanny threats taking place in relatively realistic modern, urban settings, with little on-screen special effects or violence. One of two key suspense sequences in Cat People uses a residential hotel’s basement swimming pool as a site of horror where the traumatic European past invades the clean slate of middle-class American modernity. Drawing upon the style and concerns of fin-de-siècle Gothic literature, the Lewton unit’s films repeatedly depict European history as a repressed trauma which returns to haunt the American present – and which cannot always be reliably exorcized. Adapted loosely from a fin-de-siècle Gothic short story and drawing upon both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Wolf Man (Universal, 1941, dir. George Waggner), Cat People recapitulates the fin-de-siècle Gothic narrative of atavism threatening modernity. In one of the film’s main suspense sequences, Irena stalks her rival in love, the all-American girl Alice, as she exercises in her building’s basement swimming pool. Through this rivalry in general and this scene in particular, Cat People stages a conflict between Irena’s traumatized and uncanny body, which cannot escape her European past and Alice’s modern, healthy, American ‘clean and proper body’, free of history. Alice’s access to a private swimming pool in 1940s New York suggests an aspirational and fashionable lifestyle, and supports her depiction as healthy and vigorous in mind and body – in counterpoint to Irena’s body diseased with inherited Otherness and her mind ill with the traumas of European history. The director uses darkness, sound and intercutting to show Alice’s body isolated and physically vulnerable in a pool of light surrounded by

7

Val Lewton, letters to Nina and Lucy Lewton, November 30 1939, and [1940], collection of Val Lewton Jr. Qted in Nemerov, Icons of Grief, 10.

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a looming and vengeful darkness in which it is implied that Irena’s monstrous form lurks. Horror cinema often subjects significant domestic and public spaces to uncanny invasions; it also frequently uses threats in water to stage the dramatic vulnerability of the human body. The training ground of Alice’s healthy body is here invaded by atavistic danger. From 1942 to 1948, RKO’s horror unit, a small team with a rapid turnover, pumped out a series of cheaply made, critically acclaimed box office hits notable for a distinctive house style. Economically bruised by the studio’s heavy financial investment in Orson Wells, RKO had decided to move into the horror market as part of a refocusing upon proven, popular genres and formats. Val Lewton was hired to head this new unit intended to make films to compete directly with Universal’s horror product. Films were limited to a budget of less than $150,000 and a running time of less than 75 minutes.8 Completed ahead of schedule and under budget at $134,000,9 Cat People drew huge crowds on word of mouth in an extended first run which grossed well over $2,000,000: at least twenty times its cost.10 Later films from the unit shared Cat People’s basic approach to horror, the supposed ‘Lewton formula’ of realism and suggestion, which he described to the Los Angeles Times as ‘A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence. Fadeout. It’s all over in less than 70 minutes.’11 The swimming pool sequence is the richest of the film’s three sequences of ‘suggested horror’. As Alice is about to leave the basement swimming pool of the residential hotel where she lives, she starts to suspect that someone is down there with her. She dives into the half-lit pool and treads water. Echoing, ambiguous growls are heard on the soundtrack as the camera cuts back and forth between Alice in the centre of the pool, vulnerable and isolated, shot from above with only her head above water, and the empty 8 9 10 11

Joel E. Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972) 20–1, 27. Edmund Bansak, Fearing the Dark: the Val Lewton Career (London: McFarland, 1995), 86–9. Siegel, The Reality of Terror, 36. Siegel, The Reality of Terror, 38–9. RKO production file for I Walked With a Zombie, RKO collection, University of California Los Angeles, California. cit. Siegel, The Reality of Terror, 31.

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walls of the pool room, upon which wave flickering diffuses shadows from the pool. Irena, fully human, suddenly switches on the light and engages in a delicately menacing conversation with a flustered Alice. What makes this sequence so striking is in part its very full exploitation of the setting. The basement swimming pool is a space used to generate effects of claustrophobia, suspense and, most powerfully, a lurking and amorphous sense of the uncanny. Moreover, the setting explores a confrontation between Alice’s healthy American body and Irena’s foreign, potentially monstrous one. Alice begins the sequence strong and vigorous, but, trapped in the pool, she becomes small, menaced and vulnerable, with the much physically smaller and usually less socially confident Irena towering over her from the pool’s edge. A large part of Alice’s role in the film is to show us by example what Irena can never be: the all-American girl, city edition, healthy, untroubled and uncomplicated. When she is bothered by something, Alice exercises, whilst Irena obsesses. Unpacking the dichotomy the film creates between the two women, and the spaces with which they are associated, reveals Cat People to be a film concerned among other things with trauma, exile, and their apparent incompatibility with American identity. The film is in some respects about Irena’s failed attempt to become American. Tony Williams comments that Irena ‘mistakenly believes incorporation into “normal” institutions will cure her’, but her incorporation into the American nuclear family fails and instead she becomes a threat to it.12 He argues that the film’s articulation of this failure questions the institution itself. The qualities in Irena that are monstrous are what resist assimilation. Meanwhile, American-ness is depicted as a sort of balm of forgetfulness, a clean slate that promises to erase the baggage of the past – but does not always deliver. Linnie Blake argues that horror cinema, a ‘trauma-raddled and woundobsessed’ genre, frequently addresses the sites where individual, group and national identities are ‘constituted, destroyed and reconstructed’, ‘both

12

Tony Williams, Hearths of Darkness: the Family in the American Horror Film (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 52–3.

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by the wounds inflicted by trauma and by those psychological, social and cultural attempts to bind those wounds in the interests of dominant ideologies of identity’.13 Ideologically saturated, homogenizing and harmonizing conceptions of nationhood can function to bind the wounds of the past prematurely and to conceal and ignore them ‘in a manner directly antithetical to their healing’. The Gothic narratives of horror cinema ‘which privilege the abject and the uncanny’, Blake suggests, can unbind and reopen such wounds, remembering the denied in an ‘unstable, anoretic’ manner. She ascribes to them the non-realist capacity to represent trauma that trauma theorists such as Hayden White often ascribe to literary modernism.14 Adam Lowenstein argues similarly that cinema can ‘access discourses of horror to confront the representation of historical trauma’.15 Blake argues that horror cinema’s representation of trauma can question ‘ideologically dominant models of individual and group identity’ and their role in this process of concealment and can expose trauma’s denied centrality to national identity formation.16 Cat People’s narrative of failed Americanization can be usefully read in this manner. For the film’s characters, to claim a national identity that is fully American, one must forget one’s cultural origins, as Irena is urged to do. It is notable that the film’s successfully American characters are white and Anglo-American, ethnically unmarked – ‘good plain Americano’ as Oliver puts it – and without origin or memory. The memories and traumatic past the Serbian Irena Dubrovna must deny and forget in order to become the American Mrs Oliver Reed linger within her body. Denied and ignored, they erupt monstrously.

13 14

15 16

Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 2. Blake, The Wounds of Nations, 3. Hayden White, ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth’, in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37–53, 52. Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 2–3, 9. Blake, The Wounds of Nations, 3, 6.

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In Cat People, the stain of monstrosity within is a problem of the old country. Irena’s origins are both in the monster-haunted mythological Europe of Universal horror films and in the recent traumas of European history. Monstrosity for Irena is linked closely to her Serbian heritage. Both are apparently defined by incurable suffering. In the film, we repeatedly see Irena’s haunted body curled in on itself in misery. She presses herself against her bedroom door on her chaste wedding night, sobs in a bathtub with her knees against her chest, presses her face and body into the sofa after Oliver asks her for a divorce, and finally scrabbles her hand against the pavement as she dies. Irena’s body, which cannot embrace other human beings, is constantly seeking self-comfort or the comfort of objects and finding them lacking. Her wedding reception in a Serbian restaurant (the only time we see her in a Serbian cultural setting or interacting with her compatriots) helps to underline her inheritance of suffering. It opens with a gruesome and melancholy image specified by the shooting script: in the window of the restaurant, skinned calves’ heads garlanded with flowers, seen through falling snow on the street.17 The celebration is already visually tinged with death and suffering. At the reception, Irena is isolated within an American crowd; she apparently has no Serbian friends.18 At the film’s beginning she referred to Oliver as ‘the first friend I met in America’. The feast is interrupted by the approach of a cat-like woman. Costumed in a glittering black gown, with her hair rolled to resemble cat ears, her manner is mournful and dignified. She greets Irena unsmilingly, in Serbian, as ‘moya sestra’ [my sister], by implication, a fellow sufferer. Irena crosses herself, refuses to recognize her. This incident triggers Irena’s refusal to consummate her marriage that night, asking for ‘time to get over this feeling that there’s something evil in me’. Oliver promises patience with her sexual fears, but

17 18

DeWitt Bodeen, The Cat People revised estimating script (made final), July 15, 1942. RKO Collection, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. Jeremy Dyson, Bright Darkness: the Lost Art of the Supernatural Horror Film (London: Cassell, 1997), 109.

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shows little patience with her suspicions. Instead he chucks her chin and says, ‘Oh, Irena, you crazy kid!’ Oliver’s attempts to bind Irena’s unhealed wounds do not work, but neither do those of modern psychiatry. Dr Judd, while he provides an opportunity for the film to expose Irena’s obsessions more, ultimately offers her the same impossible advice, to forget ‘the mad legends of your birthplace and lead a normal life’. Irena herself confronts Judd with the limitations of his pseudo-Freudian approach: ‘when you speak of the soul, you mean the mind […] and it is not my mind that is troubled.’ The soul, however, is incurable. Alice, Irena’s rival in love and in many respects her opposite, is marked out by three related traits: her urban modernity, her healthy vigour and her American-ness. Alice is briskly, cheerfully capable. A feature of her presentation in the film is her mastery of the city’s public spaces, and by extension, of modern urban life: the office, the streets and parks, restaurants and cafes, and the swimming pool where she relaxes by exercising. She tracks down the only Serbian restaurant in New York for Oliver and Irena’s wedding reception, and tells Irena, ‘Anything you want to know about this city, ask me. I know all the unimportant details’. Irena, by contrast, works on her fashion illustrations within her apartment: a richly dressed set with heavy drapes and velvet sofas, which is nearly always seen in semi-darkness and which Irena tells us that she douses with her favourite perfume, ‘strong, sweet’ Lalique. Outside of this warm, soft, but claustrophobic and heavy environment, Irena is hesitant, solitary and ill at ease. Nevertheless, she seeks connections with people: ‘I like to be liked’, she says to Oliver. It is only in the stalking sequences that we ever see Irena truly confident in public. As she gives in to her inner wounds and allows herself to become monstrous, we see her take ownership of the public spaces that she otherwise struggles with. Only as a predator can she briefly conquer the American city. The actress who plays Alice, Jane Randolph, is tall and statuesque. Tourneur commented later in life that his only complaint about how the swimming pool sequence turned out was that Jane Randolph ‘wasn’t

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feminine or diminutive enough’ but ‘built like a wrestler’.19 The film itself does anything but try to make Alice look smaller. In her first sequence, she is shown in a full body shot standing next to a male colleague and, clearly barely an inch shorter than him, gives cheerful orders to another male colleague. Alice and Oliver can look eye to eye, while Irena is head and shoulders shorter than him (Simone Simon was 5 ft. 2, Kent Smith 6 ft. 1). The sequence in which Irena stalks Alice in the swimming pool, like the film’s other stalking sequence in Central Park, begins by emphasizing Alice’s strength and capability and then suddenly renders her vulnerable and afraid. Alice’s love of swimming suggests several things about her. We have already seen that she is brisk, cheerful and practical, that she is a seasoned New Yorker, and that she is modern and fashionable. In lines cut from the shooting script, Oliver elaborates verbally what we see on-screen: ‘she never lets anything bother her. She says the best cure for anything is swimming […] She only lives at that women’s club because there’s a pool there’.20 She has a healthy mind in a healthy body. Alice’s access to a pool in her building is charged with positive associations of fashionable, aspirational American urban modernity. Jeff Wiltse argues that in American films from the 1920s to the 1940s, swimming pools became potent ‘emblems of a new, distinctly modern version of the good life which valued leisure, pleasure and beauty […] an integral part of the kind of life Americans wanted to live’.21 Wiltse also comments upon the increasing sexualization of American swimming culture during this period, the shrinking size of swimsuits and the shifting of swimming pool culture to favour the display of a sexualized, healthy and youthful body.22 The un-self-conscious bodily self-display involved in Alice’s swimming habit implies an untroubled sexuality. There is a stark 19 20 21 22

Jacques Tourneur, qtd in Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak (London: Angus and Robertson, 1969), 218. Bodeen, The Cat People revised estimating script (made final). Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 8. Wiltse, Contested Waters, 89, 108.

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implicit contrast with Irena, sexually withdrawn and troubled, her body draped in her black fur coat. Alice’s American-ness, like Oliver’s, likewise becomes marked only in comparison to Irena’s gloomy and haunted European identity. Where this contrast is made, American identity becomes associated with a lack of angst and a lack of past. Even an affair with a married man fails to make Alice very pensive or troubled: ‘I’m the new type of other woman’, she jokes after Oliver calls her ‘swell’ for dispensing sensible marriage advice. Oliver, too, bears no traumas and has no stories to tell about the past. In a speech to Alice, he reveals that the disintegration of his marriage leaves him baffled and indecisive because he has ‘never been unhappy before’. He explains, ‘Things have always gone swell for me. I had a grand time as a kid […] lots of fun at school [and] at the office here’. There would be little here with which Dr Judd could work. Irena, on the other hand, reveals in therapy a richly miserable interior life. As she lies in darkness on the couch, a spotlight illuminating her face, she murmurs of how images of cats ‘torment’ her, wake her in the night: ‘I walk in the day, and the tread of their foot whispers in my brain. I have no peace […] for they are in me’. Later in the film, an extravagantly Freudian dream sequence retreads this ground, showing Irena menaced by animated black cats, swords and keys. Swimming sequences are common in later horror films and films seeking moments of horror and suspense. Stranding the victim in water is an opportunity to stage the vulnerability and isolation of the human body: to give a few paradigmatic examples, Jaws (USA, 1975, dir. Steven Spielberg), Don’t Look Now (UK/Italy, 1973, dir. Nicolas Roeg) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (USA, 1954, dir. Jack Arnold). Most often, there is ‘something in the water’ — that is, in open water. However, swimming pools as such are relatively rarely used in horror films in comparison. The most notable horror sequence apart from Cat People to use a swimming pool is the climactic scene of Let the Right One In (Sweden, 2008, dir. Tomas Alfredson) and its remake Let Me In (UK/USA, 2010, dir. Matt Reeves). In Cat People, though, in contrast to the isolation of open water, the use of a basement swimming pool induces a sense of claustrophobia.

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To achieve this effect, Jacques Tourneur selected an indoor pool ‘that was like the inside of a shoebox: white walls and low ceiling, with powerful light reflections from the water’.23 The crew spent two days of their tight shooting schedule recording ambiguously growling, distorted reverberation sound effects at the indoor swimming pool of the Royal Palms hotel.24 Pascal Couté comments upon the scene’s reliance on plans vides [empty shots], which show settings empty of people: of the sequence’s eighteen shots, half are of amorphous shadows upon the walls of the pool room. In these shots, ‘the only presence is that of the invisible’, and the visible only exists as an absence.25 Arguably, that these shots are empty, and that the shadows are not obvious silhouettes clearly indicating a presence, is important for their effect. Lew Ostrow, head of RKO’s B-unit, instructed Tourneur to clearly indicate the presence of a panther in the swimming pool sequence.26 Tourneur created the ‘cat’ by moving his fist in front of an arc light with a diffuser to make diffused and suggestive, yet abstract, shadows against the wall.27 The resulting sequence oscillates between Alice’s isolated body, and the potential presence of Irena as Thing, swallowed up by her traumas, in the flickering shadows on the walls and distorted echoes on the soundtrack. In forcing such moments of stillness and terror lie Irena’s only way to memorialize her trauma and leave a legacy for those lacking in memory. In such memorable moments, the film itself cues the spectator to strain to listen to background noise and peer into darkness: for a moment, to arrest the narrative and look beyond the representative into the sensual and affective. Like most monster movies, this film offers Irena no recuperative therapeutic narrative. Just before the film’s climax, when Oliver asks for a divorce, we see her resigned but scathing about his attempts to talk her 23 24 25 26 27

Tourneur, qtd in Higham and Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse, 219. Production file, Cat People, RKO collection, Special Collections, University of California Los Angeles. Pascal Couté, ‘La féline: le visible et l’invisible’, CinémAction 120 (2006), 72, 74. Siegel, The Reality of Terror, 36. Siegel, ‘Tourneur Remembers’, 24.

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into forgetfulness of herself: ‘You can’t speak – there’s nothing you can say. There’s only silence. But I love silence – I love loneliness’. Irena’s retreat into silence amounts ultimately to a surrender to death itself, the only thing that can close her suffering. Earlier, Dr Judd has prefigured this with a comment on the Freudian death drive which might disturb Alice and Oliver’s relentlessly positive world view: ‘we all of us carry within us a desire for death’. When Oliver first suggests curing her, she looks meaningfully at the statue of King John skewering a cat with his sword. She later dreams of the same sword, which we see transforming into the key of the panther’s zoo cage, which she steals and ultimately uses to sacrifice herself to the panther. The film closes on the conventional tableau of the remaining juvenile lead couple, Oliver and Alice, comforting each other in the face of the monster’s tragic end. The pursuit of happiness in modern America proves to have a brutal pragmatic price: historical trauma and its victims must be abandoned, mourned – and then forgotten.

Edward Saunders

4

From Stadium to Street: Generations and Gentrification in Berlin Pool Scenes

Generational Models Contested, detested and admired, Leni Riefenstahl’s two ‘Olympia’ films not only shaped the image of Olympic coverage into the present day, but pioneered techniques new to film. The second of these pseudo-documentary films, Olympia: Fest der Schönheit (Olympia: Festival of Beauty, Germany, 1938), contains extensive swimming and diving footage shot during and after the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Undoubtedly one of the most significant pool scenes in film history, it can be read as both a predecessor and a point of contrast to two other Berlin pool scenes, both from feature films, Georg Tressler’s Die Halbstarken (Teenage Wolf Pack, West Germany, 1956) and Tom Tykwer’s Drei (Three, Germany, 2010). These films all feature real-life pools which survive intact to the present day, sites which reveal much about the city’s widely celebrated gentrification. The Olympic pool remains much as it was, a grand and ominous relic of the 1936 Games. The West Berlin pool in Teenage Wolf Pack is now a nightclub and exhibition space, while the floating, heated pool in Three abuts the former course of the Berlin Wall. These three films are emblematic of the ‘three generations’ of post-war German society.1 Festival of Beauty shows the first generation, those who were witnesses of and actors in the Third Reich. Teenage Wolf Pack shows 1

Susanne Vees-Gulani and Laurel Cohen-Pfister, ‘Introduction: A Generational Approach to German Culture’ in Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani (eds), Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 1–26, 5.

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the second generation, in their youth, born into austerity after the war and – at least in historical discourse – set on a collision course with a conservative and restrictive society. In Three it is the third generation, already in early middle age: free, affluent and somewhat lost. The Berlin-based scholar Sigrid Weigel understands the ‘generation’ as ‘a cultural pattern for constructing history’.2 It is clearly a model that can be criticized, but it works as an efficient shorthand for German cultural trends since 1933. The pool scenes in the films tell a story about Berlin as well as reflecting an already familiar periodization, factors which in combination indicate the special status of the pool as a location in the films. Clearly situated as they are in well-established discourses on German history and culture, a comparison and discussion of these scenes contributes to the analysis of the swimming pool’s significance in cinema as a highly particular setting for social interaction, physical display and spectatorship. Pools work in Teenage Wolf Pack and Three as spaces for exploring the self – and taken together, all three scenes function as an index of Berlin then and now. Looking at Berlin pool scenes, then, is also a way of historicizing selves and bodies in space, and, as will be seen, this is connected in the films with differing conceptions of masculinity.

Riefenstahl and Rammstein Pool-related technical innovations in the Olympia films included the placing of cameraman Hans Ertl’s camera in a waterproof box for shooting both above and below the water – an Olympic first – and filming closeups of swimmers from rubber dinghies, taken so close that one competitor

2

Sigrid Weigel, ‘“Generation” as Symbolic Form: On the Genealogical Discourse of Memory since 1945’, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 77:4, 264–77, 265.

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repeatedly brushed the lens with his hand.3 The films are also aesthetically innovative, both in the way they show mass spectatorship of swimming, and in the way they transform sports footage into an art form. The beginning of the pool sequence in Festival of Beauty shows crowds of spectators at the pool, located prominently on one side of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. The first and last parts of the sequence show divers jumping off boards in what Susan Sontag, in her essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’, calls ‘the most admired sequence of the film’. Sontag notes the divers’ ‘stylized, seemingly effortless exertions’ as an example of the sophistication of Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetics.4 Over fifty dives are shown in total from both the women’s and men’s competitions, although some footage was reconstructed later. The final part of the sequence begins by showing the complete dive, with the figures landing in the water (Figure 4.1). But by the end, Riefenstahl shows only the figures leaving the boards, twisting and spiralling in the air. The sequence has been described by Taylor Downing as ‘one of the most imaginative celebrations of the elegance of the human form ever put together on film’.5 Riefenstahl’s representation of bodies is highly ambiguous in Olympia. Downing describes the ‘bizarre open-air gayfest’ with which the first Olympia film begins.6 If at the beginning of the film the athletes’ bodies seem impersonally eroticized, live models of classical statues, by the diving footage they have been reduced to silhouettes, an example of the way fascist art tends, as Susan Sontag notes, to turn people into things.7 The sequencing is intended to have a euphoric effect with the figures appearing weightless and timeless, but is also emblematic of the ‘ceaseless motion’ and ‘ever swelling numbers’ (Sontag) of fascist aesthetics.8 The succession of figures 3 4 5 6 7 8

Taylor Downing, Olympia. 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 48, 54, 107. Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980 (1972)), 93. Downing, Olympia, 109. Downing, Olympia, 98. Sontag, Under the Sign, 91. Sontag, Under the Sign, 91.

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Figure 4.1 Filming the diving sequence for Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) in Berlin, 1936. Copyright: International Olympic Committee/Lothar Rubelt. Permission to reproduce obtained.

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hurling themselves into empty space, though, is also reminiscent of a mass suicide and, as if to underline the bleak physicality of the images, the footage of the divers was resequenced for the music video that accompanied the rock metal band Rammstein’s cover of the Depeche Mode song ‘Stripped’ (1998). In the Rammstein video some of the more abstract dives from the later part of the sequence are used first, followed by some of those showing the full dive into the pool. Some of the dives are then shown in reverse: the divers return to the board, flipping upwards through the air. This pattern is then repeated, until it becomes hard to tell in which direction the bodies are travelling. The Rammstein video ends in a temple ruin in Greece – unlike Festival of Beauty, which concludes with a now canonical image of an illuminated Olympic stadium at night. The pool images are overlaid with the footage of the temple, also from Riefenstahl, and a diver seems to swim towards the viewer through a wall. How this relates to the song’s exhortation to ‘let me see you stripped’ is not made explicit, but the way Riefenstahl captures the divers’ bodies is unsettling and mesmerizing; Rammstein’s use of them can be read, after Sontag, as a ‘variant of camp’.9 Taken to even greater abstraction in the Rammstein video, the bodies move back and forth through the swimming arena, which is seen both full and empty, before the video concludes with the ruins and the ghostly swimmer. This is perhaps a simple way of historicizing the Nazi past, in emphasizing ruination, while de-historicizing the footage by re-sequencing it. Although in no literal way ruined, the site of the Olympic pool today seems dated. Unlike the stadium, which was renovated to host the World Cup in 2006, the pool is run-down and rough around the edges, with piles of autumn leaves still gathering in its fenced off stairways in late spring. Otherwise it is recognizably the same, with its blue tiling and grey-brown shell and limestone walls, and the stadium towering above it. Despite the fact that it was used for the World Swimming Championships in 1978, it seems untouched since the end of the 1936 games. Visitors to the Olympic Stadium can look down at the pool whilst reading an information board about it, but swimmers access the pool via a side entrance and a long path, 9

Sontag, Under the Sign, 95.

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giving the impression that it is set somewhere well apart. If the day is quiet, you might not encounter anybody between the cashier by the street and the pool itself. Now an open-air summer lido run by the city, the pool seems to have resisted the gentrification of the city as a whole, and the renovation of the Olympic Stadium to which it belongs. While still operational, it has been musealized, as the information boards indicate, along with the rest of the site’s problematic paraphernalia, such as the Olympic bell with its swastika. Otherwise the space has changed little since the cameras left in 1936: to swim here is to imagine yourself in Riefenstahl’s film.

Delinquents on the Diving Board Twenty-odd years later, the loud jazz music, fast pace and suspense plot of Teenage Wolf Pack was intended as a stark contrast to the pompousness and militarism of Nazism (Guntram Vogt has noted the way the film references but rejects Nazi culture).10 It begins, though, with a shot that could be inspired by Riefenstahl. The first image after the opening credits is a pair of feet on a diving board, opening out to reveal adolescent boys jumping into a swimming pool. They are checking whether the expensive-looking watches they have stolen are really waterproof. One, the charismatic Freddy Borchert (Horst Buchholz), is the ringleader. Looking up, he chances to recognize his younger brother, Jan (Christian Doermer), who is sitting at the back of the diving board. The youths are the same ‘Halbstarken’ (literally, ‘half-strongs’) of the German title, playing at being men. As in Festival of Beauty, height plays an important role in representing the space. Some people dive from the top platform, while others jump in from the poolside, and the boys are shown underwater as well. The gang

10

Guntram Vogt, Die Stadt im Film. Deutsche Spielfilme 1900–2000 (Marburg: Schüren, 2001), 474–5.

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of adolescents also all have noticeably different heights. This interest in verticality is contrasted with the horizontal position of the girlfriend Sissy (Karin Baal) who is lounging on a tiled platform. When Freddy approaches Sissy he places a proprietorial foot on her bottom ‘with the pride of the big game hunter’.11 The boys are no physical match for the Olympic athletes, although Tressler – who made erotic films later in his career – might be said to share Riefenstahl’s interest in ‘an idealizing image of youthful masculinity through which controversial ideas could be experienced and simultaneously controlled’.12 Teenage Wolf Pack was on thin ice in a conservative cultural climate, and was packaged as a warning to the young, allowing it to show ‘deviant behaviour’.13 As such, the film has been compared with American predecessors such as Rebel Without a Cause (USA, 1955).14 The scene is busy, loud and fast-paced. As Maya McKechneay describes, ‘a mass of teenage bodies, all uniform in bathing shorts and suits, it’s all racing, jumping, splashing’.15 People are constantly moving across the shot and diving into the water. Lukas Maurer has noted Tressler’s interest in spaces in which the young people’s ‘Lebensgefühl’, their sense of life, can be expressed. The examples he gives are ‘the street, the bar, the swimming pool’.16 The pool scene serves not just as a social space but also as a

11

12

13 14 15 16

Maya McKechneay, ‘Baal oder Das ewige Weibliche zieht uns hinab. Das “Halbstarken”Liebchen Sissy und deren Darstellerin Karin Baal’, in Robert Buchschwenter and Lukas Maurer (eds), Halbstark.Georg Tressler: Zwischen Auftrag und Autor (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2003), 89–99, 90. This and all subsequent translations from German are my own. Ben Morgan, ‘The Masculine Body in the Films of Leni Riefenstahl’ in Katrin Kohl and Ritchie Robertson (eds), Words, Texts, Images. Selected Papers from the Conference of University Teachers of German, University of Oxford, April 2001 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002), 175–97, 196. Frank Arnold ‘Frech – halbstark – kriminell. Georg Tresslers Halbstarkenfilme im Kontext der deutschsprachigen Jugendproblemfilme der fünfziger Jahre’ in Buchschwenter and Maurer, Halbstark, 69–87, 71. Lukas Maurer, ‘Kleine Wirklichkeiten. Über den Filmemacher Georg Tressler’, in Buchschwenter and Maurer, Halbstark, 11–30, 12. McKechneay, ‘Baal’, 90. Maurer, ‘Kleine Wirklichkeiten’, 17.

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place of encounter with authority, here embodied by the pool attendant. The ringleader Freddy is smoking by the side of the pool, perhaps in order to impress Sissy. The incident provokes the fury of the attendant who is shortly after set upon by the youths in revenge. They all scarper via the changing rooms, but not before coming to blows. The younger brother is injured in the fight, which later becomes a source of dispute with the parents, who are estranged from their elder son. The opening pool scene sets up the key tensions and relationships that are to follow. The viewer learns about Freddy and Jan’s family’s problems, about the loyalty and dynamics of the group of teenage boys, their confrontation with figures of authority, and, in the injuring of the younger brother, perhaps the foreshadowing that the brothers will come to a bad end. In the final scene of the film, Sissy shoots Freddy after they attempt to burgle a large house together. Freddy is rescued by his brother Jan before both are arrested. The film as a whole seems to prefigure the inter-generational conflict that would come of age in the 1960s, shortly after the characters themselves, although McKechneay has questioned the coherence of the way the character Sissy, as a contemporary Eve, distracts from this conflict.17 Again, whether there is an inter-generational problem in the film at all has been questioned: Christoph Huber calls Freddy’s rebellion a ‘mere gesture’, as illustrated by the multiple scenes of minor provocation in Teenage Wolf Pack, noting that he has the same ‘bourgeois wishes’ (he might also have added dictatorial tendencies) as his father. The film’s use of jazz, as Huber writes, just repeats this ‘flawed dialectic’.18 Immediate reception of the film was divided, as Uli Jung notes, between those who saw it as endorsing conventional values and those who thought it criticized them. The swimming pool scene in Teenage Wolf Pack, as akin to the street, is emblematic of the ways the film dramatizes a tension, identified by Jung, between

17 18

McKechneay, ‘Baal’, 96. Christoph Huber ‘“Ach! Ich habe so meine kleinen Freuden, manchmal.” Jazz als Lebensgefühl bei Georg Tressler’, in Buchschwenter and Maurer, Halbstark, 111–21, 112.

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public spaces controlled by figures of authority, and teenagers attempting to assert control over these spaces.19 Similarly, the film has been said to portray Berlin’s ‘coldness, hardness and emptiness’ and to illustrate the lack of ‘emotional space’ for young people in the period of German reconstruction.20 The social function of the pool-as-street mimics the relationship between city and country, establishing the swimming pool as an archetypal urban space. In Guntram Vogt’s view, the indoor pool in Teenage Wolf Pack is ‘an imitation of swimming as an outdoors experience’. He believes that ‘the atmosphere of what is apparently natural seems at once wild and clinically clean’.21 Swimming pool scenes in general, and this one in particular, may be useful indices of the conditions of urban life, for they mirror the city’s conversion of wild, empty space into roads, houses and tarmac.

Changed Lives, Changing Lifestyles The pool scene in Teenage Wolf Pack takes place in the Stadtbad Wedding (Wedding Municipal Pool). Wedding is a relatively poor and ethnically diverse district of the former West Berlin, famous as a Communist stronghold in the Weimar era. Built in 1907 and reconstructed after the war, the Stadtbad Wedding has been closed to swimmers since 2002. It is now a mixed-use exhibition, performance and entertainment space frequently used as a trendy nightclub, and also home to a skateboard museum. It has been renamed using the pun ‘Stattbad’ (‘instead of a pool’ or ‘place pool’) – denoting the former baths as a performance space and as a replacement for the pool. It is the kind of Berlin site associated with so-called hipsters and

19 20 21

Uli Jung, ‘Der nachträgliche Vorläufer. Georg Tresslers Filme in der Primär- und Sekundärrezeption’ in Buchschwenter and Maurer, Halbstark, 187–223, 192–4. Vogt, Die Stadt im Film, 470. Vogt, Die Stadt im Film, 476.

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has played host to famous artists such as Moby. The pool, looking much like it does in the film, is used for a range of events, but is predominantly known for its club nights. There is also a bar space in the boiler rooms beneath the pool with a window into the basin. Stattbad has not been fully converted and is characterized by its particular mixture of ‘retro’ 1950s and 1960s design elements, its semi-industrial boiler room bar, and its rough and ready gallery space. It is a commercialized venue for staging alternative lifestyles. It markets itself as an ‘unusual’ space, and previous events there have been billed as ‘secret’ or ‘semi-secret’ gigs.22 The site seems to represent the emergence of the entrepreneurial ‘Generation Berlin’ described by Heinz Bude, but with its young public in search of a rebellion there seems to be an echo of Freddy Borchert and his gang.23 Elsewhere in Berlin, the friends of those partying in Wedding might be relaxing by a pool in Kreuzberg. The ‘Badeschiff ’ (‘bathing ship’) is raised slightly above the River Spree in which it floats and is a luminescent blue in contrast to the murky river water that surrounds it. The ship itself is moored right where the Berlin wall used to run, and the Oberbaum Bridge between Kreuzberg (former West Berlin) and Friedrichshain (former East Berlin) made famous internationally on film by Lola rennt (Run Lola Run, Tom Tykwer, 1998) is visible downstream. Both the bridge and the pool feature in Tykwer’s later film, Three (2010). Shot in winter, the ‘Badeschiff ’ scene in Three also presents an uncommon kind of pool space: in winter a roof is added and changing rooms are built on the decking, while outside space is preserved at one end of the pool. The pool scene is one of the most memorable in the film, partly because it sees a hitherto heterosexual character have his first samesex experience, partly because it sees the film’s love triangle completed, but also because the aesthetics of this unusual pool are exploited for narrative effect. The pool is featured three times in the film.

22 23

‘Info’ and ‘Blog’, Stattbad Website accessed 11 January 2014; ‘Secret Show with Moby’, Last FM accessed 11 January 2014. Heinz Bude, Generation Berlin (Berlin: Merve, 2001).

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The visit to the Badeschiff starts ostensibly as a contemplative or therapeutic one: Simon (Sebastian Schipper) has been diagnosed with testicular cancer, and after his operation is struggling to make sense of his life. A regular swimmer, Simon goes to the Badeschiff one evening – perhaps to clear his head. There is only one other swimmer at the pool, Adam (Devid Striesow). Although he does not know it, Adam is a professional contact of his girlfriend Hanna (Sophie Rois). The swimming pool visit quickly becomes erotic. Before even entering the pool, Simon hears people having sex in a cubicle, establishing the changing room as a sexualized space. In the pool, on his first length, Simon passes Adam who is swimming in the other direction. Adam clearly notices Simon’s presence, apparently turning back to look at him. Soon they are both in the outdoor section of the pool, making small talk. Adam recognizes Simon from the Kreuzberg lido. Later, in the changing room, Adam makes a successful pass at Simon, initiated by a joke about the testicular surgery he has recently undergone. Adam edges closer to Simon, who is standing, along the changing room bench and proceeds to masturbate him. The punch line is ‘Not bad for half a load’, signaling the end to Simon’s ongoing sexual insecurities. The scene is a turning point in the film for multiple reasons – not only is Simon’s perception of his sexuality altered and the love triangle completed, but he starts to assert himself again. The decisions and experiences that structure a life are an important part of the film’s discourse, as articulated in the opening voiceover, set against a tracking shot of two telegraph wires accompanied by music with a rhythm in three. The text describes a sort of generic biography, featuring decisions in a life such as: ‘Cheating. Regretting. Not getting married. Not having children. Not moving in together. Moving in together after all. Arthritis’, which in the opening are symbolically marked by the telegraph poles. Infidelity being central to the plot, the swimming pool provides the space for one of these ‘milepost’ events. Simon’s first homosexual encounter unsettles him, but later we see him in the changing room again, waiting in vain for Adam to turn up, having bought condoms at a pharmacy. Simon’s third visit to the pool sees his patience rewarded and Adam walks in. Their relationship is continued by

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hurried sex in a changing room cubicle. Afterwards they talk properly for the first time, over a beer in the cafe adjoining the Badeschiff. Here Simon is able to work through some more of his insecurities relating to his sexuality. Through these various developments, the Badeschiff functions in Three as a place for finding one’s bearings, for taking a new direction. Its original therapeutic promise is in this sense more than fulfilled. Simon is a figure related to other male characters in recent German cinema who, according to Heidi Schlipphacke, are typically ‘insecure, lost and alienated’.24 As in the films discussed by Schlipphacke, in Three it is masculinity, not femininity, that is questioned. For Schlipphacke, the ‘mode of homoeroticism and homosociality’ can be contrasted with ‘the masculine/national neoclassical ideal’.25 She sees this as indicating the way normalcy of difference remains out of reach in contemporary German cinema. However, this does not seem to be the case in Three where much that would be previously have been considered abnormal is made to seem normal, including broken families, bisexual threesomes and angelic homages to Wim Wenders. It is worth noting that the society in which the characters exist in Three seems to be almost exclusively white and heterosexual. Its scenes of bi-curious changing room seduction also appear to be rewarding for both of its privileged characters. In Three, as evidenced by the swimming pool scenes in particular, people find solutions to their problems, including their sexual ones, even if verisimilitude is inevitably sacrificed along the way. In Three the pool becomes a space of masculine competition inside and male bonding outside (Figure 4.2). The changing room becomes the scene of sexual encounter and the realization of one of the life events promised or predicted in the narrator’s opening voiceover. More generally, though, the Badeschiff site is emblematic of the kind of generation the film portrays. Working in creative industries, media and research, they belong

24 25

Heidi Schlipphacke, ‘Fragmented Bodies: Masculinity and Nation in Contemporary German Cinema’ in Santiago Fouz-Hernández, Mysterious Skin. Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 27–41, 28. Schlipphacke, ‘Fragmented Bodies’, 39.

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Figure 4.2 Adam (Devid Striesow) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper) at the Badeschiff in Tom Tykwer’s Three (2010). Copyright: X Verleih AG. Permission to reproduce obtained.

to an educated, ‘bourgeois-bohème’ community who live in Prenzlauer Berg (illustrated by a football scene set in Mauerpark) and Kreuzberg and attend theatre performances and exhibition openings. The ‘Arena’ complex of which the Badeschiff is part, while larger than some Berlin leisure sites, is nevertheless fairly typical of the way derelict or empty parts of the city have been reappropriated since reunification to reflect the city’s identity as a stage for lifestyle performance. It a place to see and be seen, the kind of Schauplatz (setting or ‘seeing place’) that Andrew Webber describes in his book Berlin in the Twentieth Century (2008): ‘scene, stage, and showplace’.26 It is a very different kind of pool space to the lido ironically dubbed the ‘princesses’ pool’ (real name: Sommerbad Kreuzberg or Prinzenbad) in the docu-fiction Prinzessinnenbad (Bettina Blümner, Germany, 2007). There the Kreuzberg lido is packed with people sunbathing, many of them from ethnic minorities, while the ‘Badeschiff ’ in Three is completely empty. Nevertheless the Sommerbad Kreuzberg is featured during the opening credits of Three: Simon and Adam are able to get into conversation because

26

Andrew Webber, Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 67.

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they recognize each other from the other pool. Their scene of encounter, which depends on the public intimacy of the empty Badeschiff, could not have functioned in the busy municipal lido. Contrasted, the two pools represent two different constituencies within Berlin society: the multicultural working class and the predominantly white, German educated elites. An aspect undoubtedly of relevance is the identification of Adam with the former East. This is an interesting aspect of Tykwer’s work: as Paul Cooke has noted, Tykwer’s Run Lola Run avoids ‘the iconography of division […] thereby knitting the city together’.27 Three does something similar, not avoiding German history, but never making a fuss about it, thus contributing to the thesis of perceived German ‘normalization’. Seen in this light, the Badeschiff is not only emblematic of changing lives, but also of changed lifestyles – the characters in Three were born in different states, with radically different expectations as to what the future might hold: Adam in East Germany, Hanna in Austria and Simon (presumably) in the West. However, Three depicts lives coming together, just as its use of Berlin locations draws the city together, and the pool is a crucial scene in the drawing together of West and East. The film’s story is clearly positioned, like other recent German films, to be about Germany but ‘also function outside of Germany’, a phenomenon motivated in part by perceived financial benefits.28 Just as the formerly divided city is made to function as a coherent unit, the characters’ actions are also normalized in the film. Bisexuality, for example, not a mainstream film motif, is presented overall in an unproblematic way, with the characters’ initial awkwardness laughed off.

27

28

Paul Cooke, ‘Abnormal Consensus? The New Internationalism of German Cinema’, in Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke (eds), German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century. Beyond Normalization (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), 223–36, 228. Cooke, ‘Abnormal Consensus?’, 229.

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Generational Parallels Pools are sites of display and, in the Berlin context, prove to be both adaptable and resistant to historical change. With each generation of users or protagonists, filmic representations see new possibilities in pool spaces. For Riefenstahl and her team, this meant pushing the boundaries of film technology and reaching new levels of aesthetic abstraction in a sports film, whereas for Tressler and Tykwer the pool opens up a whole series of possibilities for the visual narrative. In Three, as with other Tykwer films, the director attempts to ‘marry conventional Hollywood and art cinema into an innovative union’. As its opening voiceover shows, the film also describes how discrete lives connect to each other: ‘Harmony. Friction. Symmetry. Pa-ra-lle-lism’. The characters’ dilemmas are shared and then resolved. Pools are exemplary spaces for visualizing patterns such as these. In all three films the swimming pool functions as a place to stage visions of masculinity and relate them to political currents. Third-generation Simon is typical of his generation in that he is insecure and lost. He finds himself again through a gay affair. Second-generation Freddy is trying to prove his masculinity and question authority, a common post-war stance. Unlike Simon, Freddy comes to a bad end. In Riefenstahl’s Olympia, the ‘first generation’ is signified by clean, joyful and apparently incorruptible bodies: a representative example of Nazi aesthetics.29 The outcome of that story is only too well known. Comparing the films and the spaces in which they are set further enables narratives of German history to be interrogated. We learn which spaces of the German past can be updated and gentrified – pre-war Berlin, the former sites of the Berlin wall – and which, like the 1936 Olympic pool, are reserved for the museum. The sites in the films are not all contemporary to them: the monumental space of the Olympic pool contrasts with the modern lines of the Stadtbad Wedding, but the latter predates the former by almost thirty years. Meanwhile, the present incarnations of the ‘Stattbad’ 29

Sontag, Under the Sign, 88.

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and the ‘Badeschiff ’ represent a very different Berlin to that portrayed in Teenage Wolf Pack or Festival of Beauty. Pools may change less than generations but, despite this, the sense of ‘parallelism’ that Tykwer seeks to bring out in Three works across generations too. All of the swimming pool scenes discussed here involve comparisons, either through sporting competition (Festival of Beauty), the testing of stolen watches (Teenage Wolf Pack) or ‘show me yours’ type encounters (Three). Like scenes set in street spaces or bar spaces, swimming pool scenes provide a location for interaction and social exchange, in which identities can be tested and conflicts staged. In the late 1930s, critical attitudes were disdained. In the 1950s it was authority that had to be questioned, and by the late 2000s, heteronormativity: a similar form of patriarchal critique, but involving different types of people. However, in both Teenage Wolf Pack and Three – works of fiction – the swimming pool provides a space for working through such conflicts and the opportunity to start resolving them. The pool scenes in these three films are thus ‘parallel’ sites that reflect generational trends in society and in the use of urban space, and illustrate changing attitudes to masculinity and to Berlin as a city.

Axel Andersson

5

The Artifice of Modernity: Alienation by the Pool Side in the Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni

A long sequence of billboards and advertisements at the beginning of the film sets the tone for an exploration of alienation and artifice in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 Zabriskie Point. These images, so plentiful as to screen out the real nature of Los Angeles, include garish calls for the spectator to ‘get away from it all’ and to enjoy a thousand products in a dizzying collage of consumer culture. Shortly thereafter the female protagonist Daria (Daria Halprin) introduces us to the Sunny Dunes Corporation. Daria is working as a secretary in the land development company even though it is not ‘really something that she digs to do’, as she explains to the manager Lee Allen (Rod Taylor). Allen’s colleagues are soon to be seen pensively studying a promotional film for a Sunny Dunes complex of homes to be built in the desert. The film features miniatures of the development together with Barbie-like dolls ‘acting’ the part of future residents. Sunny Dunes represents a move from the ‘borderline’ of the city to the old desert frontier, now safely behind the defensive lines of the white middle class. Here people will be able to live in isolation and full modernity. The epitome of this combination is the ‘private pool’, a symbol for the dream of being able to ‘enjoy life’ outside of the meddlesome public sphere. But the pools in the Sunny Dunes complex seem from the beginning to be as false and deceptive as the billboards, luring, through a fantasy, the middle classes out of the public sphere of politics. In the scene just before the promotional film about Sunny Dunes we see the male protagonist Mark (Mark Frechette) and his friend in a gun store. In order to be able to buy the .38 calibre revolver over the counter without the stipulated background checks, the radical youngsters recount

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a rehearsed story. They pretend to be concerned inhabitants of a ‘borderline’ area. It is inferred that Afro-Americans are on the other side of the demarcation in a Los Angeles that is heaving with racial tension, student radicalism and repressive state violence. The two young white men need the guns to ‘protect their women’, to patrol their private sphere. The attendants are obliging. They even volunteer a piece of advice: shooting for selfdefence is legal if the intruder is inside the private realm of the home. If the youths want to use the gun on someone in their backyard, they should be ‘sure to drag him inside’. There is one law for the private and one for the public. Those not already on the way to Sunny Dunes are busy fortifying their homes in the Hobbesian cityscape. Zabriskie Point was Antonioni’s second film in the three-part cycle of ‘foreign’ films made for MGM. The background of social and political unrest in the USA made Antonioni an easy target for those who saw him as taking sides, and also for those who accused him of failing to do so. But Antonioni was never political in the expected fashion. What has been called his ‘interior neo-realism’ aimed at a truthful portrayal of the psychic realm. It was, as Gilles Deleuze quipped, following Antonioni, a neo-realism devoid of bicycles.1 However, the object and artifice would remain important features in Antonioni’s films. Besides, it would be a stretch to claim that the loss of the immediacy of de Sica’s bike entailed any loss of political engagement. It was merely that the psychological lyricism in Antonioni’s films invited a suspicion regarding every literal meaning. Here the swimming pool takes on a symbolic meaning between nature (water) and the artifice of modernity that should be read against the background of a highly political interest in private and public worlds. Antonioni’s interest in water ranges from the river of the poor, already established in the very first documentary Gente del Po [People of the Po Valley, 1947], to the pool of the rich, which also appears in La notte [The Night, 1961]. The particularity of Zabriskie Point is its explicit investigation of water through a notion of the ‘countercultural’. Mark is

1

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 23.

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middle-class, not poor, and he does not merely want to make the private public, he is ‘counter’ everything in the paradoxical sense of turning towards it and turning against it at the same time. The neo-realist interiority of the middle classes turns out to be schizoid. It is in motion and interacts with the world, in comparison with the image of the stagnant pool of social seclusion and the wish to privatize politics among a rich cohort eerily devoid of interiority. This complicated image of ‘counterculture’ was taken more seriously by its enemies than by its supposed real-life adherents when the film was first released.2 And this failure was not the consequence of nihilism having replaced utopianism.3 It seems, rather, that Antonioni was exploring the fraught relationship between the two terms; that is, he was moving in a middle territory in which politics can happen. In order to read the watery map of schizoid modernity in Antonioni one must shed preconceived ideas regarding his work. Although he deals with the theme of a middle class afflicted by modernity in the shadow of what Sandro Bernardi appropriately called ‘fetishes of industrial technology’, he also complicates this image.4 Antonioni makes a distinction between a modern middle class and the bourgeoisie (as well as the aristocracy). The new middle class emerges from a ‘tradition’ marked by poverty rather than old money, and their history and situation single them out as different from the more established classes. Therefore, it is highly problematic to claim that he portrays one monolithic class or to speak sweepingly of an undefined ‘middle-class focus’.5 His middle-class protagonists, in comparison to the bourgeoisie they encounter, are always in motion, they are travelling

2 3

4 5

Murray Pomerance, Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 189. As is sometimes argued, see for example: Benny Halligan, ‘The New Mesamerica’, in Shocking Cinema of the Seventies, ed. Xavier Mendik (Hereford: Noir Publishing, 2002), 19. Mike King, The American Cinema of Excess: Extremes of the National Mind on Film ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 170. Sandro Bernardi, Antonioni. Personnage paysage (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2006), 78. Mark Shiel, Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (London: Wallflower, 2006), 98.

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through social hierarchies and cityscapes, uncertain of where they belong, or at least, well aware, like Vittoria (Monica Vitti) in L’eclisse [The Eclipse, 1962], of the poverty from which they come. They are in between the world of the poor and the world of the rich ‘others’ symbolized by the private pool. Class, in Antonioni, is not merely a socio-economic category but a psychic symptom, and the middle class is a symptom of in-betweenness. Another important consideration is Antonioni’s insistence that modern ‘artifice’ should be understood as artificial in relation to something natural. Artificiality is, in other words, always set against a background of nature, in contrast to, say, the cinema of Federico Fellini. The difference between the two is, appropriately, most evident in the portrayal of water. Fellini’s water, as in Il Casanova di Federico Fellini [Fellini’s Casanova, 1976], makes even Antonioni’s lyrical feature films feel, paradoxically, documentary. It is also in the portrayal of water that Antonioni’s notion of ‘artifice’ existing side by side with ‘the real’ becomes most apparent, opening up to a possibility of positing the swimming pool in a socio-political world of symbols. However, to understand the pool in Antonioni we must first briefly investigate the role of water in his oeuvre. In 1942, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard dedicated one of his books in the series on the psychoanalysis of the elements to water, L’eau et les rêves: essai sur l’imagination de la matière [Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter]. In it, Bachelard famously refers to his native La Vallage in Champagne, as a land of ‘brooks and rivers’.6 Antonioni similarly came from a region traversed by water, namely the Po Valley of northern Italy. The Po plays a significant part in many of his feature films, primarily in Il grido [The Cry, 1957] but also in Le amiche [The Girlfriends, 1955] and Il deserto rosso [Red Desert, 1964]. For Bachelard the river can be seen as a figure of the ‘horizontal force of imagination’, always searching for the new, for change, the unexpected. It is a spring flood, ready to leap at us with felicitous creativity.7 Water with

6 7

Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves: essai sur l’imagination de la matière (Paris: José Corti, 1942), 11. Ibid., 1–2.

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depth, by contrast, belongs to the ‘vertical imagination’ that carries with it, as a seed, all the forms. It is related both to the primitive and eternal.8 It gives rise to a material imagination rather than the imagination of forms, forever renewing what rivers’ horizontal currents bring.9 For Antonioni the scheme was altogether bleaker. If Bachelard represents a pre-eminently Romantic conceptualization of nature, Antonioni’s water never seems to stop reminding humanity not merely, as in Romanticism, of our mortality, but also of our meaninglessness. The horizontal and vertical bodies of water in Antonioni are presented as two forces of negation: the first one belonging to a vision of stagnant culture, namely tradition, and the second one to nature. In his first documentary short, Gente del Po, the river is a continuous force shaping culture but paying no attention to the singularity of the subject. The Po is not a happy brook in Champagne; it is a dour and slow master. The poor people along its banks have their grim monotonous lives shaped by its turgid waters; their lives go on and on remorselessly without hope of change. This image is reinforced in Il grido in which the vagabond Aldo (Steve Cochran) hopelessly drifts along the Po. There is a hint that other people, uprooted from tradition, use the river in other ways. Aldo witnesses a speed boat race on the river in which the subjects have de-coupled themselves from its grip, but this step is beyond him. In Il deserto rosso we get closer to those who apparently have freed themselves from tradition, but the result is the creation of a vacuous subject. But Antonioni’s focus is here on the character in between the world of the old and the new. We follow Giuliana (Monica Vitti), the wife of the manager of a petrochemical plant on the Po, a grown-up version of the daughter of Aldo from Il grido, Rosina (Mirna Girardi). Her husband and lover are unable to completely understand her pains as she sees the meaninglessness of both tradition and modernity. For Giuliana the Po valley has turned into an industrial nightmare bereft of organic nature. These are the dark consequences of a world with speedboats, helicopters and industries. Her

8 9

Ibid. Ibid.

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dream of opening a small store in Antonioni’s home town Ferrara, echoing the director’s long-standing fascination with shop girls, is a feeble attempt to construct a fantasy of a simpler world. The imagination of the suicidal Giuliana is tortured, but her horror at her own condition, however, renders her more alive by comparison with her wax-like husband (Carlo Chionetti) and her lover (Richard Harris), who seem to have avoided psychosis only by becoming strangely inhuman. The price of both the past and the future seems impossibly high. If the river in Antonioni’s films is a place of slow erasure, the sea is an agent of instant cancellation. Rather than being a force of culture, in L’avventura [The Adventure, 1960] the sea represents nature brought to its extreme. Anna (Lea Massari) is, like Giuliana, a typical female Antonioni protagonist, a walking symptom of the in-betweeness of the modernity that she is unable to live with, or without. She goes missing on a boating trip to the Aeolian Islands. The rest of the party suspects that she has plunged into the Tyrrhenian Sea. They have also heard a mysterious sound, maybe from a boat engine, suggesting that Anna might have left the small rocky islands. It is as though Anna has inexplicably vanished, been swallowed or abducted. The intimidating sea is something capable of comprehensively negating existence. If the depth is related to matter in a Bachelardian sense, then it is as anti-matter. There is no seed, no eternal quality or hint of a primordial and primitive kernel. Death in the depths, contrary to Bachelard’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe, lacks all trace of beauty or of symbolic meaning. Bachelard introduced the notion of a profound dream that could only happen when the dream ‘inscribed itself ’ in nature, as opposed to a shallower dream based on objects.10 What Antonioni does, in painting a picture of horizontal water signifying a traditional life that quickly cancels individuality and a vertical one slowly making an individual dissolve, is to give a version where dream-inscribed nature turns into a nightmare. But considering his interest in modernity it is tempting to ask what the

10

To illustrate the difference between object and element Bachelard claims that every poet who begins with the image of the mirror must necessarily arrive at the water of the fountain in order to give completeness to his poetic experience. Ibid, 33.

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‘dream of artifice’ is in Antonioni, which leads back to the symbol of the swimming pool. Antonioni is interested in the alienated subject as one who tries, but fails, to relate to dreaming. The failure is not simply a nihilistic curse. We must, as Peter Brunette urged, not get stuck in that pessimistic interpretative model.11 The artificial in the shape of the car, the speedboat, and, most importantly the swimming pool, leads to secluded worlds with their backs turned to society. This is the fantasy of the Sunny Dunes complex in Zabriskie Point. The profound in the images of either nature or tradition is a cancellation. Both images would be equally depressing options if there were ways back. The alienated middle-classes of Antonioni are capable of producing a surplus and yet another dream of a public space of freedom, in other words a dream of politics centred on the individual’s free relationship to the public. The dreams of artifice are important for Antonioni as they show how the elements are replaced by an object that directs our attention to the human interventions in nature, as in the man-made body of water, which is what constitutes the making of culture, and in extension politics, from nature. The bourgeoisie and the aristocracy treat artifice and politics as ‘natural’ and private in Antonioni’s films. The Sunny Dunes complex is an attempt to tempt the middle-classes with such a vision. It explicitly tells them that there is a way out of the public sphere. The figures of Mark and Daria go counter to the message, a movement that reaffirms a collective notion of politics. They are two in a long line of Antonioni characters who ‘perform’ alienation as a redemptive act. The symbol of the pool in Zabriskie Point can be more thoroughly grasped by first returning to the earlier film La notte where a large part of the actions take place by the poolside. Its protagonists, the author Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife Lidia ( Jeanne Moreau) are familiar Antonioni characters: there is a hint that they have come from a humbler background, or at least have known life in a poorer area of Milan, but now are comfortably well off. The pool belongs to the rich industrialist

11

Peter Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2 and 6–7.

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Gherardini who wants Giovanni to leave his life as a public intellectual to work for his private enterprise. But the world of Giovanni and Lidia is starkly different from Gherardini’s. We see them constantly traverse public spaces and search for life in the heaving modern and changing urban landscape. The alienated, and pool-less, middle classes are frantically trying to overcome their alienation by subjecting themselves both to nature and culture, as well as to people both poorer and richer than them. But the search is complicated by the ambiguity of the goal. The subjects are fraught with indecisions and a well-founded suspicion that action and inaction both produce results. Most often it is the female protagonist who represents the most extreme extent of this paradox, forever oscillating between wanting and not wanting, between being assured and being in a state of panic. The public, in other words, is a world of questions rather than one of answers that please the individual. Lidia does not know if she wants to go to the party of the rich industrialist or not. It is a classic case of the indecisive moment that perpetually risks becoming a cause of something worse, as well as being a symptom. The only thing she is sure of is that she wants to leave the home that she shares with Giovanni. She does not doubt this, any more than Vittoria (Monica Vitti) in L’eclisse doubts that she needs to leave the house of her fiancé. The private family shelter of the middle class is the site of some primordial alienation, or maybe even another black swallowing hole, like the sea, that threatens to devour Antonioni’s women. They eventually end up in the party, and in the grounds of the industrialist’s villa. There they are thrown in the path of individuals who chimerically promise to cure their impasses. However, it will be made patently clear that Lidia and Giovanni are out of their depths. The garden party is interrupted by a torrential rainfall that causes the rich and the beautiful, in sudden synchronization, to plunge themselves into the swimming pool. The pool is not the deadening stream of tradition, as the Po, nor is it the sea that cancels the individual. Into this artificiality the rich and mindless can throw themselves in abandon without suffering any consequences. They are unthreatened by alienation in the face of private artifice. This option, however, is not open to Giovanni and Lidia. Lidia is for a moment dragged along in the movement towards the pool. She takes a step out on the trampoline ready to take the plunge, but

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is stopped when a man from the party, Roberto (Giorgio Negro), comes up from the side (see Figure 5.1). He tells her not to do sciocchezze, not to do anything foolish. He then takes her for a ride in his car and tries to seduce her. Lidia refuses his advances, but is momentarily tricked by the man who intended to do exactly what he warned her not to do, namely fooling around. He just wanted to do it in a way that suited his own aims, in his own car. Lidia’s walk towards the very limit of joining another world represented by the pool is interrupted by someone who shows that he is better at the game of using something for private ends. This situation is typical of Antonioni’s films. The middle-class subjects are tempted by tradition, by modernity, by riches, but are ultimately always brought back into the ambiguity of their alienated and painful public existence. The middle classes will never be able to truly join the rich and non-alienated by the pool. The prerogative of the rich to be carefree and to lose decorum in their own private worlds will not be extended to the middle classes. The rich merely need to keep up the fantasy that their world is accessible to

Figure 5.1 Roberto (Giorgio Negro) tells Lidia ( Jeanne Moreau) not to follow the rich socialites at the Gherardinis’ party in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (1961 – Nepi Film/Silver Films/Sofitedip).

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the middle-class in order to avoid, for the rich, a too dangerous forging of links between the middle and the lower classes. The dream of artifice among the rich, which they also try to market as in the case of the pools in Sunny Dunes, is ultimately vacuous. The middle classes experience a deep loss of meaning, but the rich are beyond that point. Their swimming pools fold, as symbols, in on themselves. The swimming pool is an object that no longer means anything. It is neither a romantic link to nature nor an aspirational object; it is merely a reproduction of a self-satisfied interiority, a private mind. The alienated characters that Antonioni draws attention to are all marked by the profoundly public orientation of their minds that are in constant search for some place, for some thing or someone, that can ground them to a larger collective where meaning can be reconstituted. It is seemingly with deep empathy that Antonioni admits that their search is, for the moment, failing. And their desperate loneliness is only the result of craving to be united with the world in some way that can also be different from the traditional poverty they spring from and make space for a sense of individuality that should not be confused with individualism. The aim of the rich, on the other hand, is to limit the extent to which the outside interferes with them so that they can retreat into some splendid poolside isolation.12 Here we see the problem with a notion which implies that ‘politics’ and ‘detachment’ are antithetical in Antonioni’s films.13 On the contrary, the alienated and detached subject is the only one able to suggest a radically different society; the ones ‘attached’ to their objects merely reproduce the current order. The Sunny Dunes project is an invitation to move straight into a hyper-real fantasy of a home, and through this to a world supposedly free from the impositions of the city. But the really rich, like the manager of the company and Daria’s boss, Lee Allen, live in the real version of what they are trying to tempt the upwardly mobile white middle class with.

12 13

With the exception of La signora senza camelie [The Lady Without Camelias, 1953] where Gianni (Andrea Checchi) is driven by a passion to make ‘serious’ films. Seymour Chatman, Antonioni, or the Surface of the World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 167.

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In his North by Northwest-inspired desert hideaway the swimming pool is not a symbol of aspiration, class or a ‘successful’ escape from the fraught borderlines of the city. Just as in La notte it is merely a material statement testifying to the private realm. Lee Allen and his kind cynically seem to manage both ‘counter’ and ‘culture’ without wanting to play a part in either. Daria pulls up to the house after having heard of Mark’s death at the hands of a policeman. As she walks along a path she stops suddenly when she hears the noise of water splashing. At Zabriskie Point, Daria and Mark talked about how the desert once used to be covered with water. But what she hears is not nature. Daria enters the swimming pool area where some women lounge. This time, as opposed to in the Sunny Dunes advertisement, it is all real. We are in the enclosed private world of the rich. Daria walks past the pool area and enters a tunnel that seems to be constituted by a mix of arranged and natural rock formations just outside the house that hugs the mountainside. This appears to be the place that Daria was looking for, the place she wanted to walk through, even though it was the noise of the swimming pool that attracted her in the first place. The tunnel scene in the end of Zabriskie Point contains a curious image of cathartic short-circuiting. The tunnel has a small creek and a spring cascading down a granite rock. Here the horizontal and the vertical water meet in another symbolic conjunction, the deadening water of destiny crosses the water of oblivion. She steps into the water, starts crying, and leans against the water dropping down. There is no reason to suspect that this tunnel and its water are any less artificial than the swimming pool, but it is here that Daria can begin to mourn Mark. It is an ‘accidental’ man-made space that looks as though it could be found in a public park or botanical garden, as opposed to the swimming pool that Daria passes by. In the super slow-motion explosion scene after Daria has driven away, the poolside area is the first shown to be destroyed after the house. Parasols and deckchairs fly into the air. The swimming pool thus initiates this sequence marked by a change of camera angle and music. It becomes the opening ceremony in a visual fantasy of exploding the world of private artifice. The symbolic destruction of the ‘things’, like the swimming pools of Sunny Dunes, of the hierarchical consumer society is also an attack on them as aspirational objects, cynically used to lure the middle classes.

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The fact is that all objects are already dead for those who can possess them without feeling alienated. For the rich the borderline is a wall and not a zone of antagonism: their eyes are directed inwards towards the house, the private pool. The young countercultural pair of Mark and Daria, the Adam and Eve of a revolutionary fantasy, are always subjecting themselves to the world and they attempt to remain in this space of openness in which the conflict can be transformed into love. And maybe because their meeting is a symbolic fantasy and because Mark is a young rebel marked by death from the beginning, Daria and Mark manage to have the least emotionally fraught coming together of a man and a woman in any of Antonioni’s films. Antonioni is, as argued above, playing on the concept ‘counter’ as meaning both ‘against’ and facing something. What they remain irreparably alienated from is the world of the private pool, and this not because of its artifice as such but for the implications of closing off the outside world. The filmmaker most intensely interested by interiority found an image in the swimming pool of what was neither ‘counter’ nor ‘cultural’. A subject outside of these open categories might be free from alienation, but Antonioni shows that to be divested of interiority and political participation is a more worrying condition.

Christopher Brown

6

The Pools of The Swimmer (1968): Exurbia, Topography, Decay

The Swimmer ‘might well be called The Alumnus,’ one reviewer joked upon the film’s release in May 1968. ‘It says to an older group what The Graduate is saying to a younger.’1 As Burt Lancaster’s character dives into one luxurious swimming pool after another, he is implicated as something of a ‘Mr Robinson’ – a spokesperson for, and a casualty of, a compromised older generation. The Swimmer was directed by Frank Perry and was based on a short story by John Cheever, published in 1964. Its protagonist is the middle-aged Ned Merrill, who resides in wooded, suburban Connecticut.2 One day he decides to ‘swim the county’ on his way home, running crosscountry, stopping to swim a length in each of his friends’ pools. As he heads back towards his wife and daughters, Ned is increasingly niggled by feelings of unease: his sense of time and place is disrupted, and friends behave strangely towards him, making allusions to a less-than-perfect family life. Disturbed and physically exhausted, Ned finally returns to discover his house empty and dilapidated, with his family evidently long since departed. * The film’s emphasis on Ned’s insane performance of a role he has in reality failed to play reflects Cheever’s preoccupation with status anxiety, the paranoid fear of losing one’s place in society, which as Robert Beuka has noted, conflicted with the myth of ‘classlessness’ promulgated by the American

1 2

Richard L. Coe, ‘Velvet Rut of Exurbia’, The Washington Post (21 June 1968), B12. John Cheever, ‘The Swimmer’, in The Stories of John Cheever (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), 713–25.

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media in the postwar years.3 The film features ten different swimming pools. Each is a space in which Ned’s confidence and health progressively dissipate, prompting his gradual awakening to the truth. The earlier waters are pristine; the owner of the second pool boastfully remarks that it benefits from filters capable of eliminating 99.9% of dirt. But the later pools are less satisfactory: the seventh is empty, the eighth too crowded, the ninth too cold, the tenth – much to Ned’s dismay – too public. The film’s setting, one reviewer explained, is a series of ‘infinitely wooded estates,’ suggesting that this was not ‘your Elk Grove Village – Morton Grove suburbia.’4 Another reviewer preferred the term ‘exurbia,’ the wealthy commuter belt beyond the suburbs.5 In The Swimmer this is depicted as an immense, off-road sweep of mansions, pool complexes, patios and gardens. Each backs onto the other; Ned does not encounter a road until the end of the film. The idle, bored inhabitants drink heavily, host parties replete with trays of caviar and inflatable toys, and ostentatiously flaunt their wealth. As such, the screenplay (written by the director’s wife, Eleanor Perry) tends to align itself with Marxist readings of Cheever’s work, somewhat diverging from the preoccupations of the writer himself, who always resisted the imposition of a single interpretation upon his story.6 Cheever, whose short stories had first been published in the New Yorker and were set on the Upper East Side, in the Westchester suburbs, or Massachusetts villages, told one magazine feature: ‘My sense of the pool – and I know the Perrys are in agreement – is that it is a kind of civilization.

3 4 5 6

Robert Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 106. Clifford Terry, ‘“Swimmer”: Dunked but Not Dampened’, Chicago Tribune (30 June 1968), N11. Coe, Velvet Rut, B12. See Dana Gioia, Millicent Dillon, and Michael Stillman, ‘An Interview with John Cheever’, in Scott Donaldson, ed., Conversations with John Cheever ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 61–84, 63, and Tatyana Litvinova, ‘John Cheever’s The Brigadier and the Golf Widow’, in Soviet Criticism of American Literature of the Sixties: an anthology, in Carl R. Proffer, ed. (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1972), 24–6.

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Pool manners can be very involved.’7 But if he and the Perrys had been more engrossed in pool culture, then Lancaster conceived The Swimmer as ‘Death of a Salesman in swimming trunks,’ remarking, Cheever may not agree with my interpretation, but I see it as a mirror of a decadent society. I see it as a tragedy based on the American way of life, with its emphasis on success and a misguided notion that a man can get by on charm alone.8

Instead of playing water polo to maintain his impressive physique, Perry felt Lancaster would have been better advised to ‘immerse himself in Cheever’s world’ by visiting the ‘enclaves of high WASP-dom’ in New York and Connecticut, but ruefully remarked that this ‘was not of interest to him.’9 Watching the resulting performance, a good many critics concluded that the star had simply been miscast. Lancaster was ‘supposed to be a Madison Avenue smoothie,’ one critic wrote, but he ‘looks and sounds like a longshoreman at a union picnic’ whilst another proposed that he had ‘the dignity of a peasant.’10 There is an unmistakable whiff of snobbery amongst the East Coast reviewers, who seem to have resented a nouveau-riche Hollywood star (one who had always affirmed his Lower East Side, working-class origins) trespassing on their territory. Pools had decidedly different connotations on the East Coast than in Hollywood: Burt Lancaster … has a little $30,000 layout in Bel-Air, with a heating system, a waterfall and a tributary running into the living room. It was too splashy for Cheever country, so Lancaster & Co. had to go East. To add insult to imposition, Hollywood

7 8 9 10

Joanne Stang, ‘Lancaster Swims In Deeper Waters’, The New York Times (14 August 1966), Section 2, D9. Joseph Gelmis, ‘“The Swimmer” Making New Splash’, Newsday (18 July 1966), 3A. Cit. Gary Fishgall, Against Type: the biography of Burt Lancaster (London: Scribner, 1995), 247. Stanley Kauffmann, ‘Review of The Swimmer’, The New Republic (18 June 1968), 43, and Vincent Canby, ‘The Screen: Cross-County “Swimmer”: Burt Lancaster Stars in Cheever Story’, The New York Times (16 May 1968), 53.

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Pool complexes were symbols of Hollywood’s extravagant displays of wealth, what Richard Dyer refers to as stardom’s ‘conspicuous consumption’, and the pool was a typical domain for the exhibition of the star body.12 In this regard, The Swimmer risked accusations of hypocrisy as it deployed ten pools and a speedo-clad star in a critique of the idle rich. At times, indeed, the film ties its own thesis into knots by fetishizing Lancaster’s bronzed muscles, a theme I have examined elsewhere.13 And the pool owners are, similarly, fetishists of the immaculate. Proudly cultivating their private spaces with filters, nets and chlorine, they seek to ward off nature. * A central motif of the film is the exurban attempts at ascendancy over a predominantly natural environment. With the exception of one climactic scene, The Swimmer was filmed on location, without studio sets, and consists entirely of exterior footage. Ned never sets foot inside any of the houses he passes. The swimming pools, neither properly integrated into the domestic sphere, nor entirely subject to nature, are ambiguous spaces whose meaning in the narrative is perpetually subject to change. The film opens with a series of handheld shots of the woodland, with the crunch of footsteps on the soundtrack suggesting the progress of an unseen person. The accompanying score is a haunting melody in the lush mould of classic Hollywood. A crane moves the camera through the trees, and Ned, in his swimming trunks, walks into the frame from the bottom right. As he moves uphill, a terrace with a pool comes into view. In an impressively mounted shot, the camera speeds through the treetops, as Ned runs towards the first pool and dives.

11 12 13

Anon, ‘OK Everybody Out of the Pool’, Time (19 August 1966), 51. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 38–9. Christopher R. Brown, ‘Mad About the Boy? Hollywood Stardom and Masculinity Subverted in The Swimmer’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 29/4 (2012), 356–64.

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Hitherto in a crescendo, the music now swells in climax, announcing the swimmer’s arrival. Reaching the edge of the pool, Lancaster’s face suddenly looms in a close-up, revealing the star to the audience. Yet this overwrought introduction abruptly expires when Lancaster is unceremoniously eclipsed by a glass of gin and tonic, out-of-focus, held by a hand in the foreground. The heady Romanticism of the soundtrack is suddenly replaced by a contemporary, easy-listening piece. Ned pulls himself out of the pool and begins a conversation with the man who gave him the drink, who appears in shot for the first time; a house can now be seen in the background. From materializing out of nowhere in the woods, Ned is now fully integrated into the social sphere, having drinks on the patio. The pool is the space in which he makes the transition from the natural to the civilized. In contrast to Cheever’s original text, scenes such as this literalize the character’s journey through space, a decision consistent with Perry’s desire to accentuate socio-cultural factors. In the short story, none of the events occur on the same day, but are sequentially linked by the illogical contrivances of a faltering memory, a dream, or madness: ‘Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?’14 At the beginning of the story, Ned’s wife Lucinda is present, for instance; yet at the end, it is revealed that she left him years ago. The events of the film, in contrast, take place over the course of a single day, and Ned’s delusions are concretely contextualized (we never see his wife, for instance). Eleanor Perry believed that a film should be viewed on its own terms, ‘not as a piece of fiction transposed to another medium.’15 She observed, it has been pointed out that the more ‘literary’ the primary story, the more difficult it is to adapt. A piece which depends for its effect on brilliant style, on ideas, on interior monologues, on metaphor is often a disappointment on the screen.16

14 15 16

Cheever, The Swimmer, 718. Truman Capote, Eleanor Perry, and Frank Perry, Trilogy: An Experiment in Multimedia (New York: Collier Books, 1969), 40. Capote, Perry, and Perry, Trilogy, 39.

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In adapting The Swimmer, by most accounts a ‘literary’ piece, Perry was eager to avoid devices such as flashback and voiceover, noting elsewhere that she generally considered these to be an admission of failure on the part of the screenwriter, ‘a crutch – an easy way out of having to dramatize or “show” the content involved.’17 Working in close collaboration, Frank and Eleanor Perry, both of whom were versed in film theory, made the act of ‘showing’ central to The Swimmer. The film takes its cue from a passage in Cheever’s text: He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the country. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife.18

The equivalent scene in the film occurs when Ned stands on a hilltop terrace in the foreground, using his finger to connect an imaginary chain of pools. He touches the flattened background landscape like an explorer tracing a route on a map. Yet the friends surrounding him respond with bewildered glances. The subterranean stream acts a conceit for Ned’s deluded psychological state; an outlandish fiction defined in terms of topography. This theme is particularly appreciable in the scene featuring the seventh pool, which is drained and empty. Ned meets a young boy there, who complains that he is unpopular at school. Ned wistfully replies that it is preferable to be the ‘captain of your soul,’ not an especially practical piece of advice. Seeking to distract the boy from his troubles, Ned proceeds to make-believe that the pool is filled with water. He encourages the boy to join him in making the motions of swimming strokes as they walk the length of the pool. The absence of water lends the sequence a surreal, comedic quality. Afterwards, as he walks away, Ned hears the sound of bouncing on the diving board, and becomes terrified that the boy might follow his advice and jump into the nonexistent water, injuring or killing himself. Ned rushes back and grabs him; a long shot underscores the height of the drop, 17 18

Capote, Perry, and Perry, Trilogy, 261. Cheever, The Swimmer, 714.

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the danger such geography represents to a child (Figure 6.1). The swimming pool is just a hole in the ground. Scenes such as this dramatize what Siegfried Kracauer referred to as the capacity of the cinematic medium to ‘redeem’ the physical.19 In contrast to the topographical make-believe of a ‘quasi-subterranean stream,’ the camera contradicts Ned, providing evidence of a reality that is material, tangible and hazardous. * Initially Lancaster, appearing from the pool covered in bronzing cream, with chest hair trimmed, epitomizes a 1950s model of musclebound masculinity. Steven Cohan argues that Picnic ( Joshua Logan, 1955), starring William Holden, aimed to associate ‘an ideal, physical masculinity with culture, not nature, as a means of establishing its claim to dominance.’20 But in The Swimmer, nature rather than culture has the last word, as Ned’s body is subjected to ageing, deterioration and damage. The casting of Lancaster was important in cultivating this impression. As Cheever observed at the time, the star was ‘fifty-two, lithe, comely and somewhat disfigured by surgical incisions and he looks both young and old, masterful and tearful.’21 He looked youthful and fit enough for the film’s earlier scenes, but old enough to make his character’s later disintegration believable. There was the further sense that the star formerly dismissed as ‘Mr Muscles and Teeth’, associated with 1950s roles emphasizing his sportiness, was subverting his earlier persona.22

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Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 199. John Cheever, The letters of John Cheever (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989), 253. Letter from 13 July 1966. In films such as: Jim Thorpe: All American (Michael Curtiz, 1951), The Crimson Pirate (Robert Siodmak, 1952), From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953) and Trapeze (Carol Reed, 1956). Lancaster had worked as a circus acrobat prior to becoming an actor.

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Figure 6.1 The empty pool in The Swimmer (Columbia Pictures/Horizon Pictures/ Dover Productions, dir. Frank Perry, 1968).

Figure 6.2 Ned (Burt Lancaster) struggles to paddle in a cold pool in The Swimmer (Columbia Pictures/Horizon Pictures/Dover Productions, dir. Frank Perry, 1968).

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By the time that Ned reaches the ninth pool, he is already becoming desperate, suffering from fatigue and limping from an injury. The pool belongs to his former mistress Shirley ( Janice Rule) who, during an antagonistic rendezvous, viciously chips away at Ned’s façade, conjuring up a past defined by profound personal failings: financial, domestic, sexual, political. She soon storms off, but her words take hold in the ensuing section, when Ned is left alone in the freezing cold pool. He stands in the water, shivering and isolated. He raises his fists at the sky in anger, tensing his body, then collapses under the strain of the effort. A close-up, long in duration, tracks Lancaster holding his aching waist with one hand, pitifully paddling with the other (Figure 6.2). The scene follows Cheever’s text closely: He did not dive but went down the steps into the icy water and swam a hobbled sidestroke that he might have learned as a youth. He staggered with fatigue … paddled a length of their pool, stopping again and again on the curb to rest. He climbed up the ladder and wondered if he had the strength to get home.23

Ned’s idealized notion of himself as a dominant, athletic patriarch is rooted in a cultural understanding of physical matter, whereas his experience in this pool dramatizes his assimilation into the natural order of things. In moments such as these, the film goes further than to ‘redeem’ the physical in the Kracauerian sense. Less neutrally, The Swimmer’s cold and empty pools actively accelerate a drama of disintegration, a character arc of irrevocable physical and moral decay. The approach here has something in common with that of literary Naturalism, a structuring feature of which was the thermodynamic concept of entropy, the rate at which the energy of a given system is converted into non-useable forms.24 This process is played out quite literally in The Swimmer’s cold pool. We see Ned shivering as he loses heat, precisely at a moment when he has been morally called 23 24

Cheever, The Swimmer, 724. Literary Naturalism was perhaps epitomized by the work of Émile Zola. I follow Dudley Andrew’s designation of Naturalism as being fundamentally an impulse, however, one which was important to cinema from its earliest years, and outlasted the literary movement. Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 302.

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to account by his mistress. But more broadly, Ned’s ‘quasi-subterranean stream’ of pools represents a closed system, in psychological terms; he is neither willing nor able to step outside of his topographical fantasy. The earlier scenes indulge him, to some degree. Notably, a shot of Ned diving into the second pool is linked by a match cut to a shot of him rising from the water in the third. The distance he has travelled from one pool to the other is unknown, the ground he has covered unseen. His subterranean stream is, briefly, made cinematically real. But Ned’s system cannot sustain itself, and as the film progresses, the pools become spaces in which his energy gradually dissipates. Significantly, the tenth and last pool that Ned visits is a public one, in which he is surrounded by other people in very close proximity, few of whom appear to be swimming. This pool functions as a space for the predominantly working-class clientele to socialize. As he negotiates a length of the pool, Ned weaves his way through a writhing mass of bodies, the clamour of kids playing heightened on the soundtrack. For the first time in the film we are shown point-of-view shots at water level, bobbing above and below the waterline in a disorienting manner, splashes of water lingering on the lens. Already suffering from a damaged ankle and bruising, Ned struggles to complete the length, his trial made worse by the stinging in his eyes. At the poolside he is recognized by a man who wryly remarks that Ned, hitherto a swimmer of private pools, must be accustomed to lower levels of chlorine. The public pool becomes a domain of humiliation. Ned has so little wealth by this stage that a charitable visitor has to pay his fifty cent entrance fee, and it emerges that he owes money to the man by the poolside (the owner of a bar, which signals a further vice of alcohol abuse). Ned can no longer afford to pay his bar tab, and by this point in the narrative, he is identified as a threat to the established social hierarchy, a source of contamination. He is refused entry by the pool attendant and twice asked to shower because his feet are too dirty. Crammed in amongst other men in the shower room – his first foray indoors – Ned sits on a stool, scrubbing at his muddy, bloodied feet. He is asked to step through disinfectant to complete the process. If Naturalism tended to concern itself with workingclass subjects, fixating upon ‘what is low, what is repugnant, what stinks,’

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to cite Edmond de Goncourt, then filmic renditions shifted this focus somewhat.25 In The Swimmer, it is Ned, from the wealthy exurban elite, who is shown to be physically dirty and morally corrupt. It is his environment that is shown to be responsible for his downward character arc, he whom the working-class must disinfect for their own protection. As the film draws to a close, the audience is shown the grubbiest environment of all, Ned’s house. As he pushes open the gate, rust comes off, staining his hands. The garden is overgrown with vegetation, dead leaves and soil build-up. It is a dilapidated piece of land that seems to be returning to nature. As Ned wrestles with the handle to the front door of his house, the camera abandons him and tracks towards a broken window. There is a cut, then a pan across the building’s gloomy, dusty, empty interior. Ned can be heard outside, sobbing hysterically. His journey is over and he is left with nothing. Not even a swimming pool.

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Cit. David Trotter, ‘Rust-belt gothic: the new technology narrative’, The Literary Platform (24 December 2012) accessed 27 November 2013.

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7

Atmosphère d’Eau Sauvage: Reflections on  La Piscine (1969)

‘Atmosphère? Atmosphère? Est-ce que j’ai une gueule d’atmosphère?’ —Arletty in Hôtel du Nord (Marcel Carné, 1938)

La Piscine ( Jacques Deray, 1969) opens with the image of the credits gently rolling over the shimmering swimming pool water to reveal an idle Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) lying by the side of the pool with a full view of the landscape. The camera glides over the pool, gradually framing JeanPaul finishing his drink while a distant voice calls him, though he does not answer. This initial shot lasts just under a minute. After that, JeanPaul’s summer reverie is disrupted by Marianne (Romy Schneider) diving into the pool and splashing him, a scene reminiscent of L’arroseur arrosé (Lumière, 1895). It could be argued that this short sequence by the pool is the perfect cinematic illustration of Olgyay’s classic diagram (Figure 7.1) as commented on by Dean Hawkes: In Victor Olgyay’s ‘Design with Climate’ there is one of the most wonderful images of modern architectural science (0.1). A man (looking, from the rear, uncannily like Ronald Reagan) stands exposed to all the conceivable means by which he might exchange heat with his surroundings. His body produces heat by the metabolic processes of human physiology (1 a-d). He absorbs radiation from the sun, from glowing radiators and from non-glowing objects and surfaces (2 a-c). Heat is conducted to his body from the surrounding air, if warm, and by contact with surfaces (3 a, b). He is affected by the condensation of atmospheric moisture (4). The man then may lose heat by radiation to the sky – if it is cool – and to cold surfaces in his surroundings (5 a, b). Heat may be conducted away to surrounding cool air and to any cool surfaces

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Figure 7.1 Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) lying by the pool in La Piscine (Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)/Tritone Cinematografica, dir. Jacques Deray, 1969) and Victor Olgyay diagram. Olgyay, Design With Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 16.

with which he is in contact (6 a, b). Finally, heat may be lost by evaporation through the respiratory tract or from the skin (7 a, b).1

All the elements described by Hawkes are present in this sequence, barring the Ronald Reagan look-alike! Without a suit, Jean-Paul’s body is able more readily to exchange and absorb heat from its surroundings, interacting both with the air, the sun and the stone surface on which he is lying. We can also discern by observing the vegetation that there is a gentle breeze, providing a welcome evaporative cooling effect to balance out the summer sun on Jean-Paul’s exposed body. We also have additional information about the surrounding soundscape; an unseen bird flying off the tree above, the songs of distant cicadas, water lapping by the side of the pool. It is a perfect characterization of hot summer hours. In other words, this scene holistically conveys to us key elements of a particular environment and establishes a distinct Mediterranean atmosphere both through visual and sound cues. I would suggest that this broad 1

Dean Hawkes, The Environmental Imagination: Technics and Poetics of the Architectural Environment (London: Routledge, 2007), 203.

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notion of ‘atmosphere’ might provide a useful link between the disciplines of Architecture and Cinema. The hope is that this exploration will open a new field of enquiry that will be of use to both architects and filmmakers interested in the creation of atmospheres. I recognize the difficulty of the task, as ‘atmosphere’ is a rather elusive and ‘unmeasurable’ notion, but one that has certainly gathered momentum in architectural and urban research in the last few years, particularly in the work of Jean-Francois Augoyard and others. Augoyard readily acknowledges that ‘the notion of atmosphere is at the crossroad between measurable physical data, perception, emotion and culture’ and that the least researched area in this field is what makes an atmosphere, how to define it and how to fabricate it successfully.2 Film scholars also frequently refer to atmosphere. In reference, for example, to early European comedies, it is stressed that they were ‘shot in the street catching the atmosphere of everyday life’3 or that ‘Mae Marsh’s 1920 Screen Acting guide defines the long view’s function: the long shot is usually taken to establish the atmosphere and setting of a scene’.4 And it is impossible in this context not to mention the most famous line in French cinema, ‘Atmosphère? Atmosphère? Est-ce que j’ai une gueule d’atmosphère?’ [Atmosphere? Atmosphere? Do I look like an atmosphere?]. Arletty’s reply to Jouvet in Hôtel du Nord (Marcel Carné, 1938) indelibly associates the term atmosphere with cinema. However, one of the great masters of the creation of atmosphere is the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Internationally acclaimed for his buildings, Zumthor has published a key book on the subject, entitled Atmospheres.5 He defines this notion as follows: ‘How do people design things with such

2 3 4 5

Jean-Francois Augoyard, ed., Ambiances architecturales et urbaines (Grenoble). Faire une ambiance Creating an atmosphere: actes du colloque international, Grenoble, 10–12 septembre 2008 (Bernin: À la croisée, 2011), 12. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 848. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1988), 658. Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural Environments – Surrounding Objects (Basel: Birkhäuser GmbH, 2006).

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a beautiful natural presence, things that move me every single time. One word for it is atmosphere. […] the task of creating architectural atmosphere also comes down to craft and graft’.6 Moreover, Zumthor recognizes that cinema is key to this notion of atmosphere: ‘A place of great learning for me in this respect is the cinema. Of course the camera team and directors assemble sequences in the same way. I try that out in my buildings. So that appeals to me […] Guidance, preparation, stimulation, the pleasant surprise, relaxation […] It should all seem very natural’.7 Also relevant to my investigation is the fact that Zumthor designed the Therme Vals complex in Switzerland, the most publicized and written about of all spas, consisting of a series of swimming pools and baths, including an outdoor pool. Hawkes commented that ‘unlike the conventions represented by Victor Olgyay’s besuited man, where contact with the environment is limited and decorous, at Vals we enter an altogether different and infinitely more sensuous condition’,8 as is the case in La Piscine.9 Zumthor defines nine criteria in the creation of an atmosphere, plus three further notions or appendices. Taking Zumthor’s categories as a departure point, let us go on a journey around La Piscine in an attempt to analyse the film. For this purpose I am re-ordering Zumthor’s categories and sometimes grouping them to suit the topic. I will start with his last point, which he calls the beautiful form:

6 7 8 9

Zumthor, 11. Zumthor, 45. Hawkes, 204. The film opens with Marianne (Romy Schneider) and Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) spending the summer in a villa near Saint-Tropez. Harry (Maurice Ronet), Marianne’s former lover, and his daughter Pénélope ( Jane Birkin) drop in on them for a visit. Over the course of four days, the characters will rediscover each other and there is mounting tension as Jean-Paul is unsure about Marianne’s feelings for Harry. In the meantime he flirts with Pénélope. As Marianne becomes closer to Harry, so does Jean-Paul with Pénélope. At the end of Day 4, after a night of drinking, Harry falls in the pool and Jean-Paul drowns him. Despite discovering the truth, Marianne doesn’t report him to the police. As the summer comes to an end, Pénélope flies back to her mother while Marianne and Jean-Paul prepare to drive back to Paris.

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[It is] not something we work on – we apply ourselves to all the other things … to sound, noises, materials, construction, anatomy etc. […] what I find is that when things have come out well they tend to assume a form which often surprises me when I finally stand back from the work and which makes me think: you could never have imagined when you started out that this would be the outcome.10

So for Zumthor the final product, the architecture, is the result of having worked through all the other criteria to achieve an ‘atmosphere’. In the case of La Piscine, we already have the final product, the film itself. So we must ‘reverse engineer’ this process, starting with ‘the beautiful form of the film’ to understand the many constituents that make up its ‘atmosphere’. Considering the broader picture, Zumthor evokes Architecture as Surroundings. ‘The idea of creating a building […] and that it becomes part of its surroundings […] what I am thinking of are my human surroundings […] and of the building becoming part of people’s lives, a place where children grow up.’11 In other words, an environment is made up of individual buildings, which become part of an ensemble, the accumulation of which makes up the physiognomy of an area. In this instance it is not just buildings we must consider, as they are sparse, but the broader environment. We must look beyond the pool and the bastide to understand the surroundings presented in La Piscine.12 Looking at a contemporary aerial photograph (Figure 7.2), we can see that the pool is on a North-South axis and on the North-East of the bastide. The property is on a hill, overlooking the sea, which is situated around two kilometres east. The opening shot (see Figure 7.1) frames the environment as a series of horizontal layers where ‘each level is gifted with its own autonomy’ and its own function; the pool in the foreground, the stone paving on which Jean-Paul lies, an overhead tree branch, the countryside below and finally the sea and the sky in the background. This constitutes an establishing shot of the environment, at least on one side of the pool, but a crucial one, as it

10 11 12

Zumthor, 71. Zumthor, 63. The house in the film is typical of this part of Provence and referred to as bastide.

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situates the pool in relation to the sea.13 There are several possible interpretations of this landscape. Patrick Keiller reminds us that ‘every landscape has its myth and every myth has its history’.14 The landscape represented in La Piscine has two possible myths associated with it. One is the landscape paintings of Cézanne, for example ‘L’Estaque’ (1883–5), a view of the sea from the hill at the top of a village near Marseille; the other Marcel Pagnol’s films, which have come to epitomize the Provençal atmosphere.15 Such a mythical landscape imbues the film with a particular atmosphere from the outset. André Gardies notes, in his categorization of landscapes in cinema, that the function of the paysage-fond (background-landscape) is ‘not to be seen or at least not to be noticed for itself. Its primary function is to root it in reality’.16 I will suggest that the opening view sets a double ‘atmosphere’: a mood as well as an atmospheric condition. Later on, the idyllic setting will gradually acquire more of a dramatic function; the ‘exclusive’ location evolves into ‘splendid isolation’, the necessary condition for a huis-clos to take place amongst the four characters. The location further tightens its grip on the atmosphere of the place with the revelation, nearly ten minutes into the film, that the bastide is close to Saint-Tropez. One can well imagine that neither Cezanne nor Pagnol would have been best pleased to be associated with La Côte d’Azur and Saint-Tropez. It conjures up images of wild parties, seins nus, the star system, Brigitte Bardot, and so on. It considerably alters the tone of the film and the arrival of Harry (Maurice Ronet) in his roaring Maserati Ghibli is the agent of change. ‘Paris – Saint-Tropez in 7 hours!’ are amongst his first words as he bursts out of the car.

13 14 15 16

Marie Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, L’Écran de la mémoire: essai de lecture cinématographique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970), 82. Patrick Keiller, The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (London: Verso, 2013), 30. André Gardies, ‘Le Paysage Comme Moment Narratif ’ in Jean Mottet, Les paysages au cinéma (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1999), 141–53. Mottet, 144.

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Figure 7.2 The bastide today (left) and the map of the area (on right, the arrow points to the bastide). Map data from Google Earth: Google, TerraMetrics (2014).

Figure 7.3 The pool’s panorama, made up of frames over Days 1 to 4, from La Piscine (Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)/Tritone Cinematografica, dir. Jacques Deray, 1969).

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At that point, for the viewer, the location shifts from being generic to referential, which is to say that it becomes topographically, culturally and historically rooted.17 The swimming pool remains generic simply because the bastide itself is unidentified.18 But we have yet to take a tour of the immediate surroundings of the swimming pool. The way Deray films the pool over the first four days of the narrative, gradually revealing it through a series of carefully constructed views, is the key for my interpretation of Zumthor’s concept of Between Composure and Seduction, which deals with how architecture involves movement: rather akin to designing a stage setting, directing a play […] direction, seduction, letting go, granting freedom […] a place of great learning for me in this respect is the cinema. Of course the camera team and directors assemble sequences in the same way. I try that out in my buildings.19

Zumthor is not alone in having found in cinema a source of design inspiration: Tschumi, Nouvel, Diller and Scofidio, amongst others, have also made such claims. The reverse has also been proven true; Eisenstein famously claimed that the inspiration for his montage theory was the ancient architecture of the Acropolis, calling it ‘the perfect example of one of the most ancient films’.20 The succession of carefully arranged tableaux, encountered by a mobile spectator on his way to the Parthenon, was later to become the inspiration for Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale. In La Piscine it is as if Deray had rediscovered the lessons of Eisenstein and organized a montage of the pool, day after day, the sums of the parts amounting not so much to a promenade as to a panorama (see Figure 7.3). I was able to piece together a complete panorama of the pool’s surroundings by extracting key frames from the film. What I discovered is that for each 17 18 19 20

André Gardies, L’Espace au cinéma (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993), 77. In general, swimming pools in the movies tend to be generic spaces, an exception being the celebrated Piscine Molitor in Paris as featured in Life of Pi (Ang Lee, 2012). Zumthor, 41. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Yve-Alain Bois and Michael Glenny, ‘Montage and Architecture’, Assemblage 10 (1989), 110–31, 117.

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day, Deray provides one or two new pieces to complete the pool’s jigsaw puzzle, as illustrated in the visual analysis in Figure 7.3. I call it a panorama, referring to the ancestor of early cinema, reflecting the camera’s movement around a vertical axis, notionally situated in the middle of the pool. In this elongated view, film follows form (the form of the pool) – the result of a judiciously organized spatial chronology, which contributes to the atmosphere of the film in a very subtle way, through a game of composure, composition and seduction, to return to Zumthor. This visual approach also demonstrates great spatial and topographical coherence throughout the film. For example, when Marianne gives directions to Harry on the telephone (‘route des plages’), these are geographically accurate, as can be verified on a map of the area. As a result, the presence of Saint-Tropez is all the more real. Similar coherence can be observed in the depiction of the various parts of the house, for example the relationship between the side of the house, where the cars are parked, and the front, where the veranda and the pond are perfectly described across the cuts. In that sense, Deray did not indulge in any form of creative geography. Besides, the shooting schedule (shooting took place between August and October 1968) was arranged chronologically, as explained by Deray: ‘shooting the scenes in chronological order was for me a novelty. Nature helped. To start with, the pool was beautiful, sunny, and everybody was keen to swim […] and then as the story progressed, it is as if nature was getting in tune with the unfolding drama; at the end the trees were losing their leaves, it started to get colder. It’s exciting for a filmmaker to benefit from the complicity of a place, which is in tune with the characters’.21 This echoes Zumthor’s own view on coherence, which he regards ‘at its most beautiful when things have come into their own, when they are coherent. That is when everything refers to everything else and it is impossible to remove a single thing without destroying the whole’.22 On Day 3 of the narrative, what appear to be the remains of a small chapel are revealed, on the North-West corner of the pool. The elevated

21 22

Jacques Deray, ‘La Piscine’, L’Avant-Scène (Paris: L’Avant-Scène, 1961), 78–9. Zumthor, 67.

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chapel on the hillside is only visible for about fourteen seconds. Its dignified presence and mellowing yellow stones sharply contrast with the sparkling blue of the pool (see Figure 7.4). Though the chapel appears only briefly, I would contend that it is narratively significant. The presence of what is likely to be a deconsecrated chapel on the site also points to an old bastide of some standing. Deray composes this with a Cezannesque painterly quality, exploiting the tension between foreground, the pool, and background, the chapel, the hill and associated vegetation. This is the equivalent of what Zumthor refers to as the Tension between Interior and Exterior. ‘One can be inside or outside. Brilliant! And that means – equally brilliant! – this: thresholds, crossings, the tiny loophole door, the almost imperceptible transition between the inside and the outside, an incredible sense of place’.23 For him, this tension at the threshold is key to the creation of architecture. In this particular scene, we, as spectators, are both ‘inside and outside’ as we can see background and foreground in the same frame. The two are separated by the horizontal line of the stone edge of the pool. Chapels and pools are most unusual bedfellows, resulting in a palpable tension between the hedonistic and the sacred, the modern and the ancient, the transient and the permanent. The chapel, the winding stone staircase leading to it, and the mature vegetation have stood the test of time together. They overlook the new, as if occupying the moral high ground. The success of this image is also a function of the colour palette, how the different shades of blues, greens and yellows respond to one another in the bright sunlight. The Light on Things, argues Zumthor, ‘is so moving to me that I feel it almost has a spiritual quality’24 thus echoing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s comments on the sunlight effects in swimming pools: L’eau elle-même, la puissance aqueuse, l’élément sirupeux et miroitant, je ne peux pas dire qu’elle soit dans l’espace: elle n’est pas ailleurs, mais elle n’est pas dans la piscine. Elle l’habite, elle s’y matérialise, elle n’y est pas contenue, et si je lève les yeux vers

23 24

Zumthor, 45. Zumthor, 57.

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Figure 7.4 Pool and chapel in La Piscine (Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)/Tritone Cinematografica, dir. Jacques Deray, 1969).

Figure 7.5 Long shot versus medium shot in La Piscine (Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)/Tritone Cinematografica, dir. Jacques Deray, 1969). l’écran des cyprès où joue le réseau des reflets, je ne puis contester que l’eau le visite aussi, ou du moins y envoie son essence active et vivante.25 [I cannot say that the water itself – the aqueous power, the syrupy and simmering element – is in space; it is not in the swimming pool but is not somewhere else either. It inhabits it, is materialized there, yet it is not contained there; and if I lift my eyes 25

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et L’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 43.

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François Penz toward the screen of cypresses where the web of reflections plays, I must recognize that the water visits it as well, or at least sends out to it its active, living essence.]

Crucially, Merleau-Ponty makes the point that the pool water cannot be fully contained as it ‘sends out its active signals’ to the surroundings. The chapel probably never quite looked the same after the arrival of the pool. The camera frames the pool, the pool frames the water. The water is framed within a frame and it still breaks out of its enclosure. In the absence of sunlight, the magical blueness disappears, and the pool water turns dark. The pool sucks the light in, and becomes the perfect setting for a murder. As Bachelard warns, ‘the night alone would bring a less physical fear. The water alone would haunt in a lighter way. The water at night brings a penetrating fear’.26 The image of Pénélope ( Jane Birkin) on her own by the pool is an image of fear, one that announces future events, for, as Bachelard continues, ‘dark water, dormant water, impregnable water, all are palpable lessons for a meditation on death’.27 This scene has an anaphoric function; ‘it weaves in the narrative a network of calls and recalls’ announcing future events.28 Shot from across the pool in a long shot, Pénélope is a small figure reflected in the darkness of the pool. She is joined by Jean-Paul; they inhabit a dark ‘flat space’ without converging longitudinal lines, typical of a spatial mise-en-scène that communicates entrapment; a stark contrast to an earlier medium shot in the film, on Day 1, in which they stand in front of a ‘deep space’, an open gate and a stair framed by a bright clearing, evoking freedom.29 The two scenes (see Figure 7.5) use different cinematographic techniques, the long shot versus the medium shot, perfectly illustrating Zumthor’s concept of Levels of Intimacy: ‘It all has to do with proximity and distance. The classical architect would call it scale’.30 He then goes

26 27 28 29 30

Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et Les Rêves: Essai Sur L’imagination de La Matière (Paris: Jose Corti, 1942), 139. Bachelard, L’eau et Les Rêves, 96. Gardies, 80. Bruce A Block, The Visual Story: Creating the Structure of Film, Television, and Visual Media (Amsterdam; Boston: Focal Press, 2007), 258. Zumthor, 49.

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on to ponder the effect of building proportions on our perception of the body in space: ‘Maybe you know a tall slim door that makes everyone who comes through look great’, an observation that would not be out of place in Block’s analysis of the use of space in films. Deray had to compose with a multitude of visual material in front of the camera. In architectural terms, Zumthor refers to this as material compatibility; ‘materials react with one another and have their radiance, so that the material composition gives rise to something unique’.31 And a key ‘material’ Deray had to compose with is water. Water as filmic material in La Piscine has two further incarnations, besides its presence in the pool: the sea in the distance and the pond situated in front of the bastide. The view of the sea is crucial to situate our location but it is distant, and only very occasionally glimpsed. Nevertheless it plays an important narrative role in the opening shot. The pond, on the other hand, has in my view an important anaphoric narrative function. It is a large pond that was no doubt incorporated as a water feature at the time of the bastide’s construction. It does not feature in Day 1 but appears for the first time in Day 2 when Pénélope is seen sauntering along its edges. It is also in the background when Jean-Paul and Harry have breakfast on Day 2. But it figures prominently in the opening shot of Day 4 when Emilie (the maid) collects the empty bottles in the garden after the previous night’s party. Significantly, Day 4 is the first day that does not start with a shot of the pool. Thereafter, the pond is shown recurrently and insistently. While the pool water has irradiating qualities, the pond is dark green, ‘retaining in daylight some of its nocturnal matter’.32 Reeds sprout from it, which Bachelard sees as ‘the tangible union between earth and water’.33 By comparison the pool is artificial – things fall into it, but nothing grows. ‘The water makes the garden,’ Bachelard adds, ‘All is composed around this dreaming water’ and, evoking Claudel, ‘the water

31 32 33

Zumthor, 23. Bachelard, L’eau et Les Rêves, 137. Bachelard, L’eau et Les Rêves, 150.

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is therefore the eye of the earth and its apparatus to scrutinize the sky’.34 The pond observes the heavens and in turn Harry gazes into it (Figure 7.6), hours before being drowned in the pool. In this delicately composed image around the ‘dreaming water’ we cannot fail to notice the presence of the lit candles, symbolizing for Bachelard the ‘virility of fire facing the feminity of water’ for which ‘the imagination dreams of a durable union’, materialized by the embracing cherubs next to Harry.35 Bathing in the ‘nocturnal’ glow of the pond, while in the distance the sea is still immersed in the afternoon sun, Harry dreams of Marianne and of rekindling their love. In the construction of this scene, Deray relies exclusively on the poetics of the visual elements. The scene is silent, bar Harry’s footsteps, and no musical score was deemed necessary. Zumthor’s statements on the sound of a space come to mind: ‘I believe that buildings should sound the way they look’36 or, as rephrased by Hawkes, ‘the look of the building tells you what sound to make, or in some instances to be silent’.37 In this case, the atmosphere of the scene implies silence, as enough visual clues were already contained, making the addition of a musical narrative unnecessary. The cigales (cicadas) have already stopped their chanting while the grillons (crickets), very present in all the night scenes, are yet to be heard; it is the quiet hour between two of Provençal nature’s choirs. It is also the hour when the temperature starts to drop. It is the end of another hot day (‘the sky is so blue, it’s nearly white’, Emilie had warned).38 Throughout the film the summer heat is a real presence: ‘it’s boiling hot!’ exclaims Jean-Paul on Day 2, retiring into the bastide after yet another refreshing swim. Zumthor refers to the Temperature of a Space as ‘physical but presumably psychological too. It’s in what I see, what I feel, what I touch’.39 In La Piscine, the slow-moving pace in daytime, the house seen as a refuge from the outdoor heat, the game of cards, the lying around doing 34 35 36 37 38 39

Bachelard, L’eau et Les Rêves, 45. Bachelard, L’eau et Les Rêves, 136. Zumthor, 29. Hawkes, 208. ‘Le ciel est presque blanc à force d’être bleu.’ Zumthor, 33.

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Figure 7.6 Harry (Maurice Ronet) contemplates the pond in La Piscine (Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)/Tritone Cinematografica, dir. Jacques Deray, 1969).

Figure 7.7 Aérolande’s ‘Tore’ stools and armchair (background) and orange Brionvega radio in La Piscine (Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)/Tritone Cinematografica, dir. Jacques Deray, 1969).

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little, are in part a direct response to the heat, both a physical response but also a psychological one; the perfect narrative device to ratchet up the tension amongst the characters. It could also be construed as a cinema of observation, of everydayness in a hot Mediterranean climate, as boredom sets in; people whiling the day away, waiting for the temperate to drop. Key to this analysis are Zumthor’s criteria regarding the Surrounding Objects: ‘It happens again and again when I enter a building and the rooms where people live – I’m impressed by the things that people keep around them’; he goes on to reflect on architectural spaces as ‘receptacles of house objects’.40 In La Piscine the surrounding objects are seemingly unimportant, as they do not participate actively in the unfolding drama, or at least not in an obvious way. However, the production team made strenuous efforts to plant, here and there, key objects to root the film in its epoch. And I refer to ‘object’ here in a broad sense. For example, the cars can easily be identified as a 1967 Maserati Ghibli, belonging to Harry, while JeanPaul drives a 1967 Renault 8 Gordini 1300. Both vehicles are remarkably contemporary to a film shot in 1968. Significantly they are both racy sports cars and represent the latest advances in automobile technology. The pool furniture is in the same league. Figure 7.7 shows Pénélope lounging on a ‘metamorphic trapezoidal’ bed, designed by Roger Tallon in 1966.41 In other scenes by the pool, we can recognize that the stools are part of the same Module 400 series, an aesthetic that contrasts sharply with the traditional furniture in the house.42 In Figure 7.7 we can also spot, by the lounger, the Italian-designed Brionvega cubo radio TS502 (1964), while in the house Jean-Paul watches television on a Téleavia P111, also designed

40 41 42

Zumthor, 35. The bed is covered by a new foam material called Spazmolla, which was typically used to absorb sound in recording studios. The Module 400 series was first exhibited in 1967 by the gallery Lacloche, Rue de Grenelle in Paris, a place patronized by wealthy collectors of contemporary artifacts, and where, no doubt, the production team spotted Tallon’s design.

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by Tallon.43 The oversized double bulb lamp, which at one point Harry contemplates, is an Ingo Maurer design (1966). All of these objects have since made their way into design museums around the world. Similarly, the clothing range sported by Marianne and Pénélope, mainly designed by André Courrèges, represented the latest in fashion. But even more intriguing is the presence of the ‘Tore’ armchair and stools by the group A. J. S. Aérolande.44 This furniture was first exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in March 1968 under the aegis of the Utopie group. Curious as it may sound now, the inflatable furniture movement was seen as a way to challenge the norm, and had revolutionary connotations: ‘Pneumatics and revolution agree well. Both are fuelled by wind […] and the promise of an imminent passage into a perfected future. In the 1960s, as radical ambitions to fuse art and life regained currency, both became a norm of avant-garde practice and both produced spectacular uprisings in 1968.’45 In other words, the presence of the Aérolande furniture is as close as we get to an evocation of May 1968. Arguably, this is quite astonishing for a film shot only a few months after the événements, and Michel Boujut poignantly remarks that May 68 appears very far or not to have taken place at all. None of the characters mentions it, as if the great spring revolutionary storm had spared these sated and drowsy minds lying in the sun. It is true that we witness a bourgeois dream, cosy and timeless: a beautiful villa in a pine wood; luxury, calm and sensuality bathing in the great summer light and the cicadas’ choruses.46 43

. 44 In 1967, Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann and Antoine Stinco created A. J. S. Aérolande to commerciliaze their line of inflatable furniture. 45 Marc Dessauce, The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68 (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 13. 46 Michel Boujut, ‘La Piscine’, L’Avant-Scène 509 (2002), 1. [Mai 68 semble bien loin ou n’avoir pas eu lieu. Aucun des personnages n’y fait la moindre allusion, comme si la grande bourrasque libertaire du printemps avait épargné ces consciences repues et assoupies au soleil. Il est vrai que nous sommes dans un rêve bourgeois, douillet et hors du temps. Une belle villa dans la pinède, au bord de la piscine, luxe, calme et volupté dans la grande lumière de l’été et la stridence des cigales]

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As the aesthetically cool furniture around the pool, le lieu du crime, becomes closely associated with the unfolding drama, the surrounding objects take on an air of sleazy sophistication. There is no real surprise here, as the association of modernism with dystopia is a familiar trope in mainstream cinema. Even to this day, the legacy of La Piscine perpetuates an image associated with a life of luxury; in June 2010, Dior’s Eau Sauvage was unveiled with a 25-second advertising spot from La Piscine.47 Dior launched two further publicity campaigns in 2011 and 2012, re-editing different parts of La Piscine. Finally the last of Zumthor’s indicators is The Body of Architecture: ‘The material presence […] of architecture […] to me it’s a kind of anatomy […] I mean the word body quite literally. It’s like our own bodies […] a body that can touch me’.48 This is an idea that has been developed by a number of phenomenologists, Bachelard for one, construing the house as ‘body and soul’.49 While we may watch La Piscine using all our senses, and have an embodied experience, it seems far-fetched for the spectator to identify the pool and the house as a second ‘skin’. Rather, in this case, it would be the Mediterranean climate – the weather, the sun, the heat – which may well be perceived by the viewer as a pervasive presence, in which one would be enveloped. In other words, Zumthor’s idea of the Body of Architecture could be re-interpreted metaphorically and may prove a useful concept for cinematic studies.50

47

48 49 50

‘The company’s CEO explains the choice of film as motivated by its lifestyle aesthetic of wealth and elegance, Jean-Paul is the symbol of “an elegant and easy-going lifestyle. From the villa where the action takes place one can see the hills at Ramatuelle, the ocean and Saint-Tropez in its heyday.”’ Nick Rees-Roberts, ‘Men of Mode: Alain Delon, Christian Dior and Brand Heritage’, Film, Fashion & Consumption 1 (2011), 81–99, 90. Note that in his book, this is in fact his first section. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press; Saunders Ltd, 1964), 7. It is the forest environment in The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) or a more intangible narrative layer, such as in Jacques Tati’s humorous use of the modernist movement in Playtime (1967). In both cases they are pervasive entities that contribute to the films’ atmosphere.

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Conclusion Zumthor’s categorizations need careful re-interpretation, that may vary from film to film, in the same way as they would from one building project to another. They also present some obvious limitations: Zumthor hardly thought of creating an atmosphere conducive to drama, let alone murder! Nevertheless, to analyse La Piscine through Zumthor’s criteria has unlocked new possibilities and opened new avenues of enquiry. Contributing to film analysis by means of architectural theory brings the ‘reel space’ closer to the real one. It also helps root ‘the site of film practice as a spatial issue or problematic’.51 As cinema is, according to Élie Faure, ‘primarily an endless revelatory medium of novel passages’,52 filmmakers could use Zumthor’s indicators to construct a filmic atmosphere, while architects and urbanists may well consider analysing films in the manner demonstrated here, as a form of design inspiration.53

51 52 53

James Hay, ‘Piecing Together What Remains of the Cinematic City’ in David B. Clarke, ed., The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997), 212. Élie Faure, Ombres Solides: Essais d’Esthétique Concrète. Édition Originale (Paris: Edgar Malfère, 1934), 6. This would entail first analysing a film or films relevant to a design brief, for example, and then using the findings to feed back into the design process.

Pam Hirsch

8

A Dangerous Age: Deep End (1970)

Mitchell S. Cohen commented that the film Deep End, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, ‘never found its audience, and an unusual, complex motion picture deserving of support and detailed critical attention has for the most part gone unrecognized’.1 Although acclaimed at the Venice Film Festival in 1970, it suffered from inadequate distribution in Britain, never breaking out of the art-house ghetto. Arguably, the film’s mixture of ‘poetry and black farce’ meant that contemporary audiences did not know what to make of it, and it disappeared from view.2 David Thomson was delighted when, in 2011, Deep End was restored by the British Film Institute, describing it as ‘an honourably adolescent film’, by which he meant that the film had captured the raw and obsessive nature of adolescent desire.3 This is indicated from the first moment, with the choice of Cat Stevens’ song, ‘But I Might Die Tonight’, first heard during the title credits and then reemerging intermittently throughout the film.4 In so far as adolescence is a time of liminality between childhood and adulthood, the swimming pool, too, could be described as a liminal space. To quote D. B. Massey, identities of place ‘are constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through counterposition to the other which lies beyond,

1 2 3 4

‘Mitchell S. Cohen, Deep End: Passion in a Public Bath’ The Velvet Light Trap 14 (Winter 1975) p. 36, cited by Danny Peary in Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful (New York: Dell Publishing, ‘Deep End’, 64–7; 64. Nigel Andrews, Monthly Film Bulletin’s original 1971 review’ reprinted in Sight and Sound ( June 2011) 1 (6), 15. David Thomson, ‘Different Strokes’, Sight and Sound ( June 2011), 14–15; 14. He also provided nine songs for another cult film, Harold and Maude, another film which challenged sexual norms.

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but precisely … through the mix of links and interconnections to that “beyond”. Places viewed in this way are open and porous’.5 The film features Mike, a fifteen-year-old adolescent who is an ‘absolute beginner’ (to borrow Colin MacInnes’ term for the teenage narrator of his novel of the same name). Mike is a shy, inarticulate, gangly youth who, with his floppy fringe of hair half-covering his delicate face, seems more a child than a man (and is played by seventeen-year-old John Moulder-Brown). The narrative begins with Mike’s first day in the world of work, which coincides with his first encounter with adult sexuality. He has previously had a chaste relationship with a school girlfriend, Kathy (Anita Lochner), but essentially he is a boy who has just left school, lives with his parents, who has had virtually no sexual experience. When he takes up his job at the pool, his mentor Susan (played by Jane Asher) is a young woman in her twenties, who has vastly more social and sexual experience than he, and who enjoys teasing him (see Figure 8.1). The film captures a moment in a shift in the history of gender relations. The power dynamics between Susan and Mike are made explicit when she draws his attention to a poster on the wall featuring a photograph of a pregnant man. This was an ‘advert’ made in 1970 by Cramersaatchi for the Family Planning Association and it challenges men with the strapline ‘Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?’6 Susan cuts out this figure from the poster, makes Mike lie down and places it on his body. She is literally on top and is herself no doubt protected from pregnancy by the contraceptive pill, which, because of the efforts of the Family Planning Society, had, since the 1960s become available to single women. ‘The Pill’ (as it was generally called), was packaged in shiny, bright-coloured plastic strips, reminding me of the shiny, bright plastic of Susan’s mac. The kind of pool in which the film is set is crucial. The second half of the nineteenth century had witnessed a quasi-moral campaign to provide public baths, envisaged as ‘model sanitary purifiers […] hourly bestowing

5 6

D. B. Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge, and Malden MA: Polity Press, 1994), 5. A forerunner of Saatchi and Saatchi.

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Figure 8.1 Susan ( Jane Asher) flirts with Mike ( John Moulder-Brown) by the pool in Deep End (Maran Film, Kettledrum Films, Bavaria Film, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970).

blessings, cheap, pure and healthful, on the toiling masses of this great community’.7 Victorian pools were divided by class (first-class and secondclass pools with separate entrances) and by gender (men’s pools and women’s pools were entirely separate). Although Deep End was shot in 1970, many Victorian-built London pools, notwithstanding the dismantling of gender restriction in pools, and some modern refurbishments, often held most of their original features, such as poolside changing cubicles and individual baths for hire.8 Although there were no longer first-class and second-class 7 8

Hugh Shimmin, writing in the Liverpool Mercury, 1856, cited in Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis, Great Lengths: The Historic Indoor Swimming Pools of Britain (English Heritage, 2009), 10. As an example, Kentish Town Pool in St Pancras, a Victorian building, was refurbished in 1959–60, putting in 91 baths, as this was an area with many bedsits and rooming houses. See also Gordon & Inglis, 106.

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pools, even this late in the twentieth century, some (working-class) homes only had cold water and no bathrooms, so a weekly trip to the local public baths remained a common practice. Consequently, the private bath cubicles remained a space largely utilized by working-class customers. In 1842, Chadwick had stressed, in his Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, that the dire living conditions of the poor had produced ‘an adult population short-lived, improvident, reckless, and intemperate, and with habitual avidity for sensual gratifications’.9 And although a common adage of progressive reformers was that ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’, ironically, in this film, the swimming pool is steeped in sexuality, from flirting around and in the pool, to the curiously sensual arena of the so-called public baths, which were actually quasi-private bathrooms. Mike’s respectable working-class parents come for a bath weekly, and it seems likely that this married couple would go home for a weekly session of sexual intercourse; their bodies would be not only clean, but also warm and relaxed after their baths. Mike’s father winks at him to suggest this, although it is not clear that Mike interprets this wink. These private bathrooms, both intimate and anonymous, are on the one hand symbols of cleanliness – Mike spends a lot of time scrubbing the floors and walls of the cubicles – but they are also breeding grounds for sexual fantasies.10 On his first day Mike’s first job is to scrub graffiti from the men’s cubicle walls: ‘When they’re in there, they’re all supermen’, Susan tells him. Like a bizarre form of grooming, Susan then initiates Mike into the culture of ‘swapping’. Susan is supposed to look after women’s cubicles and Mike the men’s, but a little surreptitious swapping, she explains to him, is financially advantageous. She tells him that sometimes a woman might want a bit of excitement with a boy, and some of the men may give him ten bob too (although she does not indicate precisely what either the women or the men might want). She explains rather that it is largely a matter of

9 10

Gordon & Inglis, Great Lengths, 31. A point noted by Nigel Andrews in Monthly Film Bulletin’s original 1971 review reprinted in Sight and Sound ( June 2011) 21 (6), 15.

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indulging the clients’ imaginations, which Susan assures him is harmless. Though Mike’s own imagination, it turns out, will lead to disaster. On his first encounter, Mike is overwhelmed by a plump, blowsy woman, the same age as his mother, who visits the public baths in search of pseudo-sex with the male attendants (see Figure 8.2). In a brilliant bit of casting, she is played by Diana Dors, who in the 1950s had been a screen sex symbol. She brings herself to orgasm by fantasizing about the star soccer player, George Best (‘It’s always tackle, dribble, dribble, SHOOT’), whilst clasping Mike to her ample bosom, almost smothering him. Although she could not, as a character-type, be more different from his mother, her appearance does indicate his need to escape from mother-women, in order to achieve adult (including sexual) autonomy. The strongest term of contempt with which Susan abuses Mike, is to call him ‘Mummy’s boy’. In a sense she is right. His clothes when he reports for his job interview and first day at work are emphatically those his mother would have bought and chosen for him: a shirt and tie, a sleeveless pullover and jacket. At the moment of greatest humiliation, when he has tried to make love to Susan on the floor of the empty swimming pool, and ejaculated almost immediately, she blithely leaves him to take a phone call from her fiancé, and he cries ‘Mummy!’. Susan, by contrast, is adept at making use of the privacy of the cubicles to conduct an affair with an older married P. E. teacher (played by Karl Michael Vogler), who brings a class of schoolgirls to the baths for swimming lessons. Mike is incensed because he had been Mike’s own teacher and to some extent a father-figure. When Mike spies on him in the cubicle with Susan, he reacts with the rage of a wounded child, smashing a mirror, cutting his finger and starting the fire alarm, before retreating to his own storeroom, weeping and sucking his thumb. What makes Mike dangerous is exactly what, to some extent, makes adolescence itself a dangerous period; child-like emotions are not securely under control, although the maturing body is filled with amorphous sexual desire. The problematic relations between the generations are signalled in various ways, but especially by the clothes each character wears. As noted, Mike arrives for his job interview in a version of adult clothes for men. By contrast, Susan is a young woman who in her style of dress embodies youth,

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Figure 8.2 Mike ( John Moulder-Brown) is ‘out of his depth’ with a client (Diana Dors) in the private bathroom in Deep End (Maran Film, Kettledrum Films, Bavaria Film, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970).

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and simultaneously, her hostility towards middle-aged women. In 1955, Mary Quant had opened ‘Bazaar’ with fashion designs that placed emphasis on the girl’s body, selling clothes that a middle-aged woman could not wear. This marked a crucial shift. The French designer André Courrèges’s ‘Space Age’ collection in 1964 included extensive use of PVC clothing in his collections; the colours were primary: red and yellow, with the addition of white and metallic blocking. The shape of his clothes was geometric and the look included boots, and skirts with hemlines high above the knees, generally referred to as mini-skirts.11 Susan’s mini-dresses, yellow plastic mac and white boots define her as being from this new generation, and her style in the film is explicitly contrasted with that of the classic twinset and pearls style of the middle-aged woman cashier (played by Erica Beer). Susan is a cruel tease; she drinks a calorific milk shake in front of the cashier to taunt her that whereas she can afford to do so with her slim body, the cashier certainly could not. Susan tells Mike that her mother is dead, and whether or not she is telling him the truth, it is true metaphorically; she has eliminated the power of the mother. Susan’s own sexual knowledge is intimately connected with the baths. It seems likely that she was first seduced by the predatory PE teacher, whilst he was teaching her to swim, so swimming and sex are inextricably linked in this arena. We see him peering down the costumes of his current girl pupils, before pushing them into the pool. Ewa Mazierska argues that: Although Susan is cynical about men and does not love any man, she is unable to detach herself from them because men have power she cannot gain independently. They manage the public baths where she works, have cars, buy her diamond rings and pay her for sexual services. The only way she can ‘cheat’ them and the whole patriarchal system in which she operates, is by making sure that she does not do anything for free.12

11 12

This boxy, uncluttered look spread quickly throughout the British fashion world, because cheaper versions were sold in Carnaby Street, or through Biba’s online catalogues. Ewa Mazierska, Jerzy Skolimowski: the cinema of a nonconformist (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 59.

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Although this may be generally true, it would seem that the PE teacher still receives sexual favours from Susan for free, presumably because he was her first lover, and this still holds some kind of significance for her. Ironically, Susan’s downfall comes about precisely because she, in turn, is Mike’s first lover. But he, unlike her, is incapable of making the transition from innocence into cynical game-playing. Skolimowski, who is Polish, began his career making semi-autobiographical films depicting Polish youth dealing both with ‘Communist restrictions and the hypocrisies of an older generation’.13 His film, Rece do gory, drew such disapprobation that he was obliged to emigrate and resume filming elsewhere. With help from fellow exile Roman Polanski he directed a film based on four stories by Arthur Conan Doyle (The Adventures of Gerard, 1970). Following post-production in London, he stayed on, learned English and made Deep End. Arguably, because he was working in foreign territory, he viewed the seedy public baths with an outsider’s eye. Although some of the shots of the corridors and interiors of the swimming baths were shot outside London (generally in Munich), the film accurately presented the culture of the public baths in Cathall Road, Leytonstone in east London, where the swimming pool scenes were shot. But, despite this, David Thomson argues that it seems to belong more to a European than a British tradition of film-making. He suggests, for example, that it can be usefully be compared with Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934): ‘the one is black and white, the other is colour, but both films are about the same underwater attempt to attain desire, and both come from an age in which we were accustomed to see creatures swimming in the screen’s liquid as if we were at an aquarium.’14 He adds, half-joking, that Deep End could be described as ‘a movie of diverse fluids – red paint, milkshake, swimming pool water, snow, blood and bodily fluids too’.15

13 14 15

David Thompson, ‘Jerzy Skolimowski: The Fugitive’ in Sight and Sound (April 2011), 38–41; 40. David Thomson, Sight and Sound ( June 2001), 14–15; 15. David Thomson, Sight and Sound ( June 2001), 14–15; 15.

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But he is right. There is something of the painter in Skolimowski who, along with his art director Tony Pratt, draws contrasts between the sitespecific green of the old Victorian tiles, the red of blood and the blue of the pool. Even the yellow of Susan’s plastic raincoat plays its part (the shiny coat seems to define her personality; it has a hard carapace which admits no entry). The baths, the towels and the uniforms of the attendants are white; they suggest nursing uniforms and hygiene. The schoolgirl bathers are white-fleshed (there is no expensively tanned skin here) and there is nothing immediately sexually appealing about this pale schoolgirl flesh. By contrast, when Susan goes to watch a singularly dull soft porn film with her boyfriend at the cinema, she wears a black blouse with see-through sleeves. Mike, who has stalked her and crept into the row behind her, finds her veiled but visible flesh irresistible and reaches forward to fondle her breast. Within the institutional space of the baths the typically municipal green paint on the walls is re-painted red during the course of the film, in, presumably, an attempt to make this old-fashioned space more hip for new times. During the bad-tempered scene between Susan and the cashier, a section of the corridor wall is being painted red in the background. Pots of red paint are overturned during Mike and Susan’s quarrel. The film begins and ends with red liquid spilling across the frame; not only red paint, but also blood punctuates the film. When Mike smashes a mirror, his blood runs though his fingers as he sets off the red fire alarm. Susan’s red hair signals her as a sexual temptress, and finally, her blood flows into the water of the swimming pool. If financial constraints led to a restricted range of settings, then the insistent focus on the various areas of the public baths – the private cubicles, the swimming pool itself, the bath attendants’ closets – increases the claustrophobia of the narrative. On the one hand Mike is contained in a very specific, controlled and richly detailed social, cultural and gendered situation. But swimming (or washing in one of the baths where Mike is an attendant) entails switching from clothed to unclothed states, from dryness to wetness, to intensely tactile and sensual experiences. Several aspects of the film contrast Mike’s innocence with Susan’s experience. For example, there is the sequence featuring the childlike game of finding the diamond lost from Susan’s engagement ring. Susan loses it

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in snow, and the pair of them take the snow back to the empty pool to melt it, in order to find the diamond by straining the water through a pair of Susan’s tights (Figure 8.3). The diamond is hard and, like Susan’s heart, un-meltable, and so will remain intact when the snow has gone. Mike finds and hides the diamond in his mouth, so that she will need to kiss him in order to retrieve it. It serves as a sort of reverse metaphor: it is his virginity at stake, not hers. If Mike is not able to deal with Susan’s cynical sexuality, his inability to deal with girls and women is indicated at several other points in the film. When he accidentally ends up in the cabin of a Soho sex worker (Louise Martini), he first anxiously washes his hands. She, experienced and alert to the desires and fantasies of her clients, offers to cover her own body with the cardboard cut-out of a stripper who looks eerily like Susan. When the

Figure 8.3 Susan ( Jane Asher) in the empty swimming pool in Deep End (Maran Film, Kettledrum Films, Bavaria Film, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970).

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sex worker realizes that Mike’s wage is only £10 a week and that he has to pay most of this to his parents for his keep, she realistically asks him for £3. But, if it is unsurprising that he is out of his depth in this situation, even the teenage girls whom he encounters at the hot dog stall immediately recognize that he is an innocent whom they can hustle: ‘wielding his first pay packet, teenage Mike encounters an intensely commercial sexual culture … though he consumes little more than hot dogs, Mike encounters a world drenched in sex for sale’.16 Returning to the deserted swimming pool, Mike swims naked with the cardboard cut-out of ‘Susan’ that he has stolen from the Soho club, experiencing a powerful and surreal vision of swimming underwater with a naked Susan. The film ends inexorably with the death of Susan. Ejaculating prematurely, Mike is revealed as sexually inadequate and thus sees himself as disgraced in the eyes of the very person he would like to impress. Mike’s sense of abjection, of being cast off as Susan casually abandons him in order to meet her fiancé, provokes a ‘violent, dark [revolt] of being’.17 Following the scene of sexual encounter, which means so much to him and so little to Susan, Mike swings a heavy light at Susan’s retreating head. As the water, like the tide, flows back, re-filling the empty pool, red paint and Susan’s blood flow into the water, representing not only her death, but the blood of a girl’s first sexual experience metaphorically displaced onto Mike. In sexual terms, he progresses from the virginal shallow end to the deep end or depths of deranged sexual obsession with Susan. In his act of shamed rage it is arguable that Mike is oblivious to the likely consequences of his action. Also, as Skolimowski has persuaded us to identify with Mike, at her death ‘we feel more sorry for Mike than for Susan, whose dead body floats away in the pool, as if she was a receding image, rather than a human being.’18 And indeed this is the case; Susan herself looks like the two-dimensional cardboard cut-out picture of herself 16 17 18

Yvonne Taker, ‘Permissive British Cinema?’ article within booklet included in the BFI edition of Deep End (2011), 8–10; 10. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1. Ewa Mazierska, op. cit., 59.

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that Mike had fetishized. The fantasy Mike had of swimming underwater with a naked Susan is rapidly undercut, for the spectator, by a moment of adolescent aggression that results in a dead woman floating in the pool. Nevertheless, what makes the film haunting are the underwater scenes of Mike in the pool, his body submerged and self-absorbed as he dissolves into the water, surrendering to fantasy. It is only in this medium, where he imagines Susan swimming with him naked, that Mike achieves the jouissance which evades him in real life.

Rose Hepworth

9

Staging Embarrassment in The Last Picture Show (1971) and Morvern Callar (2002)

This chapter examines embarrassment in film, specifically as it is experienced by young women in relation to states of dress and undress in a swimming pool setting. It looks at the mechanics of the emotion, and considers the role of the public gaze in embarrassment. The second half of the chapter employs this thinking in the analysis of two ‘case study’ swimming pool scenes. In each, the female body is exposed or partially revealed in a sexualized environment. The potential or actual embarrassment experienced in each scene is a result of the public gaze, an element that transforms the subject of the experience into the object of spectacle. Embarrassment studies scholars appear to agree that embarrassment is primarily a public phenomenon.1 Rowland S. Miller, who has conducted several key studies in embarrassment, reports that there are very few instances of people reporting having felt embarrassed when they are alone, without real or perceived spectators.2 Rom Harré describes embarrassment as ‘an emotion characteristic of situations in which personal conduct becomes an object of a public consideration and judgment of which the actor is either aware or believes himself or herself to be aware’.3 Robert J. Edelman writes that, following embarrassing events, people feel

1 2 3

Robert J. Edelmann (1987), The Psychology of Embarrassment (Chichester: John Wiley, 1987), 13. Rowland S. Miller, Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996), 3. Rom Harré, Embarrassment: A Conceptual Analysis in Shyness and Embarrassment: Perspectives from Social Psychology (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1990), 181–204, 181.

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‘exposed, like the center of attention, and worried about what others were thinking’.4 Embarrassment occurs when something happens that momentarily ruptures our publicly presented social image. Maintaining this self-presentation, ‘increases the chances that we will be perceived as we wish and deserve to be, and allows interaction to proceed with less confusion and greater grace.’5 Both Miller and Susie Scott highlight the importance of the work of sociologist Erving Goffman in understanding how embarrassment arises from the loss of face that individuals attempt to maintain as part of public performances.6 Scott explains that when embarrassing mishaps occur, it is not the incident itself that troubles us, but rather the way we might be seen by other people ‘critically evaluating’ our performance.7 In Goffman’s interpretation of social interaction as a theatrical performance, actors who fluff their lines, or make other false steps, temporarily rupture the performance of character. We understand from this that to lose face in this way is to allow involuntarily a little of the private self to leak out where it can be subjected to public scrutiny. Embarrassment arises from the discrepancy between what others see and our desired selfimage, and from the sense that others are looking inside us, seeing our inner self laid bare. No wonder that instances of involuntary nudity, wardrobe malfunctions, or inappropriate dress represent such keen sources of embarrassment. If clothing can be likened to the self-image we present to others, then its removal is a stripping of that protective concealment: our inner selves are naked, and at the mercy of the judgement of others. If we view what Ruth Barcan calls the ‘nudity/clothing dialectic’ as an analogy for the precarious maintenance of a protective self-image that

4 5 6 7

Edelmann, The Psychology of Embarrassment, 8. Miller, Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life, 110. Miller, Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life, 10, and Susie Scott, Making Sense of Everyday Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 25. Scott, Making Sense of Everyday Life, 39–40.

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conceals the inner self in this way then we might consider the swimming pool to be a fertile setting for staging embarrassment.8 It is a public space and the action staged therein constitutes a collective performance. The ‘success’ of this performance depends upon maintaining a precarious balance of (in)visibility, which itself relies on a deft negotiation of the swimming pool’s capacity to reveal and conceal its occupants and their self-images. Susie Scott’s Reclothing the Emperor: The Swimming Pool as a Negotiated Order, highlights the way swimmers follow unspoken rules and rituals to maintain the ‘polite fiction’ that the swimming pool is a merely a place of exercise where bodies are desexualized.9 When these rules are breached, the fabric of this constructed reality is ruptured and behaviour that, in other contexts, would represent inappropriate conduct, becomes suddenly conspicuous, just as the emperor in the story felt suddenly naked when the fiction that clothed him was revealed to be such. Scott examines the ways in which the theatre of the swimming pool conceals, yet threatens to reveal, its actors’ bodies. She explains that, ‘In the pool, the surface of the water conveniently dissects the swimmers’ faces from their bodies, making the latter much less visible. This makes it easier to ignore the embodiment of actors and the potential for embarrassment.’10 Swimwear itself also both reveals and conceals the body. Scott notes that, ‘Bathing costumes provide a tokenistic nod to modesty but leave little to the imagination, and so the swimmer stands effectively unshielded from the gaze of onlookers’.11 Barcan also points to the tokenistic status of swimwear as clothing, writing that the nudity/clothing dialectic is not always clear and, that swimwear in particular is an example of ‘borderline clothing’—that is, it does not cover any more than lingerie does but, in the setting of the swimming pool, it is the only respectable way to dress in public.

8 9 10 11

Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 11. Susie Scott, ‘Reclothing the Emperor: the swimming pool as a negotiated order’, Symbolic Interaction, 32/2 (2009), 123–45. Scott, ‘Reclothing the Emperor: the swimming pool as a negotiated order’, 134. Scott, ‘Reclothing the Emperor: the swimming pool as a negotiated order’, 133.

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Rose Hepworth Clothing constitutes a highly complex continuum or matrix; there is no simple opposition between being clothed and being naked. There is, rather, a whole complex matter of being sufficiently or appropriately clothed, and that is context- and code-driven rather than being intrinsic to the piece of clothing.12

As we shall see from the two case-study examples in this chapter, this can be further complicated by the particular social contexts for which the swimming pool sets the stage. Nonetheless, the swimming pool is a setting rich in its potential to expose the inner self to the judgemental gaze of others, leading to numerous possibilities for embarrassing incidents. If the swimming pool is able both to reveal and conceal, thereby heightening the potential for embarrassment, this is a property undoubtedly shared by film whose camera both replicates and magnifies the gaze of the judgemental other. George Toles examines the way the camera ‘continually crosses and re-crosses the line between a brutalizing proximity and a restorative distance’.13 The structure of narrative film, he claims, commonly traces a movement from a scalding exposure (that seems to mark a point of no return) to a partial replenishment of dignity. The hole that has burned open in a character’s self-image is usually closed up by a surge of spectator sympathy/ identification that has been orchestrated by the director.14

Toles identifies the capacity of film to trace the development of humiliation through the moment of ‘exposure’ to the re-veiling needed to restore dignity to ‘suddenly unshielded’ characters.15 I am struck by this description of filmic humiliation, and the similarities it bears to Scott’s account of the way that the exposure an individual feels is mitigated by those around him or her who, sensing the threat to the collective performance, demonstrate

12 13 14 15

Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy, 17. George Toles, ‘This May Hurt a Little: The Art of Humiliation on Film’, Film Quarterly, 48/4 1995, 2–14, 4. Toles, ‘This May Hurt a Little: The Art of Humiliation on Film’, 3. Toles, ‘This May Hurt a Little: The Art of Humiliation on Film’, 4.

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‘supportive social reactions that keep the actor in face, thereby helping to maintain micro-level social order’.16 It seems to me that film is uniquely placed to represent the emotional impact of embarrassment. Firstly, its temporal nature captures the full process of embarrassment, from the moment the embarrassing incident occurs, to the partial recovery of poise that indicates a restoration of social order. Secondly, the visual organization of narrative film not only approximates the revealment/concealment tension characteristic of embarrassment, but also effectively captures the public nature of that exposure: it shows the subjective experience of embarrassment, but also what it means to be the object under the scrutiny of others. In doing so, film depicts the embarrassed individual’s state of self-attention, showing him or her watching themselves being regarded as the object of the gaze of others. Finally, there is an intersubjective element to filmic depictions of embarrassment in which the empathetic embarrassment we feel in real-life situations, is mediated through the filmic text, causing us to feel the full force of the ‘scalding exposure’. This is followed by the sense that we are somehow responsible for the camera’s partial re-veiling of the character – or, as Toles expresses it, the camera ‘answers our need for a reprieve, providing some sort of image protection or veiling which we are tempted to regard as our own doing.’17 Perhaps a conditioned social response compels us to help keep the embarrassed actor in face, and film provokes this response in spectators. As we shall see from the two case studies that I present here, this intersubjective implication of the spectator in the public gaze is particularly effective when the on-screen audience fails to provide the embarrassed individual with supportive social responses to help them ‘save face’. Morvern Callar (2002), directed by Lynne Ramsay, tells the story of Morvern (Samantha Morton), a young woman living in a small Scottish town, who wakes up one morning at Christmas to find that her partner has killed himself in their home. Stunned by a tearless grief, she discovers a suicide note on his computer, a note that instructs her to print the

16 17

Scott, Making Sense of Everyday Life, 43. Toles, ‘This May Hurt a Little: The Art of Humiliation on Film’, 3.

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manuscript of his novel and attempt to find a publisher for it. This she does, but not before changing his name to her own on the title page. After dismembering the novel’s true author in her bathtub, she buries him in the countryside and uses the money he left for the funeral to buy a package holiday in Spain. Morvern becomes frustrated with the hedonistic culture of drink and promiscuity at the 18–30 style resort, and the scene I discuss here marks a significant point in Morvern’s alienation from her environment. In this scene, the swimming pool forms the backdrop for a game in which a couple enclosed in a sack must switch bathing costumes. The sack is lowered to the ground to reveal a man dressed in a pink bikini, the halter neck looped hastily around his neck. Next to him, a girl stumbles, blinking into the sudden brightness of the sunshine. She is wearing large red swimming shorts but is naked from the waist up. As she regains her balance, a man with a megaphone turns her body so that she has no choice but to face the applauding crowd. The girl in this scene is credited only as ‘Bikini Girl/Sick Girl’ (in a scene that almost immediately follows the swimming pool scene, the same girl is seen extremely intoxicated in the toilets of a nightclub). Ramsey uses this character to illustrate the exploitative atmosphere of the resort. In both of these scenes, the girl provokes in Morvern a desire to distance herself from the resort. Bikini Girl is shown first in a long shot. This shot follows the moment of (literal) exposure. She emerges from the sack, registers the situation and displays typical characteristics of embarrassment. The spectator can hear the audience clapping and cheering. The camera turns to show the audience, all clothed in gender-appropriate swimwear, as they laugh and crane their necks to get a better view of the spectacle. As spectators we are shown the audience in the act of looking, and we map our gaze on to theirs. It is the gaze of scrutiny and it further corrodes Bikini Girl’s protective self-image, rendering her even more exposed than her literal state of undress. As we watch, Morvern glances briefly to the left, an eye movement consistent with those experiencing embarrassment, according to Miller.18 We might 18

Miller, Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life, 147.

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read Morvern’s reaction as that of reflected embarrassment, but there is something else, too, in her reaction. Miller points out that shame contains a larger self-evaluative component than embarrassment and often alerts individuals to some inner flaw that does not necessarily depend on the scrutiny of others to be felt keenly.19 It seems to me that Morvern’s reaction is one of shame at having taken part in the public humiliation of Bikini Girl. Morvern’s shame sets her out from the crowd. As spectators, we now have a choice of gazes with which to align our own: that of the crowd, or the dissenting and shamed gaze of Morvern. The next, extremely brief shot is angled from top right and barely includes Bikini Girl. It shows Morvern in the bottom left of the frame. We can see her whole body but she does not fill the frame. Reduced in size in this way, Morvern turns away from the spectacle in front of the pool. The camera, suddenly omniscient and moralizing, shows that her shame make her feel, as Elspeth Probyn puts it, ‘small and somehow undone.’20 Establishing that the spectator ought now align her gaze with Morvern’s, the camera returns its attention to Bikini Girl, this time showing her in close-up. The length of time the camera spends on this close-up is notable. As the camera fixes itself on her face, our attention is redirected from her body as spectacle, and we are encouraged to consider instead her experience of embarrassment. Citing a 1981 study by Edelmann and Hampson, and a later study by Keltner, Miller describes the typical physical reactions of embarrassed individuals: ‘Often, their body motion increases, they avert their gaze, smile sheepishly, and blush’.21 As the camera lingers on the close-up of Bikini Girl, we see her gaze falter as her mouth curves into an odd half-smile that suggests a suddenly self-conscious awareness of herself as the focus of the crowd’s gleeful attention.

19 20 21

Miller, Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life, 26. Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 2. Miller, Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life, 5.

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It is Bikini Girl’s conspicuousness that is the cause of the embarrassment here, and these symptoms of embarrassment serve only to make her more conspicuous than her state of (un)dress. Miller points out that, ‘[i]mportantly, such reactions mean that embarrassment is not only a social emotion that occurs in public, it is an obvious emotion that may be readily apparent to any others present.’22 This, in turn, heightens the state of embarrassment. In this lingering close up – already an example of what Toles calls ‘scalding exposure’ – the soundtrack gradually fades, simulating the effects of blood rushing to our ears and impairing our hearing as though we too are experiencing the white-hot intensity of mortification. In some way, we too are exposed here: exposed along with Morvern in our shame at having witnessed another’s pain and done nothing. Probyn claims that, ‘[i]n shame, the feeling and minding body comes alive. It’s in this sense that shame is positive and productive, even or especially when it feels bad. The feeling of shame teaches us about our relations to others.’23 The following morning Morvern leaves the resort in search of something more fulfilling. Bikini Girl’s embarrassment, and Morvern’s shame, has a transformative effect on Morvern, and it has a similar effect on us because for perhaps the first time in the film, we understand something of the motivation behind Morvern’s actions. The Last Picture Show (1971), set in the early 1950s, features a smalltown community in Texas, and follows a year in the lives of three teenagers: Sonny, Duane and Jacy. It is a coming-of-age narrative, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, and it traces these adolescents’ last year of high school and their fortunes in the months following graduation. In the scene I want to examine here, Jacy has left her boyfriend Duane at a local dance in order to attend a pool party at the house of wealthy Bobby Sheen. On arrival at the residential pool, Jacy is greeted by a handful of naked teenagers, possibly slightly older than her, who explain that in order to join them in the pool, she must first strip naked on the diving board. Clearly this prospect would make even the most confident of teenagers self-conscious. What makes this scene particularly compelling is the way the film portrays 22 23

Miller, Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life, 5. Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame, 34–5.

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Jacy’s negotiation of embarrassment, and how this can be read according to the dialectics of clothing/nudity as a concealing and revealing of the inner self. Unlike Bikini Girl’s on-screen audience, who are dressed in swimwear but viewing her partially naked body, the crowd at the swimming pool are all already naked and Jacy is fully clothed. If this situation represents a ‘sudden unshielding’ then it is in her clothes that Jacy is first exposed. Yet, in both case studies, the on-screen audiences are appropriately clad for the context, and it is the young woman, as the object of spectacle, who is inappropriately (un)dressed. As Jacy approaches the diving board carrying her coat and purse, she displays classic signs of embarrassment including gaze avoidance and nervous glances upwards. Once atop the diving board, the stage from which she is to perform her ‘strip show’, she walks to its edge like a pirate being made to walk the plank. The camera follows her tentative progress along the board before panning the edge of the swimming pool in a point-of-view shot that shows the audience who are comfortably naked and swinging their legs in anticipation. The camera returns to a simulation of their gaze, showing a dead centre shot of Jacy that frames almost her whole body. As in Morvern Callar, our gaze is aligned with that of the onscreen audience. As she reaches back to begin undoing the fastening of her dress, the music that had been playing on a record player in the background suddenly stops, and we feel the audience’s attention fix itself fully on Jacy. Jacy knows that only by reaching a state of undress can she enter the water and re-veil herself. However, the process of stripping lies between her and the safety of the water. This process is fraught with risk (in terms of embarrassment avoidance), and negotiating it incorrectly can mean becoming an object of ridicule. On stage and in the limelight, she cannot avoid exposure but, as Barcan is quick to point out in Nudity striptease puts the mutual dependence of nudity and clothing into greater flux than more static arts like sculpture or photography. […] Striptease makes use of the tactic of delay in order to prolong this transitional state [between the state of being clothed and the state of being naked].24

24

Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy, 18–19.

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It is this element of performance in Jacy’s undressing that complicates her exposure. The actor who plays Bikini Girl in Morvern Callar may well be performing but her character is not—her character is ‘suddenly unshielded’ by her involuntary nudity and conspicuousness. Jacy, on the other hand, has time to anticipate her conspicuousness and, as she takes off her clothes, we see in this ‘transitional state’ between being clothed and being naked, her attempts to ‘perform’ the striptease. However uncomfortable she looks as she removes an article of clothing, however much she avoids the gaze of the crowd or wobbles on one foot, when she flings each item to the side, she attempts to do so with flair. She is almost triumphant in these moments, and she smiles almost convincingly into the crowd, feigning a confidence that she almost certainly does not quite feel (Figure 9.1). In performing her role as stripper, she fashions herself a new social identity in which becomes the object of the desiring gaze. She can hide herself behind this identity, reducing the risk that her inner self will leak out under public scrutiny, thus rendering her instead an object of ridicule.

Figure 9.1 Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) feigns a confidence that she almost certainly does not quite feel. The Last Picture Show (Columbia Pictures/BBS Productions, dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1971).

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Only twice does this re-constructed social identity threaten to crumble under the gaze of the on-screen and off-screen audience. The first time this happens, Jacy has removed all her clothing except her bra and panties. As she reaches back to undo her bra clasp, the camera angle changes, showing her torso from behind. We see her hesitate and begin taking off her panties instead before returning to her bra. In this moment, she is exposed to the audience as an inner self trying to maintain a self-performance to the on-screen audience. The camera returns to show her from the front, thus re-aligning itself with the on-screen audience’s gaze, and it is at this moment, as she slips her bra straps from her shoulders, that her foot falters on the edge of the diving board and she falls to a sitting position, still gripping her bra to her chest. As she falls, her self-performance also slips for a moment, and she meets the resultant laughter with a grimace of self-consciousness discomfort. Unwilling to surrender herself to the mockery of a hostile gaze, she quickly flings her bra to the side in an imitation of the flourish with which she discarded her slip and stockings. The camera switches angles again, just for a moment, as we witness Jacy struggle to remove her briefs (and regain the poise of her performance). At this moment, Bobby Sheen’s young brother surfaces from the water in front of Jacy and she seizes the opportunity to perform, bunching her underwear in her hand and throwing the garment at him so that it covers his swimming goggles, an action that is met with laughter at his expense, not hers. Symbolically concealing herself from the gaze of scrutiny in this way, she slips triumphantly into the water. In this scene Jacy cannot escape the objectifying gaze, but she can attempt to exert some agency over the way she is objectified. I am reminded of John Berger’s distinction between nakedness and nudity in his discussion of the nude in the western art tradition in Ways of Seeing (1972): To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen by others and yet not recognized for oneself. […] Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguise.25

25

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Company and Penguin, 1972), 54.

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This perfectly expresses the tension between nakedness and nudity in Jacy’s struggle to avoid embarrassment by adopting the ‘disguise’ of nudity to conceal her own nakedness. Nakedness itself is the ‘sudden unveiling’ here. When she stumbles on the diving board, Jacy risks the audience seeing her as herself. By employing the tactics of the striptease performance, she clothes herself protectively in the disguise of the nude. Nevertheless, the offscreen audience does not quite forget the glimpses it has of Jacy’s inner self during the ‘scalding exposure’ of the swimming pool scene. By turns aligning our gaze with its on-screen counterpart, and then showing us the moments the performance slips, we see Jacy’s performance as she intends it to be seen but we also glimpse it from ‘backstage’. From this perspective, we see behind the disguise and, empathise with her attempts to ‘save face’. These scenes demonstrate the potential of filmic embarrassment, in all the rawness of its ‘scalding exposure’, to see behind the public performance of a character. Bikini Girl is naked in body and in identity before the gaze of others, and Morvern’s shame at witnessing this exposure, allows us to see something of her inner self behind the carefully maintained self-performance that keeps her secret. Jacy, on the other hand, attempts to veil her inner self in the cloak of nudity, and being witness to this struggle heightens the audience’s understanding of her behaviour in the ensuing scenes. In both scenes, the gaze of the spectator is split, so that s/he feels implicated in the embarrassing occurrence. The camera enables us to hold the gaze of the on-screen audience, which subjects a young woman to public scrutiny, and in order to demonstrate the self-conscious element of public embarrassment, it also lets us borrow her gaze, a technique through which we see her observe the audience regarding her as an object of spectacle. Finally, the exposure inherent in embarrassment is harnessed in order that we might see her inner self, and then fold this knowledge into our understanding of the narrative. The swimming pool, then, is a place that derives considerable dramatic possibilities from its capacity to expose and stage the painful humiliation of seeing one’s inner self rendered naked before others.

Monika Keska

10

Filming the Splash: David Hockney’s Swimming Pools on Film

In 1964, shortly after his first solo exhibition at John Kasmin Gallery, David Hockney relocated to the United States. He moved first to New York and then to Los Angeles, where he started a series of paintings that represented a typically Californian theme, a swimming pool. He continued to paint this subject over the following decades, constantly reinterpreting it in different media and forms. In this essay, I will focus on the paintings of swimming pools that were created between 1964 and 1972 in Los Angeles and Southern France, and examine three films that represent very different cases of intermedial transcriptions of this work into cinema. Californian scenery fascinated Hockney long before his first visit: ‘California in my mind was a sunny land of movie studios and beautiful semi-naked people’.1 His idea of the American Dream was strongly influenced by Bob Mizer’s beefcake photographs from the Physique Pictorial magazine. In the early 1960s Hockney began using images of nude or seminaked men as a source of inspiration for his works. One of the best examples of Mizer’s influence is the 1963 painting that represents two men in a shower entitled Domestic Scene – Los Angeles. The picture was conceived before he moved to California and was based on a picture from Mizer’s magazine. The magazine was published by Athletic Model Guild, a film studio funded by the photographer in 1945, announced as a bodybuilding or sports publication only as a pretext to show homoerotic photographs of male nudes. The magazine and Mizer’s photography were a subversive force in the gay community and later had a significant impact on numerous artists: 1

Christopher Reed, Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 171.

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Andy Warhol, Mike Kelley, Robert Mapplethorpe, and possibly Francis Bacon, as some copies of the magazine were found in his London studio after his death. Mizer often photographed models swimming or getting out of a pool. During his stay in California, Hockney met Mizer and visited the house where he produced the photoshoots for the magazine: ‘I went to visit the place where Physique Pictorial is published in a very seedy area of downtown Los Angeles. It’s run by a wonderful complete madman and he has this tacky swimming pool surrounded by Hollywood Greek plaster statues. It was marvellous!’2 When Hockney painted his own versions of the backyard paradise, he replaced the playful and smiling models from Mizer’s photos with more melancholic and hieratic figures and simplified the backgrounds. His swimming pools are set in clean-lined and geometrical spaces; they are surrounded by minimalist architecture, impeccable green lawns, vibrant blue skies and matching blue water. In this series of paintings Hockney creates an artificial paradise, inhabited by homosexual couples. In the 1960s he was one of the first openly gay artists who made his sexuality a subject of his own work, a stance that inspired many young artists. Derek Jarman described him as ‘the first English painter to declare his homosexuality in public. By example, he was a great liberating force, reaching far beyond the confines of the “art world”: his work paved the way for the gay liberation movement at the end of the decade’.3 Despite the fact that Hockney’s inspiration predominantly came from beefcake photography, he focused on the depiction of domesticity and the intimacy of homosexual couples, rather than the hyper-erotic possibilities of the male nude. Paintings such as Sunbather (1964), Peter getting out of Nick’s Pool (1966), Portrait of Nick Wilder (1966) and John St Claire Swimming (1972) represent young men swimming or relaxing next to the pool. Although these paintings represent mainly single figures, they

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Cécile Whiting, Pop L. A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 120. Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (London: Quartet Books, 1991), 70.

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transmit the sensation that their protagonists are not alone – they are being observed by another person, possibly a partner or a lover. Shortly after his arrival in Los Angeles, Hockney began experimenting with new techniques: acrylic paint and photography came to play a fundamental role in his creative process. He purchased several pictures from Mizer, but later decided to take photographs himself, with a Polaroid camera. Many of his paintings from that period repeat the square format of these Polaroid pictures. Hockney began to document his models, the waves and reflections of light on the surface of the pool. In his 1960s paintings, water became a recurring motif and achieved the same prominence in his compositions as the human figure. In many cases, water is the only subject of his works. One of his most famous works of the 1960s, A Bigger Splash (1967), represents an almost abstract spray of water created after a swimmer has dived into the pool. The splash is painted with wide brush strokes and a series of smaller lines to imitate the dispersion of streams of water and drops. It contrasts sharply with the flat colours and geometrical lines of the pool and the house. The background was painted relatively quickly with a roller, although Hockney spent two weeks working solely on the splash.4 In all his pictures of the Los Angeles swimming pools, water is meticulously painted, either in a realistic or almost cartoonish manner. Hockney experiments with different ways of representing reflections of light on the surface, chromatic changes, movement of waves and falling drops using short brush strokes, undulating forms or sharp white lines. As water became a central motif in Hockney’s art, he was faced with a series of technical challenges: ‘In the swimming pool pictures, I had become interested in the more general problem of painting the water, finding a way to do it. It is an interesting formal problem; it is a formal problem to represent water, to describe water, because it can be anything. It can be any colour and it has no set visual description’.5 The lithograph Water Pouring into Swimming Pool, Santa Monica (1964), now in the Tate

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Penelope Curtis, David Hockney: paintings and prints from 1960 (London: Tate Gallery, 1993), 28. Nikos Stangos, Pictures by David Hockney (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 48.

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Gallery collections, is a perfect example of Hockney’s experiments with depicting water in motion. In 1968 Hockney travelled back to London and then to Southern France to visit his friend, the British film director Tony Richardson. He stayed in his villa in Nid-du-Duc, near St Tropez, where he took a series of photographs of a young man in white shorts, swimming in the pool. The polaroids were later used for his acclaimed Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972). This work represents Hockney’s former partner, the painter Peter Schlesinger standing at the edge of a pool and looking down at a swimmer ( John St Claire). The figure of the painter was added to the composition and was based on a photograph of Schlesinger standing in a park, taken in London in 1972. It was originally used for a portrait that was left unfinished and eventually destroyed. The creation of this painting is the central subject of Jack Hazan’s documentary A Bigger Splash (1973). The film concentrates on the paintings of swimming pools and borrows its title from one of Hockney’s most acclaimed works. Hazan tries to capture the connection between the artist’s life and his art, constructing a semi-fictional account of the disintegration of Hockney’s relationship with Peter Schlesinger. The painting Pool with Two Figures represents the breakup, symbolized by the struggle to incorporate the figure of Hockney’s ex-lover into the final composition. Hazan kept a record of Hockney’s creative process, revealing different stages in the conception of his paintings, from moving images to a still photograph, subsequently projected as a slide on a canvas, and eventually contoured and painted by the artist. Hazan reversed this process and created moving images based on Hockney’s paintings. He experimented with different ways of transcribing painting into cinema: from filming the canvas of The Bigger Splash with the added sound of a real splash, to creating a series of tableaux vivants based on Hockney’s works. Hazan often juxtaposes Hockney’s images against sequences inspired by them. He compares the canvas that gave the title to his film with sequences showing the sprays of water formed by a swimmer (see Figure 10.1). He recorded his splashes in slow motion to accentuate the different stages in the movement of water drops. Hazan creates almost oneiric sequences, such as that inspired by

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Figure 10.1 Hazan compares the canvas with sequences showing the sprays of water formed by a swimmer in A Bigger Splash (Buzzy Enterprises/Circle Associates, dir. Jack Hazan, 1973).

the painting Beverly Hills Housewife (1966), which interrupts the narrative flow of the film. The film was shot between 1971 and 1973 and its action was located mostly in London and Southern France. However, Hazan introduced numerous flashbacks from Hockney’s stay in Los Angeles. He produced a series of tableaux vivants based on the pool paintings of the 1960s, showing young men in a suburban villa that remind us both of Hockney’s swimmers and Mizer’s models. Even the artist himself becomes part of a tableau vivant, when filmed having a shower in his London flat in a manner that reminds us of his paintings of Beverly Hills bathrooms. Cinematographic qualities are embodied in Hockney’s pool paintings; their Technicolor tonalities and their focus on the depiction of movement proved particularly attractive to filmmakers seeking inspiration in plastic arts. I will focus on two films, Bad Education [La Mala Educación] (2004) by Pedro Almodóvar and Peter Greenaway’s short film Making a Splash (1984), which represent two very different approaches to David Hockney’s swimming pools. In contrast to Hazan’s film, they do not show or mention the paintings in question, but their influence is still perceivable in the mise-en-scène.

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Both films can be regarded as ekphrastic transcriptions of Hockney’s painting into cinema. The term ekphrasis, originally understood as the verbal representation of visual content, was recently applied by authors such as Siglind Bruhn and Laura Sager Eidt to non-verbal artistic forms, including cinema.6 Bruhn proposes to redefine ekphrasis as ‘a representation in one medium of a real or fictitious text composed in another medium’.7 Filmic ekphrasis can refer to different aspects of the original work: to composition and formal aspects, content and meaning. Greenaway’s film focuses on the representation of the movement of the human body and its interaction with water, while Almodóvar pays particular attention to the depiction of a male figure and the expression of homosexual identity. Almodóvar often seeks inspiration in art and, in his films, alludes to a wide variety of painters, from Goya and the Spanish Masters to Edward Hopper and Pop-Art. He appropriates various elements of the pop aesthetic; its kitsch imagery, its references to popular culture and its vibrant primary colours. These elements come to form an indispensable part of his flamboyant visual style. In Bad Education, the sequences that are inspired by the paintings are set in a similar environment of an affluent suburb. Both Almodóvar and Hockney were regarded in their respective countries as pioneers who introduced homosexual themes into mainstream culture. Bad Education has a strong autobiographic component; it alludes to Almodóvar’s childhood experience in a Catholic school in the 1960s, and his first steps as a film director. The action of the film is set in 1980, the year when he released his first feature film, Pepi, Luci y Bom y otras chicas del montón. Bad Education narrates the story of the reunion of two childhood friends, Enrique (Fele Martinez) and Ignacio (Gael García Bernal) who met in a Catholic boarding school in the 1960s, one of them suffering sexual abuse at the hands of a priest. Enrique suspects that Ignacio, who

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Laura Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis in Literature and Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 16. Siglind Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting (New York: Pendragon Press, 2000), 8.

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now calls himself Ángel, might not be the person he pretends to be, and subsequently challenges him, in order to find out the truth. In an important scene in the film, the two friends arrive at the villa Enrique is renting, situated in a wealthy suburb of Madrid. The location has a similar atmosphere to the Hollywood residences represented in Hockney’s paintings. The modernist architecture of the house with its swimming pool, sub-tropical climate and vegetation, bring to mind Hockney’s images of the backyard paradise. The mise-en-scène contains many clear allusions and direct quotes, as it were, from Hockney’s pictures. Almodóvar recreates the Technicolor hues of the swimming pool series; he contrasts the aquamarine of the pool with bright reds of the beach chairs and ochre tones of the façade of the house. Almodóvar produces a series of tableaux vivants inspired by Hockney’s works; the images are easily identifiable as Peter getting out of Nick’s pool (1966), Portrait of Nick Wilder (1966) and Portrait of an Artist (1972), among others. In the sequence shot in the pool, Enrique swims naked, while Ángel decides to keep his white underwear on. The protagonists of the film echo the men portrayed by Hockney: Nick Wilder in a Los Angeles pool and John St Claire swimming in Nid-du-Duc. The sequence in question signifies a turning point in the narrative, and also represents a break-up between the two characters. It is possible that while quoting Hockney, Almodóvar is simultaneously referring to Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash. This allusion becomes more evident in the filming of Ignacio’s jump into the pool. The act is shown in slow motion, in a similar way to Hazan’s recreation of the splash. Almodóvar’s interpretation of Hockney’s pool series focuses on the depiction of the male nude and the intimacy of a homosexual couples. His references to Hockney are limited to one ekphrastic sequence and one singular location. On the other hand, Peter Greenaway’s Making a Splash can be regarded as an example of an ekphrastic film. The title suggests a connection with Hockney’s most celebrated painting of a Los Angeles pool, even though it contains few direct quotes from Hockney’s art. The only literal reference is connected to A Bigger Splash; Greenaway films the splashes formed by a dive into the pool in slow motion, just as Hazan and Almodóvar do. Greenaway’s film is centred on the representation of

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movement: of the body, of the swimmer and of water. He captures different stages of movement and the dispersion of water drops. Water has had a strong presence in Greenaway’s films, exhibitions and paintings since the early stages of his artistic and cinematic career. Greenaway explores water’s symbolic qualities in his experimental films, such as Intervals (1969), filmed in Venice, and Water Wrackets (1975), a fake documentary on a fictional tribe that inhabited rivers and streams. In 1993, Greenaway returned to the Italian city to curate an exhibition in Palazzo Fortuny. Watching Water explored the idea of cinema as an optical illusion and the representation of Venice on film. Water is also represented in Greenaway’s films as the origin of life. The director is a confessed admirer of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. He often used Darwin’s theory of the origin of species as an organizing principle that replaces or supports traditional storylines. Probably the best example of this occurs in Zed and Two Noughts (1983). The film was structured as a series of short fragments of a documentary dedicated to the evolution of the species, with a voice-over by Sir Richard Attenborough. It begins with the origins of life in water and simple aquatic organisms, and concludes with man. Making a Splash is constructed in a similar way. The film begins with a series of images of flowing water, starting with single drops, then streams, cascades and waterfalls. Successively, small aquatic organisms appear, first insects and fish, gradually larger animals are incorporated, and finally Greenaway shows swimming dolphins and hippos. Subsequently, the action transfers to an indoor pool where small children and babies are learning to swim. Greenaway progressively introduces more experienced swimmers and divers, and more organized forms of swimming, such as groups of people playing various sorts of water sports. The film culminates with an elaborate choreography performed by the British synchronized swimming team. All the sequences are cut to Michael Nyman’s minimalist music. Greenaway’s documentation of the swimmers’ movement recalls the photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge. The inventor of the Zoopraxiscope, an early device destined to display moving images, is often regarded as a precursor to cinematic exhibition. Muybridge photographed people and animals in movement with multiple cameras. His subjects were

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animals, domestic and wild, people of different ages and genders, dressed and naked, performing daily activities and sports. He also recorded the trajectory of water thrown from a bucket, in a series of images that inspired Francis Bacon. The models were photographed against a neutral dark background, divided by a grid. Muybridge published sequences of photographs for the first time in 1887. The reprints of his books had an enormous impact on other photographers and artists, including Greenaway and Hockney. Greenaway often quotes Muybridge in his films and installations. In A Zed and Two Noughts he creates his own version of the photographic experiments, using the dead bodies of black and white animals. Instead of recording live animals in motion, Greenaway films the ‘movement’ of decomposing flesh and insects invading the carcasses, accompanied by Nyman’s musical compositions. Making a Splash is a much more joyful take on Muybridge’s photographic series. Greenaway films animal and human swimmers of all ages, dressed and naked, swimming in different styles. The tiles that cover the pools walls and floor form a grid, similar to that of Muybridge’s backgrounds (Figure 10.2).

Figure 10.2 The tiles that cover the pools walls and floor form a grid, similar to that of Muybridge’s backgrounds in Making A Splash (Media Software International/ Mecca Leisure, dir. Peter Greenaway, 1984).

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The polaroids taken by Hockney as part of his artistic process document the motion of swimmers in a similar manner to Muybridge’s experiments. He deconstructs movement into a sequence of still images. For Hockney, the representation of movement suspended in time became a central preoccupation: ‘I loved the idea, first of all, of painting like Leonardo, all his studies of water, swirling things. And I loved the idea of painting this thing that lasts for two seconds; it takes me two weeks to paint this event that lasts for two seconds’.8 The photographs of Muybridge had a huge impact on Hockney’s paintings. He purchased a copy of Human Figure in Motion in the 1950s and used it as a source of inspiration at least until the mid 1960s.9 It is possible that Muybridge’s photographs of frozen trajectories of water thrown into the air, and falling drops, influenced Hockney’s paintings of swimming pools and splashes. In Greenaway’s Making a Splash, there is no voice-over or storyline. Narration is replaced by the director’s reinterpretation of a biological classification of species, and his personal categorization of swimming styles according to their complexity. Making a Splash is an example of Greenaway’s pursuit of the ideal of a ‘cinema of ideas, not plots’, where traditional narrative techniques are replaced by allegories and taxonomies, alphabets, number series and catalogues that carry metaphorical meanings and act as an organizing principle.10 He rejects the limitations of the four tyrannies: text, actor, camera and frame, as well as any attempt at realism, and believes that the artists who experimented with light using a camera obscura are the real pioneers of cinema. For Greenaway cinema is an optical illusion of a three-dimensional space, represented in two dimensions as a projection on a screen. Hockney shares with Greenaway a fascination with optical devices, especially the camera obscura.11 In 2001 he formulated a controversial thesis, stating that the level of realism and accuracy obtained by artists 8 9 10 11

Curtis, David Hockney, 28. Paul Melia, David Hockney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 123. Peter Greenaway, The Stairs 2: Münich. Projection (London: Merrell Holberton Publishers, 1995), 13. See David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York: Viking, 2001).

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since the Renaissance could not have been achieved without the use of optical tools. His own technique, employed to create the swimming pool paintings, involves the projection of photographic slides onto a canvas to be contoured and painted by the artist. It is not dissimilar to the practice of the baroque artists who painted with the help of camerae obscurae. Making a Splash contains numerous parallels with Hockney’s paintings, despite the absence of literal quotes and the tableaux that were present in the films of Hazan and Almodóvar. Greenaway transcribes the inherent cinematographic characteristics of Hockney’s swimming pools: the depiction of movement and the manipulation of light. However, Greenaway’s film is far from being a mere exercise in ekphrastic transcription. The director alludes to Hockney’s works as a pretext for addressing issues that have interested him since the start of his cinematographic career. Making a Splash is a brief reflection on the origins and essence of cinema and its future as an independent medium.

Clara Garavelli 1

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The Swimming Pool as a Site of Subversion during the Spanish Transition: The Case of Pepito piscina (1978)

The last decade of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain was signaled by a series of economic reforms that opened the country to foreign investment and tourism. Before long, less inhibited men and women began to appear on the streets of major cities, challenging local society’s traditional mores with their relaxed customs and extravagant clothing.2 This period, described by many critics as a ‘liberal dictatorship’ and an apertura [opening up] to European culture and ways of life, initiated a long-term transition from Francoist immobilism and isolation to democracy.3 Far from being a smooth passage from one stage to another, economic attempts to modernize the country constantly clashed with efforts to perpetuate tradition, reflected in the cinema of the time, in suggestive comedy titles such as El turismo es un gran invento [Tourism is a Great Invention] (Pedro Lazaga, 1968)

1 2 3

I am grateful to Laura Gómez Vaquero, Marc Ripley, and the editors for their comments and suggestions. José María Ponce, El destape nacional. Crónica del desnudo en la transición (Barcelona: Glénat), 18. Tatjana Pavlovic, Inmaculada Alvarez, Rosana Blanco-Cano, Anitra Grisales, Alejandra Osorio, and Alejandra Sánchez, 100 Years of Spanish Cinema (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 104–20. Sally Faulkner, ‘Spain of the apertura’, A Cinema of Contradiction. Spanish Film in the 1960s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press., 2006), 3–7. Roman Gubern, ‘El forcejeo entre censura y reformismo: ¿La primera apertura?’, in Carlos F. Heredero, and José Enrique Monterde, eds, Los ‘Nuevos Cines’ en España: Ilusiones y desencantos de los años sesenta (Valencia: Institut Valencià de Cinematografia Ricardo Muñoz Suay, 2003), 69–78.

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and Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos [Smut Starts at the Pyrenees] (Vicente Escrivá, 1973). The death of Franco in 1975 and the end of film censorship in 1977 had a notable impact on the local film industry and its productions.4 Within the comedy genre, as Steven Marsh has explained, the effect of political change can be perceived in the intricate coexistence of films that were marked by certain ruptures associated with new freedoms, and those that maintained formal continuities with the old regime.5 Pepito Piscina (Luis María Delgado, 1978), normally associated with the latter, also sought to adapt to the new times, reflecting spectators’ thirst for ‘new images of a sexuality repressed under the dictatorship’, which has been recognized as a distinct characteristic of audiences of the early 1970s.6 Directed by one of the creators of the often repudiated Landismo, a sub-genre of popular comedies named after the interpreter Alfredo Landa, who starred in many of them, the film thus continued the ‘sexy comedy’ style of the 1960s whilst incorporating elements of the destape – literally works that ‘uncovered’ the body, which appeared mostly at the beginning of the democratic period, with the aim of adjusting audience desires.7 In this context, it will be argued

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For further information on the implications of the change on state regulations, and the impact of politics in the Spanish cinema of the Transition, please refer to Manuel Trenzado Romero, Cultura de masas y cambio político: el cine español de la transición (Madrid: CIS, 1999). Steven Marsh, Chris Perriam, Eva Woods Peiró, and Santos Zunzunegui, ‘Comedy and Musicals’, in Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlović, eds, A Companion to Spanish Cinema (West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2013) 193–223, 196. Manuel Palacio and Kathleen Vernon, ‘Audiences’, in Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlović, eds, A Companion to Spanish Cinema (West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2013) 464–85, 480. For a general description of the criticism of these Landismo comedies, please refer to: Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Alfredo Martínez-Expósito, ‘Stereotypical Bodies’, Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007) 11–36, 11. John Hopewell described this period in the following terms: ‘The apertura had been sidetracked into a destape – an “opening” became an “uncovering”’. John Hopewell, ‘Saying a Long Goodbye to Mother’, Out of the Past. Spanish Cinema After Franco (London: The British Film Institute, 1986) 78–104, 96.

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that the swimming pool, which is pivotal to the film’s plot, represents a unique cinematographic setting that encourages carnivalesque interactions that subvert – in a Bakhtinian sense – everyday customs, and challenges traditional conventions. Drawing from analyses of gendered space, and also from contemporary gender and genre readings of Spanish film comedy, this essay aims to explore how the municipal swimming pool in Pepito Piscina serves as the perfect setting to put into play contested identities at a transitional moment in history. It will be shown that hegemonic notions of masculinity and femininity are both reinforced and resisted at the intersections of gender, sexuality and politics; thus the swimming pool becomes a politicized site where stereotypes are mutually confronted and reaffirmed. The representation of this space offers new insights into the first years of the Spanish Transition and its film productions.

Unveiling the Prohibited Marsh asserts that comedy is a contradictory genre ‘based on misunderstandings, things out of place, confusion, impotence, the thwarting of desire, and deviations from convention’, which has a complex relation to cultural identities due to its connections with national or ethnic discourse.8 Although he makes a general remark on the genre’s particularities in order to map its development in Spain, these lineaments can be anchored to the case of Pepito Piscina, which bases its plot on the deviation of the galán canon – defined by Chris Perriam as the figure of the gallant gentleman who is ‘handsome, elegant, and eligible’ – in order to give a humorous portrait of the ‘average’ spaniard of the time.9

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Marsh, Perriam, Woods Peiró, and Zunzunegui, ‘Comedy and Musicals’, 193–94. Chris Perriam, ‘Introduction’, Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 1–16, 1.

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José Fernández Arribas, alias ‘Pepito Piscina’ (Fernando Esteso) is a flirt, who uses the local public swimming pool as the centre of operations for his dodgy business selling second-hand cars. With the help of the pool lifeguard, waiter and masseur, he preys on possible victims for his scams and on attractive women to assuage his uncontrollable sexual appetite. From the beginning, in the establishing shots, spectators are introduced to his full persona: the camera zooms out from Pepito’s legs while he climbs up the springboard and, in a high-angle shot, shows him set against the vastness of the swimming pool, before cutting at once to a low-angle shot where he removes his sunglasses and looks down at the bathers in an arrogant manner (see Figure 11.1). This representation clearly plays against audience expectations. The image of a short, hairy, chubby man, dressed in a tacky swimsuit and hat promptly challenges typical images of film stars in swimming pools – handsome star bodies, such as that of Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer (Perry 1968), which was released in Madrid at the end of the 1960s, with considerable success.10 Inspired by the character played by Alfredo Landa in Manolo La Nuit (Mariano Ozores 1973), Esteso’s leading performance in this film represents a renewal of the Francoist macho celtíbero under new freedoms, and the artistic licence that came into being with the opening of the democratic period.11 On the one hand, he embodies the traditional, patriarchal archetype of the strong, virile ‘ordinary man’. According to Pietsie Feenstra, in her analysis of the actors who appeared in these films, ‘the strong, little, macho man is […] a hispanisation of the masculine image at a certain period’, a ‘historicised image of the body’ that locates Alfredo Landa – and Esteso by extension – as 10

11

Burt Lancaster’s character in this film was described by the Spanish newspaper ABC in 1969 as ‘un tipo maduro, atlético, bronceado, […], simpático, al que parece que se le da todo bien’ [a mature guy, athletic, suntanned, […], amusing, who seems to be very skilful with everything]. A. C., ‘El Nadador’, ABC (11 May 1969), 77. Landa’s protagonist has been described as: ‘a grotesque parody of the sexy film star […] the racial celtíbero español […] a caricature of the narcissistic male’. Barry Jordan and Mark Allinson, ‘Stars’, Spanish Cinema: A Student’s Guide (London: Hodder Education, 2005) 117–33, 128.

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the embodiment of the 1970s idea of the macho man.12 This embodiment accounts, in this film, for the nationalist discourse of the old regime, which constructed an idea of masculinity based on virility, patriotism, decency and strict gender divisions.13 On the other hand, Pepito also transgresses this social norm, simultaneously embodying a contested, transitional identity. This identity reveals not only the problematic mythologies of social ideals of masculinity, as Pavlovic explains in the case of Landismo films, but also the foundations of contemporary metrosexual masculinity.14 Several sequences show Pepito performing feminized acts, such as when he uses the vibrating belt massager and undertakes beauty treatments. Furthermore, he flirts with the Conde – a homosexual – in order to sell him a car, sleeps in ‘queer’ satin pyjamas and enjoys the flattery of the lascivious masseur, who cannot take his hands off Pepito’s chest. Even though this might be at the service of comic effect, it demonstrates how hegemonic notions of masculinity were contested and how they had begun to change. Before this film, Esteso appeared in other roles typically associated with Landismo, in Onofre (1974), for example, also directed by Delgado, and Virilidad a la española [Virility, The Spanish Way], directed by Lara Polop in 1975. But he gained popular recognition when he was paired with Andrés Pajares; the pair became one of the most famous comic double-acts in the country. Fouz-Hernández and Martínez-Expósito use one of these films to illustrate the objectification of women, and male chauvinism, that pervaded these transitional years. According to them,

12 13

14

Pietsie Feenstra, ‘The Homosexual Body on Stage’, New Mythological Figures in Spanish Cinema. Dissident Bodies Under Franco (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011) 129–97, 133. For an analysis of the construction of masculinity at the end of Franco’s dictatorship and in the Landismo, please refer to Tatjana Pavlovic, ‘The Authoritarian Body in Agony’, Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies. Spanish Culture from Francisco Franco to Jesús Franco (New York: State University of New York Press) 71–89, 82. Pavlovic, Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies, 82. For a historical and conceptual explanation of the term metrosexual, please refer to: David Coad, The Metrosexual: Gender, Sexuality and Sport (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).

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Clara Garavelli Whilst the destape films that followed the end of censorship in 1977 were unashamedly generous with the exposure of female bodies (‘destapar’ literally means ‘to uncover’ or to ‘undress’), male actors usually kept most of their clothes on, thus accentuating the objectification of women and the self-confidence of men, who rarely had to expose their own bodies or put under scrutiny their physical adequacy as sex symbols.15

This tendency in film productions of the time harked back to the Francoist period, inspiring many critics to react against these comedies, labelling them as ‘reactionary’.16 Arguably, Landismo, as described by the director of Pepito Piscina himself, is a term that refers to a series of comedies ‘que se distinguen por su capacidad correctora de las costumbres, recalcando los vicios y los errores de los hombres’ [which are distinguished by their corrective representation of customs, highlighting the vices and mistakes made by men].17 Indeed, frequently occurring elements in these films include, as Fouz-Hernández and Martínez-Expósito argue, the showcasing of scantily clad foreign women (generally Swedish or French) and of the ignorant, provincial, womanizing man, with multiple jobs, attempting to earn extra money by not-so-legal means. Pepito Piscina is no exception to this. Nonetheless, while Delgado’s definition of the subgenre implies a conservative approach that advocates a ‘rectification of customs’ compatible with the ideals of the old totalitarian regime, the ambiguity of Pepito Piscina’s message, mainly triggered by the carnivalesque environment of the swimming pool, allows a twofold reading: either as a moralistic tale, or a subversion of past principles. Undoubtedly, Pepito Piscina has all of the features of the destape films: the generous exposure of female bodies, the foreign girl as object of desire, and the imperfect macho celtíbero in dubious circumstances. But unlike Fouz-Hernández and Martínez-Expósito’s assertion, the male character 15 16 17

Fouz-Hernández and Martínez-Expósito, Live Flesh, 12. A good example of this labelling is Alberto Mira’s description of Landismo in Alberto Mira, ‘Introduction’, Historical Dictionary of Spanish Cinema (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press Inc., 2010) xxxiii–lxiii, lv. José Manuel Recio, Biografía y películas de Alfredo Landa (Barcelona: Centro de Investigaciones Literarias Españolas e Hispanoamericanas), 51.

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in this case is made to expose his body, owing to the particular setting in which he chooses to do business. Pepito’s body is constantly under scrutiny, evident in the camerawork of the opening sequence, and in every scene in which he is shown parading around the pool in different outfits. Moreover, his physical adequacy as a sex symbol is also challenged, not only by his embodying of the anti-galán canon, but also by his performance of lascivious acts that gain him the derogative nickname of ‘Pepito Piscina’, someone who unashamedly tries to pull women and customers at the swimming pool, albeit with questionable success. In her analysis of despotic and transgressive bodies after Franco, Tatjana Pavlovic argues that in spite of the pejorative connotations, Landismo ‘problematizes gender dynamics, probes masculinity, touches upon rapidly changing women’s roles, explores abrupt mutations of mass culture and its relationship to sexuality, and encompasses all the anxieties tied to those changes.’18 Hence, Pepito Piscina not only assesses male stereotypes through its protagonist, but also portrays a transition in hegemonic notions of femininity. Although women are still portrayed as objects of desire, with the typical appearance of a French woman in a bikini in the first sequence, they are also depicted as strong characters who dominate the action. In this vein, the film subtly unveils previously forbidden female roles. The widow with whom Pepito falls in love, though she wins the man in a competition with free-wheeling foreign girls (demonstrating the importance of the ‘national product’), is not the prototypical chaste housewife and devoted mother.19 Instead, she is represented as an independent sexy woman, able to wear a tiny bathing outfit like other European women, without fear of being judged. She also has a rather masculine fixation on cars and loves taking part in dangerous male-oriented motoring rallies. The comedy’s complex relation to cultural identities is also manifested in its attempts to critique, in a self-reflexive manner, the destape productions themselves. The scene at the police station, in which Pepito and the chorus girls from the nightclub end up after fighting with a man who has sexually

18 19

Pavlovic, Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies, 75. Pavlovic, Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies, 83–4.

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Figure 11.1 The establishing shots of Pepito piscina (Acuarius Films S. A./EMSE, dir. Luis María Delgado, 1978) situate the swimming pool as the principal enclave where the deals take place.

Figure 11.2 Towards the end of Pepito piscina (Acuarius Films S. A./EMSE, dir. Luis María Delgado, 1978), the swimming pool acts as a place of punishment for the protagonist’s scams.

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assaulted one of the dancers, represents conservative apprehensions of the changing times and of its cultural manifestations. When the attacker is confronted by Pepito, the performers and the policeman, he claims that he was confused by the immorality of the performance, and by a transitional period that keeps ‘confundiendo la democracia, la apertura y el destape con el erotismo y la censura’ [mixing up democracy, the ‘opening’ and the ‘uncovering’ with eroticism and censorship], a remark that is immediately rejected by all those present. The ambivalence of sequences like this forms the core of this comedy genre. In Marsh’s words, ‘Is it reactionary, as the abundance of racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes might suggest? Or is it subversive and transgressive; does it hold up a critical mirror to corrupt, self-satisfied, and hypocritical power?’20 This ambivalence is emphasized in Pepito Piscina in the carnivalesque interactions that take place at the swimming pool.

A Site of Conflicting Encounters When Lynda Johnston analysed the disruptions of binary notions of femininity and masculinity in gym spaces, she declared that the materiality of bodies is constructed and inscribed by the environment and, therefore, that bodies ‘become sexed according to a particular place and time’.21 In Pepito Piscina, bodies are constructed and inscribed first and foremost by the swimming pool – like a gym, a site of exercise, but one also of leisure and contemplation. In this environment, Pepito becomes, at the beginning of the film, the stereotype of the Spanish everyman who strolls around the poolside, looking salaciously at women’s bodies.

20 21

Marsh, Perriam, Woods Peiró, and Zunzunegui, ‘Comedy and Musicals’, 193–223. Lynda Johnston, ‘Reading the Sexed Bodies and Spaces of Gym’, in Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile, eds, Places Through the Body (London and New York: Routledge, 1998) 182–96, 182.

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Nonetheless, as the story progresses and Pepito’s scams are unveiled, this construction of the body is contested. This is particularly evident in the last dinner party, when Pepito’s tricks are exposed and his victims, who want to teach him a lesson, throw him into the water with his clothes on (see Figure 11.2). Ironically, Pepito does not know how to swim, which causes all those present to laugh, and confirms the fissure in the self-assured macho stereotype. In spite of this, he manages to get to the edge and grab the leg of the Conde, who also ends up in the pool. The scene finishes with everyone jumping into the water, as an act of forgiveness and shared responsibility, in a merrymaking erasure of the conflicting encounters generated at the beginning, in the same swimming pool that now unites then. Although there are distinctive similarities between the gym spaces described by Johnston and swimming pools, such as the formation of segregated gender spaces (for example, the women-only sessions and the male fast lanes), the socio-political structures of a municipal swimming pool tend to deconstruct the female/male binary. In his Social History of Swimming Pools in America, Jeff Wiltse describes the site’s peculiar feature of bringing together people from different backgrounds in the following terms: People who might otherwise come in no closer contact than passing on the street, now waited in line together, undressed next to one another, and shared the same water. The visual and physical intimacy that accompanied swimming made municipal pools intensely contested civic spaces.22

Although the social and political situation in Spain was not the same as that described by Wiltse in a segregated America, inner city municipal pools on the Iberian Peninsula were also sites of social struggle, where people from different classes and cultural backgrounds were forced to share their leisure time in quite an intimate way – a situation that started to change in the 1980s with the proliferation of private pools. Municipal pools

22

Jeff Wiltse, ‘Introduction: “Just Don’t Touch the Water”’, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (United States of America: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007) 1–7, 3.

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were melting pots where class and gender divisions tended to dissolve, as the film Pepito Piscina demonstrates, mixing together a trickster proletariat with members of the bourgeoisie, feminized males and masculinized women, as well as with people of all ages. In this vein, the presence of the Conde, a homosexual character, although constructed in a caricatured way as a queer man exuding femininity, is also significant. As Alejandro Melero Salvador reminds us, in his article on the new sexual politics in the cinema of the transition to democracy, until 1979 homosexuality remained illegal in Spain, along with adultery and drug-taking, three topics that were constantly present in the films of the time and, therefore, which exhibited provocative societal transformations.23 Additionally, the film demonstrates how attitudes about the body and cultural standards of public decency had changed. The figures of Tip and Coll, two famous comedians of the 1960s and 1970s, appear in Pepito Piscina to add an extra dimension of humour that diminishes tensions in favour of an entertainment factor. Their cameo role finds them in the film sunbathing in their trademark dinner jackets, transforming the swimming pool into a space where anything is possible – even the presence of Romeo and Juliet in their renaissance outfits, walking by the pool’s edge. In the 1960s and 1970s, comedy’s capacity to elude partially classificatory discourse allowed a timid treatment of previously forbidden topics. This tenet takes its cue from Marsh’s analysis of the Spanish genre, but also from the influential work of André Bazin, who analysed comedy in American cinema in terms of it being the most serious genre in Hollywood, ‘in the sense that it reflected, through the comic mode, the deepest moral and social beliefs of American life’.24 The same remark can be applied to Spanish comedy of the Transition. The film analysed in this chapter, which can be considered as part of the Landismo and destape films, reflected the complex moral and social beliefs of Spanish society of the time, and did so

23 24

Alejandro Melero Salvador, ‘New Sexual Politics in the Cinema of the Transition to Democracy: de la Iglesia’s El Diputado (1978)’, in Steven Marsh and Parvati Nair, eds, Gender and Spanish Cinema (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2004) 87–102, 88. André Bazin, The Cinema of Cruelty (New York: Seaver Books, 1982), 35.

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by bringing together contested identities and gender roles in the carefree environment of a municipal swimming pool. The swimming pool puts into play the representation of certain stereotypes and gender conventions, particularly significant at a transitional time when these roles were being called into question. Following Wiltse’s reflections on swimming pools as public spaces in America, I have argued that the public pools shown in Pepito Piscina portray a vibrant community life, a counterbalance to the segmenting and alienating aspects of modern life that arose with the opening up of Spanish culture to a broader European way of life. As a pleasure-centered site, the pool facilitates the carnivalesque interactions and bodily exposure that were in tune with the destape, yet still retains certain formal characteristics of earlier productions from Franco’s time. The setting thus helps the filmmaker portray the liberation of men from the bonds of traditional masculinity and the changing role of women in society. But it does so in an ambiguous way, one that still allows room for nostalgic feelings towards old customs. The main character played by Fernando Esteso has since become a popular icon of the macho, body-conscious and narrow-minded provincial male who comes out every summer when the pools reopen, making a fool of himself with a performance exuding hyper-masculinity. The character has acquired mythical resonance, anticipating the shameless macho figure later played by Javier Bardem in Bigas Luna’s trilogy.25 Pepito Piscina manifests the ways in which comedies of the transition now tend to be read more in reactionary terms, rather than as conflicting passages to democracy.

25

Chris Perriam, Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema, 93–119.

Matilda Mroz

12 The Aesthetics of Overflow: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) in Duration

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s penultimate film, Russian poet Andrei Gorchakov is set adrift in Italy, ostensibly researching the life of Pavel Sosnovsky, a Russian composer who had lived in Italy and had committed suicide upon his return to Russia.1 At the edge of the pool of St Catherine in the village of Bagno Vignoni, Andrei encounters Domenico; according to the village’s residents and the guests of the hotel, Domenico is a lunatic. Andrei is drawn to Domenico, however, perhaps recognizing that both men suffer from a failure of containment. Domenico locked up his family for seven years to await the end of the world, before his wife and children escaped, while Andrei’s visions of his family in the Russian countryside continually intrude onto his present, refusing to be contained within the space of the past. Andrei is suffering from a nearly debilitating nostalgia. Following the encounter of the two men, the identities of Andrei and Domenico begin to merge and overflow into one another, until Andrei takes it upon himself to complete Domenico’s ultimate errand: to save all of mankind by crossing the pool of St Catherine with a lit candle. While Andrei crosses the pool in a continuous long-take lasting just over nine minutes, at the end of which he collapses and dies, Domenico sets himself alight at a demonstration in Rome, becoming a human candle. The pool in Bagno Vignoni is named after Catherine of Siena, who was brought to the popular thermal baths in the Fourteenth Century in order to dissuade her from joining a Dominican order. Catherine, according to the mythology, entered the pool not to heal, but to scald herself, recovering

1

Nostalghia, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. Opera Film Produzione. Italy/Soviet Union, 1983.

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only when she was allowed to join the order and dedicate her life to God.2 There are a number of Christological and messianic resonances in the film that partially dovetail with this mythology.3 The bathers floating in the pool are tourists who are attracted to the thermal waters for superficial health benefits. While they cast judgement on Domenico like a floating chorus, Domenico sees their actions as blasphemous; they seek the pool, he suggests, in order to live forever. His own mission is to save humanity, partly by self-immolation, a trajectory closer to St Catherine’s path. This action cannot be conducted within the space of the pool as it initially appears; it is only when the pool has been emptied of both bathers and most of its water that Andrei can fulfil Domenico’s redemptive vision. The space of the pool is, then, one of change and flux, a space where one character merges with another, a space of superficiality, judgement and eternal life which modulates into a place of suffering, death and redemption. The space of the pool and its elements (eroded stone, columns, water, steam) as well as its cinematographic rendering (the exploration of haptic surfaces and unfathomable depths, long tracking shots) continually recur in the film’s other spaces, as though this most central space for the film were being stamped across all others, or as though the pool space and its elements have overflowed the boundaries that frame it, spilling into other frames and other spaces. This spatial overflow resonates with a particular vision of duration, formulated by Henri Bergson, and revised by Gilles Deleuze, in which past, present and future are interpenetrating categories that flow into each other, in a process of ‘mutual penetration, an interconnexion and organization of elements’.4 Bergsonian duration is ‘defined less by succession than by coexistence.’5 While it is clear that, in one sense, the film’s scenes succeed one another and proceed through a chronological, linear time (the time of viewing), the way in which the film structures its 2 3 4 5

Sigrid Undset, Catherine of Siena (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 33–4. For a detailed discussion, see Gerard Loughlin, ‘The Long-take: Messianic Time in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia’, Journal for Cultural Research, 13/3–4 (2009), 365–79. Henri Bergson, ‘The Idea of Duration’, in Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey, eds, Henri Bergson: Key Writings (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), 60. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 49–77, 60.

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spatial regions ensures the presence of each region within the next, so that they do not seem to succeed one another, but rather co-exist: the pool, like the past, persists. The pool functions as a microcosm of the film’s temporal layering. Not only does it interweave Andrei-Domenico’s personal histories with Christological mythology, but the pool’s space also gestures towards a wider and greater ‘universe memory’, a non-anthropocentric, elemental force, in the form of the geothermal springs that emerge from the Earth’s very core.6 In order to arrive at a more detailed analysis of the region of the pool, it seems logical first to consider the nature of nostalgia and temporality presented in the film. As Svetlana Boym has argued, nostalgia is both spatial – a longing for a different space – and temporal – a longing for a different time.7 The film visualizes this longing by inserting into Andrei’s Italian ‘present’ scenes from his Russian ‘past’, as rendered through the transfigurative lens of nostalgia. The visions of Russia are fluidly interwoven through editing patterns and sound. For example, as Andrei converses with Eugenia in their hotel lobby, he turns his head to see his wife, shot in the sepia tones used for the scenes in the Russian countryside. The shot-reverse shot directly connects the realms of memory and present. The sounds of dripping water and Eugenia’s voice create a sound bridge between the different spaces. According to Bird, the former sound in particular is significant, as it suggests Andrei’s ‘flows of desire’ ‘welling up’ and being redirected from Eugenia to (the image of ) his wife.8 In the film’s final image, past and present pulsate within a single frame, as Andrei’s Russian dacha is shown to lie within the ruins of a grand Italian cathedral. While the dacha was built within this space for the purposes of the film’s production, the effect is one of superimposition. In this sense, it recalls Boym’s statement that ‘a cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images – of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday 6 7 8

David Martin-Jones, ‘Archival Landscapes and a Non-Anthropocentric “Universe Memory”’, Third Text, 27/6 (2013), 707–22, 710. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xv. Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 178.

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life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface’.9 The (figural) superimposition in this final scene is an image of overflow, where past and present permeate each other. Andrei exhibits the symptoms of what Boym has termed ‘reflective nostalgia’, in which the nostalgic lingers on the ruins and traces of the past, ‘resist[s] the pressure of external efficiency and take[s] sensual delight in the texture of time not measurable by clocks and calendars’.10 From the film’s first Italian scene, Andrei is temporally inefficient, out of time: he no longer wishes to see the painting of Madonna del Parto that they have driven to the countryside for. He seems continually unaware of clock time; at the poolside, for example, he does not know if it is seven o’clock in the morning or evening. The film intertwines reflective nostalgia with a conflicting tendency, that of ‘restorative nostalgia’, which seeks to rebuild the lost home and reconstruct the monuments of the past.11 For the restorative nostalgic, ‘the past is not a duration but a perfect snapshot.’12 The sepia-toned Russian scenes draw on the aesthetics of photography, with still figures artfully spaced across the frame. Such an aesthetic evokes the promise of photography’s indexicality, connected to the desire to capture and archive passing time, as Mary Ann Doane has shown.13 However, interspersed with moments of stillness in these sepia scenes are movements of a floating slowmotion that make it appear as though the characters were walking through water, echoing the movements of the bathers in St Catherine’s pool. These movements place duration back into the ‘snapshot’, overflowing the container of the still photograph. The photographic aesthetic itself overflows from the Russian scenes; a similar use of stasis with slow motion, tableauvivant and photographic spacing is notable on the steps of Rome where Domenico burns himself alive, where only the occasional movements of some of the spectators betray the lived duration of the image. 9 10 11 12 13

Boym, xiii–iv. Boym, 49. Boym, 41. Boym, 49. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 16.

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While we may be encouraged to see certain elements of the film’s interspersing of past and present as symptomatic of Andrei’s nostalgia, however, the film’s vision of temporality is not necessarily motivated by any particular character and is rather a vision of the operation of time as such. Nostalghia depicts and enacts a vision of duration that may be seen as Bergsonian, in which the present moment cannot be reduced to a ‘mathematical instant’ that separates past from future. What we call the ‘present’, Bergson wrote, ‘has one foot in my past and another in my future. In my past, first, because “the moment in which I am speaking is already far from me”; in my future, next, because this moment is impending over the future: it is to the future that I am tending […]’14 Our present perceptions retain a ‘reservoir of connections with the past as well as a close anticipation of the imminent future.’15 The ‘present’ moment has fluid boundaries and is not a self-contained and clear-cut instant. The present moment must be seen to include memories of previous ‘presents’ that continue to ‘generate sensations and cannot, except arbitrarily, be cut off from the present.’16 Nostalghia visualizes this vision of porous presents, where elements spill over from one frame to the next. In the film’s opening scene, for example, a Russian folk song plays over the soundtrack, while the camera positions itself on the top of a hillside; this sepia-toned shot is of the Russian countryside. Fog emerges from the left hand side of the frame, moving towards the right. Soon, an opera piece is introduced into the soundtrack, but rather than replacing the folk song, the two musical pieces are interwoven together. When the scene changes to an Italian hillside, fog is also moving from the left hand side of the frame to the right, as though it has spilled over from the previous frame. In the church in Monterchi, a woman wearing a white shawl releases tiny birds into the air; the feathers and shawl flow into the next shot of the Russian countryside, showing Andrei with the shawl at his feet. Twice in the film, an ‘impossible’ tracking shot shows us the same

14 15 16

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Dover Publications, 2004), 177. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 173. Grosz, 176–77.

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character standing seemingly ‘next to’ themselves, as though they overflow their present frame. Taking a cue from the steaming water of the pool, many of the film’s images speak to the idea of overflow in ways that seem to resonate with the film’s thematic concerns related to the leakages between identities, past and present, memory and perception. Such images are often liquid in form: dripping candle wax, falling rain, jars and bottles overflowing with water, blood and tears seeping from human beings, milk gushing from a bottle, objects seen underwater and losing their fixed dimensions. Tarkovsky was often questioned about the meanings behind his perhaps obsessive use of the natural elements in his films, particularly water, to which he would offer non-specific answers such as ‘water is simply water and rain is intended to convey the experience of rain.’17 Of course, as texts such as Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams, not to mention numerous analyses of Tarkovsky’s films, so eloquently show, water and other liquids carry a multitude of symbolic and poetic resonances, which there is not room to enumerate here.18 It is possible, however, to see these overflows, albeit thematically resonant, as themselves overflowing the meaningful and symbolic containers that we may attempt to construct for them. This process of overflow is reminiscent of the writing on the informe by Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois, stemming in part from Roland Barthes’s analysis of George Bataille’s Story of the Eye.19 In this ‘story of an object’ rather than of characters, Barthes argues that the object and its properties, the eye and its moistness, migrate from image to image, to become eggs, genitals, saucers of milk, and so on.20 Krauss and Bois argue that this betrays an operation of formlessness that 17 18 19 20

Tarkovsky cited by Angela Dalle Vache, Cinema and Painting (London: Athlone, 1996), 137. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas: The Pegasus Foundation, 1983). Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone, 1997). Roland Barthes, ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’, in Story of the Eye, Georges Bataille (London: Penguin, 1982), 119–27, 119.

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continually displaces meaning, instead provoking a rhythmic pulsation, which ‘annuls metaphor through metaphoric excess.’21 In contrast to a transcendental allegorical schema, the slippage between Nostalghia’s different elements may also reveal an elasticity of meaning where images are no longer easily ‘impressed into the service of meaning.’22 As I have argued elsewhere, it is then particularly apt that the film repeatedly features fluid materials that can continually transform into different shapes.23 As Luce Irigaray has written, fluids ‘resist adequate symbolisation and serve as a constant reminder of the powerlessness of the logic of solids to represent all of nature’s characteristics.’24 Fluid structures, as Olkowski emphasizes, are part of an ontology of change.25 As much as Nostalghia is a story of characters (or, perhaps, figures becoming other figures), it is also a story of fluids that refuse to be contained within a space, for example of the pool, or within a frame. There is a particular non-anthropocentricism in many of the film’s compositions, where the human characters are not privileged, and they are only one element among others. Drawing on Tarkovsky’s own statement that ‘the actor is part of the composition, like a tree, like water’, Pallasmaa argues that humans within his films tend to be presented as more object than character.26 This is often a matter of lighting: in Andrei’s hotel room, for example, he appears as a silhouette in long-shot, while lights from windows, refracted by rain and reflected in mirrors, illuminate variegated textures on the walls; in the hotel corridor, Andrei and Eugenia are thrown into shadow, while, at the centre of the depth perspective, an aged statue and its watery reflection in the floor is brightly lit. Such compositions have the effect of moving us away

21 22 23 24 25 26

Krauss and Bois, 32. Krauss and Bois, 146. Matilda Mroz, Temporality and Film Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 146. Irigaray cited by Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 63. Olkowski, 68. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema (Helsinki: Rakennustieto Publishing, 1999), 75.

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from individual memory, nostalgia and consciousness, instead opening out a vision of how, as Martin-Jones puts it, ‘time’s various layers encompass us’, of ‘the way in which we exist in time, in a giant virtual memory bank, which shifts and turns around us.’27 We can think of the film’s main regions (Monterchi church, pool, Andrei’s hotel room, Domenico’s house, flooded church, Russian countryside) as sheets or layers of time, each of which gesture towards the ‘whole’ of the film. The ways in which each region is framed and filmed, and the elements contained within each region, can be found in the film’s other spaces, in expanded or contracted forms. Elements, surfaces, depths, geometries and textures overflow the boundaries of particular regions, echoing the spaces that have come before, and become echoed within spaces yet to come. These regions can be thought of as different circles of the past, in Deleuzian terms: the past appears as the coexistence of circles which are more or less dilated or contracted, each one of which contains everything at the same time […] between the past as pre-existence in general and the present as infinitely contracted past there are, therefore, all the circles of the past constituting so many stretched or shrunk regions, strata and sheets: each region with its own characteristics, its ‘tones’, its ‘aspects’, its ‘singularities’, its ‘shining points’ and its ‘dominant’ themes.28

It must be noted that a Bergsonian or Deleuzian schema cannot be unproblematically laid over the entire film, with each space fitting perfectly into the mould of an ideal expanded or contracted circle of past; even this framework, the film overflows. Nevertheless, there are powerful parallels that justify this dialogue. Central to the durational aesthetic is the region of the pool, through the three shots that make up its introduction within the film, and the single take at the film’s completion. This region or layer of time expands outwards to infect other scenes, while contracting within itself so many of the elements that make up the film’s ‘whole’.

27 28

Martin-Jones, 714. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 96.

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Our first vision of the pool region is a composition in depth: a stone, pillared outdoor walkway, through which Domenico and a dog move toward the camera. Tracking left, the camera passes over the pool proper, which is set against a flat, crumbling wall in the background. The camera tracks at an angle that allows depths to open up behind and beyond the space. The wall of the pool immediately before the camera is kept in sharp focus in the foreground. The walls surrounding the pool are reflected in wavy lines on the pool’s surface. At one stage, the camera passes over glass bottles and discarded clothing on the pool’s edge. The pool’s actual parameters are oblique in places, softened by fog, while this same substance covers most of the surface of the water, again gesturing toward the depths that lie beneath a palpable surface. The tracking shot merges together a number of different, though interpenetrating, rhythms that demand our attention: the largely banal conversation of the bathers as well as the stories regarding Andrei and Sosnovsky, the interior thoughts of Domenico, and the movements of the camera, which have their own rhythm and attention, and allow Domenico and the other characters to drift in and out of frame, focusing instead, in a non-anthropocentric fashion, on spaces, their surfaces and depths. The next shot immerses us in the water with the bathers, and this steaming thermal element takes up a significant proportion of the frame. The frame is suffused with a blue haze, refracted through the steam. The swimmers drift slowly, only their heads and shoulders visible above the waterline, while the camera drifts alongside them, as though it were another swimmer. In the next cut, the camera is back in the pillared walkway, this time picking up Andrei as he walks, while framing in long-shot Eugenia and Domenico, who has dipped his feet in the pool and come out to ask Eugenia for a cigarette, which she has trouble lighting (‘it’s gone out’). What of the film’s ‘whole’ do these three shots contract or expand? For one thing, they are suggestive of the merging of Andrei and Domenico. The first shot presents a composition in depth that is temporalized: Andrei is positioned in the background, but will soon move to the foreground to ‘replace’ Domenico in his redemptive task. In Deleuzian thought, depth of field explores a ‘region of past’ within a single frame instead of enacting a chronological succession through

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editing.29 The dog has linked them already: it has emerged from Andrei’s Russian visions, from his hotel room, and migrated to become Domenico’s ‘Zoe’. The camera follows first Domenico then Andrei, but in between these two tracks is the insert within the pool, a suggestion that the two men currently remain separated from each other and their task by the thermal pool and its inhabitants. The first shot in particular manages to at once ‘graze’, in Marks’s term, the eroded texture of the pool as well gesturing towards hidden depths, activating an oscillation or pulsation of contrary elements that is also seen in the film’s final composition.30 The sharpness of the textures of erosion and dilapidation encourage a thematic engagement with the vicissitudes of passing time; nostalgia thus seems both enacted and conceptualized. Even the seemingly innocuous lighting of the cigarette is a contraction of Domenico’s self-immolation and Andrei’s final crossing. Deleuze writes of sheets of past as ‘distinct levels, each one of which contains the whole of our past, but in a more or less contracted state’; one can speak of ‘the regions of the past all coexisting, all “repeating” one another.’31 It is this kind of vision of time that the film approaches by redistributing objects, depths, surfaces, textures and elements in each region of the film. In the church of the film’s opening, the camera frames the columned space in depth, the echoing footsteps of people carrying candles are an expanded procession of Andrei’s final journey across the pool. Andrei’s hotel room is suffused with blue light and the reflections of rain water; sparsely furnished, the interior contracts the pool’s space, even containing two portals to depth on either side of the room in the form of the bathroom and its mirror, and the window with its reflections of rain, just as the pool’s flat façade is bordered by two columns of depth. Columns frame the corridor of the hotel lobby, while the statue’s reflection undulates on the polished floor as it would in water. Domenico’s house (Figure 12.1) appears as an emptied pool, with water flooding its floors, and

29 30 31

Deleuze, Cinema 2, 105. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 162. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 61.

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Figure 12.1 The flooded interior of Domenico’s house in Nostalghia (Opera Film Produzione/Rai 2/Sovinfilm, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983).

an expansion and contraction of other constellations of objects from the film: bottles, candles, lace, mirrors, book. Like the space of the church and pool, columns within Domenico’s house suggest a greater depth perspective, while at other times, the camera grazes eroded textures in close-up. It is in Domenico’s house that sepia-coloured visions of Domenico’s family intrude onto the present, although there is no way of knowing whether these are Domenico’s memories or Andrei’s imaginings; as Bird notes, as Andrei ‘merges with Domenico, it is unclear whose imagination is dictating the terms.’32 When Andrei wanders into a ruined and flooded church, the camera similarly pans closely over its eroded stone walls and constellation of objects: a glass bottle, a book, a fire. In Andrei’s dream or vision, his identity overspills his physical body: when he looks at himself in a mirror, Domenico looks back.

32

Bird, 179.

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Andrei’s final crossing of the pool, which is successful after the third attempt, compresses within itself, as Bird writes, the entire narrative duration of the film; the long-take echoes, structurally, the first pool scene, and the arrival at Domenico’s house, in its lateral tracks back and forth that rest finally on the third repetition.33 It was also intended to compress within itself something more than just the film’s thematic and aesthetic strategies: Tarkovsky wanted Andrei’s journey to be seen as encompassing an ‘entire human life in one shot, without any editing, from beginning to end, from birth to the very moment of death.’34 At the end of the film, the pool has been emptied of its ‘healing’ water, and most of its human inhabitants and concerns. Cleaners silently scoop up the calcified objects that they have left behind: a bicycle, coins, glass bottles, almost as though the human bathers that we saw initially have become thoroughly objectified. Visible now are the bubbling springs of sulphuric water at the pool’s base. The final crossing of the pool thus moves us beyond the human and beyond built structures, gesturing to a powerful non-anthropocentric force that the pool only pretends to contain. It is a visual expression of the fact that ‘it is we who are internal to time, not the other way around’, of how duration encompasses us.35

33 34 35

Bird, 192–3. Bird, 192. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 80.

Micah Trippe

13 Urban Guerilla Playfare, or Skating through Empty Cinematic Pools in Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001)

To view the empty swimming pools of 1970s Los Angeles in the film Dogtown and Z-Boys (Stacy Peralta, 2001) is to take part in a unique reconfiguration of urban space. This essay attempts to examine how the empty swimming pools of 1970s Los Angeles are viewed on film – in relationship to the appropriation of McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, New York during the 2000s – and strives to situate the swimming pool as a unique urban and cinematic space. The essay proposes to examine the pools in the film as a space within the space of the cinema. In turn, the cinema lies within the city, which is also a unique space, and which contains the pools that are filmed (and watched) in the cinemas of those cities. This essay considers the implications of such a spatial relationship when viewing Dogtown and Z-Boys. In doing so, the essay suggests that the viewing of cinematic swimming pools in Dogtown and Z-Boys acts as a prototype for the acquisition, repurposing and alterations of urban space – or urban guerilla ‘playfare’ – that cinema in general offers the viewer. The massive concrete playground alluded to in the film’s epigraph, which reads, ‘two hundred years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential (Craig Stecyk, 1975)’ is mostly composed of empty swimming pools, whose open, inviting fixtures proved fertile playgrounds for the skaters of 1970s Los Angeles. As a consequence of a drought, Los Angeles pools were drained in the 1970s and co-opted by the skaters for use as mini skate parks. These skaters were mostly natives of low-income neighborhoods of Los Angeles in and around Venice Beach, nicknamed Dogtown. They skated in the dangerous waters of the Pacific Ocean, near the decaying infrastructure of the Venice

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Beach boardwalk, as detailed in the opening of the film. These denizens of Dogtown were thus strangers far from familiar territory when invading the pools of high-income neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles. The politics and poetics of these pools will be examined in terms of how they formed a type of heterotopia, to borrow Michel Foucault’s term, in 1970s Los Angeles, and how they do so in the film itself. The surfersturned-skaters of Dogtown are a classic example of what one might term ‘individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm’.1 The film is careful to depict Dogtown as a distinct society within Los Angeles in the 1970s. Within this subculture, swimming pools acted as a heterotopia with ‘a precise and determined function’ for these skaters that was distinct from their intended use by the owners of the houses.2 The essay postulates that in Dogtown and Z-Boys, swimming pools form not only a physical, but also a cinematic horizon, latent with political undertow in twentieth and twenty-first century urban America. Their demolition and gentrification formed the foundation of urban playgrounds in the 1970s, and their relevance continues to be felt in developments such as the recent renovation of McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, New York. Michel Foucault argued that they are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which […] all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality […] these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about.3

One can argue that cinemas and pools are both heterotopias in this sense, and a swimming pool on a screen in a cinema presents a heterotopia within a heterotopia, a mirror effect. A viewer of Dogtown and Z-Boys

1 2 3

Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, Architecture /  Mouvement / Continuité October 1984 [‘Des Espace Autres’, March 1967, translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec], 4. Ibid. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 3–4.

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witnesses and enacts his or her own ‘contestation of the space in which we live’.4 The piquancy of this experience tilts towards irony for a viewer of Dogtown and Z-Boys, when one considers the reverse politics of McCarren Park Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The viewing of Dogtown and Z-Boys, then, whether in a cinema, at home, or on a computer, becomes a journey into the past, a way of visiting those pools whose walls were briefly drained and put to other uses in the skateboarding, halcyon days of 1970s Los Angeles. The film intentionally invites this nostalgic mode, through interviews with those who were there. One might argue that the process of appropriation as played out in cinematic idylls such as Dogtown and Z-Boys offers a particular strategy of resistance to the larger processes of gentrification that have swept through the cities of the United States over the last quarter of a century, reconfiguring the class politics and income thresholds of residents in inner city neighborhoods of both Los Angeles and New York. This process gained acute attention in the Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods of Brooklyn, where McCarren Park Pool is located, but finds an altogether different expression in Dogtown and Z-Boys. A full and fair examination of cinema’s political edge in these processes lies outside the bounds of this essay. But of particular note, in relation to what has transpired in cities of the United States over the last quarter of a century, is the fact that the reclamation of swimming pools in Dogtown and Z-Boys is the reverse of gentrification in Brooklyn. The swimming pool is a potent symbol of Los Angeles, one explored in myriad ways, most notably in the works of David Hockney. But while Hockney ‘employed the swimming pool as a symbol of “the good life,” the search for paradise in elite hideaways; the allure of sensuality, beauty, and leisure; and, above all, a chance to play with light and color’, Dogtown and Z-Boys take the swimming pool as an opportunity for something rather different.5

4 5

Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 4. Jonathan Spaulding, ‘On ‘L. A.: Light / Motion / Dreams: Developing an Exhibition on the Natural and Cultural History of Los Angeles’, Environmental History 10/2 (2005), 295–313, 301.

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During the droughts of the 1970s, then, skateboarders from lowincome neighborhoods in Los Angeles exploited the restrictions that the City of Los Angeles had placed on swimming pool owners, preventing them from filling them, in order to catapult their sport to a spatial practice of what was, in essence, urban guerilla playfare. Often chased off the property under threat of violence, these skateboarders were invading wealthy enclaves of Los Angeles for the purpose of sport and play. Indeed, as Craig Stycek, the photographer who documented their activities states, ‘skaters by their very nature are urban guerillas: they make everyday use of the useless artifacts of the technological burden, and employ the handiwork of the government/corporate structure in a thousand ways that the original architects could never dream of ’. The most famous of the empty swimming pools in which the Z-Boys skated was one that was, ironically, sanctioned. A young boy whose family lived on a wealthy estate in north Santa Monica asked his father to drain the pool on the grounds and allow the skaters free reign.6 His request was granted and led to a skateboarding residency, and to some of the more sustained images of skating in empty pools in the course of the film. Narrator Sean Penn comments that, ‘when the Z-Boys began skating in empty swimming pools, they destroyed the status quo and changed the idea of what was possible’. The empty swimming pool is thus a renegade image, woven into the fabric of what a city might be, rather than what it is. While it is too sweeping an argument to insist that all swimming pools play such a role in cinema, this spatial approach allows for fruitful interpretations of pool scenes from Jean Vigo’s La Natation par Jean Taris (Jean Taris, Swimming Champion, 1931) to The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), interpretations that lie outside the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, the idea that swimming pools form a heterotopia put to use by various parties for different purposes (as rehearsed above), gains further traction when one conceives a cinema itself as a heterotopia within the city in which it is

6

The young boy was in fact dying, and no doubt he welcomed the skateboarders due to their extraordinary physical prowess, which perhaps explains the parents’ conciliation.

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housed. Scholars such as Edward Dimendberg and Giuliana Bruno have presented persuasive and tantalizing interpretations of urban locales on film as unique spaces through which we travel, from the city as a tourist destination for those who could not otherwise visit, to film noir’s ‘powerful allegory for the disappearance of familiar architectural landmarks and neighborhoods’ in New York City after 1939.7 Yet the swimming pool itself has remained relatively untouched as a unique cinematic space, an omission this volume attempts to correct. Of central concern in this essay is how this situation, in which the pool is a space within the cinema, which in turn lies within the city that contains the pools, which are then filmed and watched in the cinemas of those cities, affects the viewing of the film, and what happens in the process of viewing it. Taken at its broadest remit, this approach to viewing a film concerns the ways in which film as a medium and cinema as the structure and network that houses the viewing of that medium presents, in a trip to the cinema and a viewing of the film, a way to reconfigure a city, or, in the words of Giuliana Bruno, ‘turning the city into a cinematic event: the city as a mechanism that moves at a specific speed, tempo, rhythm’.8 Curiously, Dogtown and Z-Boys is a film that directly addresses architecture without acknowledging this relationship. A voice-over proclaims, in relation to Los Angeles and contemporary cities in general, that the skateboarders’ appropriation of swimming pools, and other urban spaces, was ‘more human than what the architects originally planned’. In bringing their practices to a film, and to a cinema, director Stacy Peralta, himself once a Z-Boy, extends this humane vision to cinemagoers as well, allowing them to remember, relive and reappropriate these spaces themselves. Consider, for example, the following sequence, near the beginning of the film: a teenager (who is in fact Jay Adams, the most famous of the Z-Boys) in jeans, a black t-shirt, with long flowing, platinum-blonde hair,

7 8

See Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion (London: Verso, 2004), 19–20, and Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 130. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 22.

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the visual epitome of the world’s popular conception of Los Angeles, skateboards along the bare walls of a swimming pool, his hand outstretched to steady himself, or save himself in the event of a fall. This is followed by a very brief black and white shot of graffiti on a wall, then by a young man skating up the side of a pool, then a surfer, then several still shots of skaters. After the shots of the skaters in the pools, several shots of the skaters surfing in the Pacific follow. The film thus sets up a relationship between the pools and the ocean, as if they were interchangeable. Indeed, the sturdy walls of the empty swimming pools allowed the surfers-cum-skaters to perfect moves they had initially attempted in the waves of the Pacific. As a viewer sits in a darkened cinema or at home in front of a computer or television, these images offer the viewer a visual journey through the time and place of Dogtown and Z-Boys. This process was also part of the original photographs of the Z-Boys taken in the 1970s. As one surfer recalls in the film, ‘Craig [Stecyk] had a way of looking at situation, photographing it, writing about it, and then giving it to kids, and sparking kids’ imagination’. Children could thus imagine being part of Dogtown through Stecyk’s photographs. Those children are, of course, potential adult viewers of the film, which is offered as a trip down memory lane, another attempt not only to live through the moment, but also to travel through those empty pools. Most potently for Dogtown and Z-Boys, the shots of skaters in the pools offer the only access to those empty pools, now filled and used by their owners. While a similar argument can be made for any space or city filmed at a particular moment gone by, the presence of the empty swimming pool in Dogtown and Z-Boys demonstrates further film’s ability to illuminate a vanquished urban space. At one point, the film progresses through a montage of black-and-white images featuring long-haired skaters in shorts and a t-shirt. They are suspended in air over a pool, and cypress trees form a quotidian backdrop familiar to any Angeleno, but the scene is far from everyday. The film invites further nostalgia by invoking bygone analogue technologies, such as Polaroid pictures and flipbooks, during the montage. What is the purpose of these strategies? After this montage, Henry Rollins comments during an interview that the photos ‘really translated the velocity of the move … they showed a lifestyle’. One is tempted to imagine

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that the film is simply offering a new generation the same viewing experience, and in fact, director Stacy Peralta seems to have gone no further in his thinking than this nostalgic possibility. However, the elapsed time between the 1970s and the present, in addition to the medium of moving images rather than photography, allows for a voyage. One can thus view cinema as the modern way of being somewhere else, a spatial practice of moving through cities that extends far beyond the original travelogues of the Lumière brothers, the ethnographic portraits of the Archives de la planète, the ‘cinema of attractions’, or the city symphonies of the 1920s. Movement through urban spaces also forms an integral part of more recent histories of the moving image, from the opening sequence of Manhattan, to music videos such as Eva Husson’s ‘If I Know You’ for The Presets. This cinematic spatial practice allows for a more expansive view of ‘swimming’, ‘skating’ and indeed viewing Los Angeles in Dogtown and Z-Boys. Considering the practice of film within this expansive purview, one can argue that the film acts as its own manipulation of urban space, a process this essay calls urban guerilla playfare. The film is thus an extension of the various practices undertaken by the Z-Boys in the 1970s; it is an act of manipulating urban spaces for new purposes and invites viewers into that process via film. This playfare was available in the 1970s through skating and is made available again through watching the film at the time of its release, 2001, and in each subsequent viewing. As such, the historical context in which the film was released, viewed and received, seems pertinent to this playfare. The film goes some way toward explaining the reach of the Z-Boys’ reputation in the 1970s, and the reasons why the film is of interest beyond the confines of Los Angeles, or Southern California. Indeed, in speaking of the spectacle of the Z-Boys, Henry Rollins recounts during the film, growing up on the east coast of the United States, surrounded by snow, while reading and looking at pictures of skateboards in empty swimming pools, ‘we were living through it vicariously’. The phenomenon and influence of Dogtown stretched far beyond Los Angeles. As Mark Reiter, a 1970s New York skater, recounts of his attitude as a young man, ‘they break into people’s backyards and skate empty swimming pools. I’m in!’ The film offers a new opportunity to sign

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up. This opportunity has seemed ever more important for the likes of the Z-Boys in New York since the film’s release, as the case of McCarren Park Pool demonstrates. McCarren Park Pool is one of seventeen public swimming pools erected under the aegis of Robert Moses, the urban planner who transformed New York City during the early and mid-twentieth century.9 Popularly known as the Goliath vanquished by Jane Jacobs in her quest to save Greenwich Village from demolition, Moses’ influence extended far beyond that particular locale. Moses dramatically refashioned the city’s parks with playgrounds and pools and forced his agenda for urban planning on the city’s residents. Moses is now known as ‘the most reviled man in the history of American urban planning’.10 McCarren Park Pool was ‘one of 11 gigantic public pools [Moses] wanted to build throughout the city. When the federal government enabled the spending of about $10 million in Works Progress Administration funds, Moses pounced and used New Deal funds to finance the projects, including a 6,800-person-capacity outdoor pool in Greenpoint’.11 When it opened, it was the largest public pool in the world. In the United States recession of the 1970s, New York’s public infrastructure fell into disrepair. Just as a drought caused Los Angeles’ swimming pools to lie empty, so too bankruptcy and a lack of popular support led many of New York’s public swimming pools to fall into disrepair, unused and in need of renovation. McCarren Park Pool closed in 1984. New York’s public spaces offered other opportunities for skateboarders that Angelenos lacked, and perhaps for that reason the pools never became the haven of skaters. Still, the fate of the swimming pools echoes loudly across the coast, particularly for those who embrace the urban guerilla playfare of the Z-Boys.

9 10 11

Bruce Epperson, ‘Eminence Domain: Reassessing the Life and Public Works of Robert Moses’, Technology and Culture 48/4 (2007), 816–23, 817. Epperson, ‘Eminence Domain’, 816. Aaron Short, ‘The Politics of McCarren Park Pool’, accessed 15 August 2013.

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McCarren Park Pool has been touted as a large success for Michael Bloomberg’s rehabilitation of New York City’s parks, maligned as a centerpiece of gentrification, and the site of several melées between users of the pool who live in different neighborhoods.12 The politics of the pool are multi-stranded, but of particular interest in relation to Dogtown and Z-Boys are the uses to which the empty pool was put before it re-opened as a swimming pool. While in the 1980s and 1990s, after the pool closed, it was often the site of vandalism; in the late 2000s, the pool became a concert venue. The endeavor to turn the pool into a venue for outdoor summer concerts cost the city one million dollars. Many local residents felt that these concerts were a pivotal point in the gentrification of the surrounding Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods and helped speed the renovation of the pool. It is in the opposite relation of the pool to the city when comparing New York and Los Angeles that Dogtown and Z-Boys continues to act as a heterotopia for contemporary viewers. Indeed, Foucault argued that a mirror points to a ‘place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there’.13 Looking at the empty swimming pools of 1970s Los Angeles thus illuminates for us the spaces surrounding the pools and the spaces surrounding the viewer. While the real pools of 1970s Los Angeles occurred in a specific time and place, they occur to a viewer as newly present as a celluloid pool. They further illuminate the pools we ourselves may occupy outside the cinema, in the urban grounds and thoroughfares forever inviting us to play.

12 13

Accounts of McCarren Park Pool are drawn from Aaron Short’s article and the author’s personal experience. Also of recent interest is the protest over development of the South Bank Skate Park in London. See . Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 4.

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Figure 13.1 Jay Adams in Dogtown and Z-Boys (Agi Orsi Productions/Vans Off the Wall, dir. Stacy Peralta, 2001).

Figure 13.2 Skater in a pool with cypress trees in Dogtown and Z-Boys (Agi Orsi Productions/Vans Off the Wall, dir. Stacy Peralta, 2001).

Sophie Mayer

14

Gutta cavat lapidem: The Sonorous Politics of Lucrecia Martel’s Swimming Pools

You can just about hear it over the closing credits: the sound of the thermal pool that is the submerged centre of La niña santa [The Holy Girl] (2004), the second full-length feature from Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel. Part of the Latin American ‘buena onda,’ Martel is particularly concerned with the unseen, ‘disappeared’ and repressed as they float to the surface, a process both psychological and political that is represented literally through her use of swimming pools. Her films depict relations between the older bourgeoisie, complicit in the junta, and the emergent dispossessed generation post-junta and/or economic crisis. This is exemplified in La niña santa by hotel manager Helena, a former competitive diver, and her daughter, the titular holy girl Amalia. In the final scene, Amalia and her best friend Josefina swim out of the frame before the scene cuts to black, either erased by the adult forces they have set in motion, or escaping them; their voices and bodily movements persist tellingly on the soundtrack. Splashing, whispering, giggling, singing, the girls’ bodies are continuous with the water in the pool as it creates auditory distortions. Throughout the film, this spa/ce, which is both within and without the hotel, provides a sonorous marker that disturbs and connects the central characters. Only at the end of the film is it seen – ‘revealed’, to borrow the film’s religious language – through the typical crane shot that positions the surface of a swimming pool as equivalent to the cinema screen. Here, the pool, framed eccentrically on a diagonal and from a canted angle, is not commensurate with the rectangle of the screen; nor is the camera ever submerged. Far from providing either surface gloss or visual depth, the pool remains opaque, impenetrable and polyvalent. Its cinematicity – its polysemy and sensuality – are realized not through the eye but through the ear.

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Sound, as Kaja Silverman has noted, is a feminized aspect of cinema because it denotes interiority and porosity. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theory of the chora, the maternal matrix of sound-before-sense, Silverman suggests that film audio can therefore act as a formal register in which feminist filmmakers have challenged ocularcentric masculine fetishes and fantasies.1 In each of Martel’s films, the swimming pool offers an – albeit ambivalent – alternative maternality, a rebirthing undertaken by an adolescent female character as a contingent, partial and attempted rejection of the bourgeois, patriarchal milieu of her own mother. In each film, the pool mediates two female-female relationships: between two adolescent girls; and between one of the girls and her mother or, in La mujer sin cabeza [The Headless Woman] (2008), her aunt. In La niña santa, the pool represents the possibilities for liberation enfolded in Helena’s lost past, as well as the potentiality of Amalia’s future. When we first hear the pool, long before we see it, its echoic sonority marks and mirrors the appearance of Helena, when Dr Jano – who develops attractions to both Amalia and Helena – arrives at the hotel. Walking along the corridor, he is distracted by the quality of its sound; this is at once physical (the pool is on the other side of the opaque glass blocks that limn the right-hand side of corridor) and sensory, as we discover later that Jano visited the hotel as a student, conceiving a passion for Helena, who trained in the hotel’s (now empty) cold pool. As his ear is turned by the echo, so he catches sight of the now-adult Helena, talking to a handyman about a problem with the hotel’s pipes. Aural and aquatic blockages interlink with a visual distortion as a maid swings the hotel room door to, cutting off Jano’s sightline. As well as enmeshing sound and sight, the auditory distortion created by an enclosed body of water affects the body haptically, for characters and viewers alike: ‘The surprising result of this sound awareness is an embodied intellectual experience. [Martel’s] films emphasize the interpenetration

1

Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

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of hearing, seeing, touch and smell.’2 The presence of water leaks from sound to sight to skin-touch into interiority. As Adriana Cavarero insists, this impalpable absorption is the most radically disturbing potentiality of sound: ‘The play between vocal emission and acoustic perception necessarily involves the internal organs. It implicates a correspondence with the fleshy cavity that alludes to the deep body.’3 Helena exhibits a tinnitus caused by swimming that Jano diagnoses onstage at the close of the medical conference hosted at the hotel. A presentation at the conference about otoscopy is a marker of medical specularization of the interiority of the body, an invasive procedure connected, by Helena’s tinnitus, to water.4 Jano also suggests that the symptoms may be caused by, or imitate, Helena’s habit of falling asleep watching movies on late night TV; cinema, like the pool’s water, is an invasive, pollutive, distortive force. As demonstrated by Jano’s initial voyeurism, Martel is interrogating the intrusive male/cinematic gaze as a distortion in the visual field, one that intersects with and is frustrated by an auditory distortion that resonates with the feminine. Jano’s perversions – which parallel his medical training – translate auditory disruption into fleshly desire a second time when he follows the sound of a theremin being played in the street; using the opportunity of the crowd gathered to listen, he presses his crotch against Amalia’s buttocks. Associated with psychedelic music and science fiction film soundtracks of the 1970s, the theremin is the foundation of electronic music, invented in 1920 by Soviet scientist Leon Theremin, who subsequently designed bugging devices using the same technology.5 The only instrument to be played without being touched, the theremin’s eerie sound resonates with

2 3 4 5

Dominique Russell, ‘Lucrecia Martel: “A Decidedly Polyphonic Cinema”’, Jump Cut, 50 (2008) accessed 16 December 2013. Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman (Redwood City CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 4. Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Albert Glinsky, Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

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political paranoia, as well as vibrating – like the swimming pool – at the intersection of the palpable and audible. As if it were the sign Amalia seeks to confirm her religious vocation, the theremin follows Jano’s body to reside at the hotel, eventually being piped around the hotel’s sound system at the climactic moment when Josefina’s mother arrives to tell Helena that Jano has assaulted her daughter. The sonic thread of the theremin is audible as a narrative principle to the viewer, but oblique to the fragmented characters, raising the question of whether it is signal (señal is the word Amalia uses for ‘sign’) or noise. Water, similarly, is medium and message, signal and noise in Martel’s work; its transparency is often polluted, its presence on the soundtrack not always diegetic. La ciénaga [The Swamp] (2004) opens with the sounds of a storm, which takes a while to manifest diegetically, as Liz Greene analyses; the soundtrack is predictive, even oracular, oblique and portentous in the same way as much of the film’s dialogue.6 As Martel tells Haden Guest, ‘There are two aspects of sound that are extremely interesting to me – pure sound and sound that carries meaning, like conversation. In particular, how the rigid categories with which we typically organize our perception disappear when people are engaged in conversation.’7 Signal and noise are enmeshed in conversation, an ‘asymmetric reciprocity,’ to use Iris Marion Young’s term, in which each has to be open to the other.8 Like conversation, water erases all rigid categories and boundaries in Martel’s work, including the diegetic, ‘leaking’ the matter of the film into the end credits of La niña santa; the theremin passes into the non-diegetic soundtrack, along with the hotel band’s Hammond organ. Yet the louder electronic instruments cannot – quite – ‘drown out’ the playful, persistent sounds of adolescent femininity that continue beneath and beyond the closing track. Moreover, their entwined presence suggests that the 6 7 8

Liz Greene, ‘Swamped in Sound: Lucrecia Martel’s Sound Image in La Ciénaga/The Swamp’, Printed Project 15 (2012), 52–60. Haden Guest, ‘Lucrecia Martel’, Bomb 106 (2009). accessed 16 December 2013. Iris Marion Young, ‘Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought’, Constellations, 3/3 (1997), 340–63.

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swimming pool is itself a musical instrument and moreover a technology, in the Foucauldian sense, that extends the female body and voice into a public sphere in which it has previously been silenced or inaudible. This has been clear from the first scene in the pool space, wherein Amalia’s whispered invocation to the Virgin Mary is barely audible to the viewer yet louder than all the background conversations. Like the religious studies Amalia undertakes as part of an after-school group, the swimming pool creates feedback: it may amplify, but also distort, adolescent female subjectivity. The closing images of the film are blissful and utopian, as Josefina sheds both her clothes and her haute bourgeois mother’s prohibitions against using the thermal pool, and doubly so because so brief: a contingent moment of possibility before the support structures of family, friendship, class, religion and state are pulled away. Jose’s willingness to join Amalia in the pool marks a haptic honesty in contrast to her ambiguous dialogue; physically, she is in league with Amalia, moving and making sound with her, intervulnerable to sound waves as to water. Having betrayed Amalia’s secret to her disapproving mother, who is about to deliver it to Helena, Jose proclaims a bodily solidarity that can be read as simultaneously escapist – floating around in a pool of juvenile affect – and courageous, open to the transmissibility of Amalia’s fall. Martel stresses this intervulnerability as a quality of swimming pools in an interview with Chris Wisniewski for Reverse Shot. I don’t like swimming pools, because I have the feeling that they are always dirty, like an infection. At the same time, in Argentina, there are not many public swimming pools, so I think that the idea of having a cube of water just for a few people is like having a slave –to think that all of this water belongs to you as your property. I like to shoot in swimming pools, though, because it’s […] fluid. The sound outside and the waves inside the pool both touch you in the same way. I think there are a lot of similarities in perception – between being in a pool and being in the world.9

Infectiousness is the risk carried by fluid relations with others and with the world. This is a relational politics described by Elizabeth Povinelli, 9

Chris Wisniewski, ‘When Worlds Collide’, Reverse Shot accessed 16 December 2013.

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where she considers how a sore contracted during fieldwork in Belyuen, Australia, manifests her bodily assumption into an indigenous genealogy where reciprocity is traceable through infection.10 Legible only as a class stigma and medical problem in the US, the sore resembles the traces of infectious sociality in La niña santa: perversion, downward social mobility and sinfulness are all characterized as transferable and socially stigmatizing diseases, like (and analogized by) headlice. Even emotion risks infection: when Amalia cries about Jano, Josefina tells her to stop rubbing her eyes because, ‘You are filling your eyes with microbes.’ Self-touch is caught up into the expression of emotion as a potential health hazard, an embodied – and watery – gesture that impairs the body’s desired impermeability. The dichotomy of cleanliness and dirtiness, and their associates health and infection, are almost as basic to EuroWestern notions of culture as, in Lévi-Strauss’ formulation, ‘the raw and the cooked,’ and Martel’s films are by no means as willing to embrace/be embraced by infectious sociality as Povinelli is. Yet there are two qualities of the swimming pool that she names in her interview answer that appear to compel her, and her characters, to risk the intervulnerability of the pool. The first is, as is audible in La niña santa, the potent soundscape of the enclosed pool. As Martel tells Guest, ‘Sound is also the only truly tactile dimension of the cinema. It is the only way in which the cinema physically touches the spectator. Audio frequencies are experienced through the entire body.’11 The pervasive liquescent sonority of Martel’s films has been widely noted, as has the visual fetishization of water both falling and still.12 Water leaks across, drowns out, refreshes and stains the soundscapes of her films, often in parallel with canted angles and eccentric framing that dismember character bodies subject to desiring gazes. Amalia is mirrored by Momi in La ciénaga and Candita in La mujer sin cabeza, adolescent characters emerging from their chrysalids through 10 11 12

Elizabeth Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Towards a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Guest, ‘Lucrecia Martel’. Jeffrey M. Anderson, ‘The Nature of Water’, Combustible Cinema, accessed 16 December 2013.

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desire, which both deranges their embodiment and allows them to inhabit it fully. Simultaneously imitating the contorted social relations of the adults around them, for whom sexual desire is a repressed perversion, and – through their repetition with a difference – holding a mirror up to the troubled lassitude of Argentina’s post-dictatorship bourgeoisie, these hungry young women differ from their parents and teachers in their openness to an infectious sociality, expressed in each instance through swimming as an analogy to, and extension of, sexual exploration. Amalia actively seeks out Jano, believing that – by martyring herself to his sexual assault – she can save him, while her friend Josefina has pre-marital sex (either anal intercourse or frottage, the film leaves the question of penetration deliberately unclear) with her cousin Julian, while silencing him so she can deny the act. Quasi-incestuous intimacies are both analogical for the political complicity of the bourgeoisie and symptomatic of it in Martel’s films; at the same time, desire (like water) is full of possibility, as a force for changing that political blindness. As Martel says to Guest, in her films, ‘Desire is something that can’t be governed, that someone can feel toward any person, really […] Desire is always above the law, beyond limitations. Desire is precisely where we see that the world can be anything. I always try to make the camera see like a ten-year-old child.’ This embryonic sexuality is polymorphously perverse, signified through a suggestively quasi-autobiographical lesbian moment in each film. Amalia and Josefina, cocooned in the hotel laundry and their own performative religiosity, kiss passionately; Momi – the only person in the family who dares to swim in the polluted swimming pool – and the family’s indigenous maid Isabel share a kiss, as do Candita (who has an indigenous girlfriend) and her aunt Vero, who is the titular headless woman. Candita’s kiss, in a profound sense, seeks to return her aunt’s head, to re-member her as a person. Perverse and incestuous, it signifies Candita’s outsider status. Despite (or because of ) her hepatic condition, probably waterborne, Candita, like Momi, is a solo swimmer. She braves the town’s new private pool – said to be polluted by animal effluvia – while the adults lie around it languidly. I have written elsewhere about the polluted bodies of water (and water of bodies) in Martel’s work, with specific reference to water

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privatization in Argentina.13 Swimming pools, in particular, mark a literal and metaphorical privatization, the European and bourgeois appropriation of natural resources and cultural meaning from indigenous and agrarian communities; enslaved, as per Martel’s analogy. The demographic profile of Martel’s home province Salta, where all her films are set is 66% indigenous, 33% European, the exact inverse of the Argentinean mean.14 In La mujer sin cabeza, an indigenous community plays a major role in the narrative, and its sociality is contrasted with the atomized urban Europeans. This is the second quality of the swimming pool that compels Martel and her characters: its potential as a site to make visible and therefore challenge class, racial and sexual relations, to adopt radical stances based on water community. For both Momi and Candita, the risky vulnerability of swimming is paralleled by risky relationships with indigenous women, crossing a dual class taboo against pollution. Candita is a rebel against her name (Whiteness, Purity) and its bourgeois, EuroWestern (double) standard. In conversation with David Phelps, Martel connects the swimming pool and the adolescent female body as sites of pollution and potentiality, and through those qualities to the animal kingdom: It was important that when we got to the pool scene, that there would be animals present. When going to a pool there’s a sort of beast-like, an animalistic component. There’s this idea that the pool is very pristine and clean, but the background there could be turtles, or a vet’s office, and things aren’t as clear as they seem to be. I wanted to film a scene that was very clean – but in which everything could be contaminated in some way or another.15

13 14 15

Sophie Mayer, ‘Dirty Pictures: Framing Pollution and Desire in the new New Queer Cinema’ in Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway, eds, Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (New York: Berghahn, 2013). [forthcoming] Sergio Avena et al., ‘Heterogeneity in Genetic Admixture across Different Regions of Argentina’, PLoS ONE 7.4 (2012) accessed 16 December 2013. Daniel Kasman and David Phelps, ‘Dread Desert’, trans. Lilia Pino-Blouin, Notebook accessed 16 December 2013.

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Aberrant embodiments – aberrant because embodied – take their place in the pool, out of which new life may be transgressively birthed (like Isabel’s secret pregnancy in La ciénaga). Elizabeth Grosz argues that feminist theory, reading culture, ‘needs to welcome again what epistemologies have left out: the relentless force of the real, a new metaphysics […] we need to reconsider both representation and representational forces in their impact on the mediation of the real.’16 In La ciénaga, the environmental real (that which the social attempts to deny, but reasserts itself ) is configured by an oscillation between analogous spaces: between the domestic pool and the industrial swamp, as the punning title suggests, but also between domestic spaces. The dark interior of Momi’s family house rhymes with the equally bleak and chaotic exterior patio and swimming pool. Tall trees enclose the pool, heightening and distorting sound as in La niña santa, so that the film opens as if with an experimental noise installation or performance: above the storm, ice rattles in a glass (the storm’s arrival will coincide with shattered glass) and metal chairs are dragged, painfully, across concrete. ‘The sound volume of these chairs being dragged around the poolside is played at a hyper-real level in order to sound both menacing and irritating. This is the most significant sound image created in the film.’17 Leaves shed by the trees float in a viscous, milky green liquid, rotting; visual distortion and haptic threat once again mirror sonic disruption. Pollution – physical, visual and audible – sets the water of the pool free, returning it to a wider, more uncontained sociality, as geographically as well as visually, the trees link the poolside scenes to the unsettling scenes of Momi’s brother and his friends hunting in the forest with their dogs. Boys running with a dog through pipes and drains spark the chain reaction of events and metaphors in La mujer sin cabeza, where it is the water system that provides the spatial and narrative linkage: the diegesis is framed, structured and delimited by the municipal pipes that carry water

16 17

Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 85. Greene, ‘Swamped’, 59.

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and sewage, supplying the swimming pool as well Vero’s interior taps and exterior sprinklers. Blocked by heavy rainfall and by the corpse of an indigenous boy whom Vero may or may not have hit with her car during the storm, this system not only analogizes the contingencies of social linkage but actualizes it, demanding its acknowledgement if we are not to be headless. Despite her fears of infection, Martel’s swimming pools thus embody a politics of change. In an interview with Demetrios Matheou, Martel describes her cinematic poethics, to borrow Joan Retallack’s word, through a quotation from Ovid: ‘Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi, sed saepe cadendo, “A drop hollows out a stone, not by force, but with frequent falling.” With films you can, you know […] knock-knock.’18 The swimming pool, like cinema, is the ‘hollow’ that produces the sound of potential change. While the visual field is opaque and resistant to intervention, Martel’s films ‘knock knock’ through soundscapes whose liquescence records and transmits affect from the body of the performer to the body of the viewer. Taking an example from Sally Potter’s film Yes (in which the protagonist takes her goddaughter swimming, with the reverse generational liberatory effect to Martel’s films), Elena del Río argues that ‘If […] no micromolecular particle of dust ever disappears, neither do the affects: like dust, they simply move, change places, get picked up by other bodies, gain or lose their individual strength according to their joining with other affects or separating from them. The staggering implications of this simple principle of physics also pertain to the realm of the affections.’19 This ‘simple principle of physics,’ the transmission of energy at a molecular level, is exemplified by water. Calling for a critical biopolitics derived from Deleuzian powers of affection, del Río opens film theory to the ‘staggering implications’ of cinema’s embodied affect for the viewer, its contagious contamination of our hapticity and emotions.

18 19

Demetrios Matheou, ‘Latin American iconoclast: Lucrecia Martel’, Faber Book of South American Cinema (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 322. Elena del Río, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 209.

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In an oblique response to Guest’s question about swimming pools, Martel suggests the ambivalence that attends cinema for this reason, drawing a parallel between the hierarchization of the natural world (with swamps seen, in the EuroWestern imaginary, as a lower form of life because unproductive) and of cinema itself. ‘La Niña Santa, La Mujer Sin Cabeza, and La Ciénaga all seem like B-movie titles, and I love that. La Ciénaga translates as “marsh”, a place that’s flooded with water in the summer where a lot of bugs live and the leaves rot, but not all of humanity sinks in […] When I wrote the synopsis for La Ciénaga I said that swamps are dangerous for some animals, but are also full of life.’20 So her films stand as a swamp, or its parallel the polluted swimming pool, in relation to the main body of cinema. As viewers, we are often asked to parallel ourselves with the risky, diffuse, difficult young proto-characters, emerging informe as if from the primeval swamp, who dare to swim in these dangerous waters, or to recognize our reflection in Helena or Vero, to whom the possibility of foregoing privilege and re-entering the waters of affinity and sociality is initially extended, and finally denied. Even at her most playful, Martel dives into the waters of blurred human/animal boundaries, rain’s nightmarish affect and the politics of memory. In her short film Pescados (Fish, 2010), fish sing: a witty but disturbing illusion that – like the presaged storm in La ciénaga – draws attention to the separation of the sound from the image track.21 A windscreen shot of a wet, dark road, strafed by truck headlights, cuts to assorted tropical fish in a pool, fighting to swim into the tight frame. Their gulps for food are given voice by experimental musician Juana Molina in an underwater electronic opera. ‘We were driving down the road,’ one says/sings, and the film cuts from the fishpond back to the road; the fish are, suggestively, deevolved reincarnations of those who died in a road accident, given a second chance at emerging from the watery acousmatic space of Martel’s cinema. ‘Sleep, sleep!’ exhort others, an incitement to repression and forgetting that

20 21

Guest, ‘Lucrecia Martel’. Catherine Grant, ‘On the films of Lucrecia Martel’, .

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Cecilia Sosa reads as the Argentinean politics that Martel’s films attempt to counter. To opt for an alignment with Amalia, Momi or Candita is to undertake the refusal of complicity in the status quo that Sosa identifies as the central politics of La mujer sin cabeza. ‘It offers a frightening mirror in response to the guilt that flows from one time to another, embracing successive generations. In doing so, the film invites viewers to consider the distortions of their eyes, and eventually to re-make reality.’22 Opposite that funhouse mirror of repressed memory is the acoustic mirror of the pool, bubbling with pollution and infection, overflowing with unconventional and disruptive desires, insisting on the impossibility of purity or boundaries, de-evolving. Dare we dive in?

22

Cecilia Sosa, ‘A Counter-narrative of Argentine Mourning: The Headless Woman (2008), directed by Lucrecia Martel’, Theory Culture Society 26 (2009), 259.

Emma Wilson

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‘The sea nymphs tested this miracle’: Water Lilies (2007) and the Origin of Coral

I. In September 2012, Cahiers du Cinéma devoted its issue to the question of women filmmakers. This followed the same summer’s Cannes film festival where there were no films by women directors in competition. A voice that stands out in their debate belongs to French director, Céline Sciamma. She studied screenwriting at the Paris film school La Fémis; Sciamma has made two feature films to date, her swimming pool film Water Lilies (2007), Tomboy (2011), also a beautiful short film against homophobia Pauline (2010). Water Lilies was shown in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ selection at Cannes in 2007 and later won the Louis Delluc award for a first film. Tomboy was shown at Berlin in 2011. For Sciamma, women’s cinema is not an issue of aesthetics, but of politics.1 For her there is no female gaze or gesture in filmmaking; the question is rather one of point of view. She notes that at Cannes there were very few younger filmmakers with films in competition in 2012 as well. She argues that it is important politically for Cannes to be open to younger filmmakers as well as to women.2 Sciamma’s two feature films to date both take childhood and adolescence as their subject. Jean-Marc Lalanne, reviewing Water Lilies in Les Inrockuptibles comments on the cinematic aptness of this choice in a French context, referencing films by François Truffaut and Jean Vigo, whilst 1 2

Céline, Sciamma, interview with Joachim Lepastier, Cahiers du cinéma 681 (September 2012), 24–6, 25. Ibid.

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aligning first-filmmaking as art with the act of transition from childhood to sexual maturity.3 Sciamma has spoken of her interest in American teen movies and of her admiration for directors such as Gus van Sant and Larry Clark, as well as the influence of a filmmaker such as Noémie Lvovsky, whose Life Doesn’t Scare Me (1999) shifted cinematic representations of French girls.4 I suggest here that the attention to the inception of sexual feeling, and its heightening and disorganization of the senses, has political purpose in Sciamma’s filmmaking and its treatment of girlhood. I align first-filmmaking, sexual initiation, sensory attention and feminist/queer politics. To see Sciamma’s attention to sex and the senses as political is to engage with questions about the politics of emotion, of affect, and this strand of thinking in queer theory informs my work. What is particularly striking, in Water Lilies, is the way the public leisure space of the swimming pool is adopted as the stage, the locale, for this burgeoning feeling and for our sensing of its political purpose. Sciamma takes affect and intimate relations and observes their propagation in a sterile, showy, wet public arena.

II. Sciamma’s filmmaking is engaged with rapture and transformation, with exquisite pain and pleasure, with the bruising intensity and gloss of unrequited love, the surface pressure in the blossoming of sexual feeling. Sciamma sees a permeable membrane between childhood and adolescence and examines its rupture. Her films use a rarefied, heady sense of self and world to rethink senses, surface, atmosphere, environment. Her films

3 4

Jean-Marc Lalanne, ‘Naissance des pieuvres de Céline Sciamma’, Les Inrockuptibles, 31 July 2007 [accessed in the Bibliothèque du film press dossier on Céline Sciamma]. Ibid.

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are saturated, bathed in feeling, newly attentive to their girls’ sensations, their sensorium minutely adjusted to their subjects. Water Lilies takes us into an arena of female sexuality and sensory excess through the theme of synchronized swimming. This sport, and the spaces of the municipal pool, with its chlorinated water and bleached, white-tiled surfaces, is an unlikely reservoir for the flowering of adolescent girls’ eroticism. In her attention to activity and sensation both above and below the surface of the water, I argue Sciamma recalls numerous images of nymphs and naiads, thus making the contemporary pool a deeper, more allusive space. In Book IV of the Metamorphoses, Ovid relates the myth of the origin of coral where the touch of Medusa’s head on the living weed, her power absorbed, transforms its properties: ‘hardening at the touch of the head, it acquired a strange new rigidity in its leaves and branches’.5 The text continues: The sea nymphs tested this miracle, trying it on several twigs, and were delighted to find the same thing happening again. By scattering seeds from these plants over the waves, they produced more of the substance. Even today coral retains this same nature, hardening at the touch of air: that which was a plant when under the water becomes rock when brought above the surface.6

There is a double act of metamorphosis here where Medusa’s head, cut off, spouting blood, cradled in weed, instates a change of texture, matter, property. The weed, infested, itself embodies a new metamorphic nature, changing state between vegetable and mineral as it moves from water above the surface. The sequence draws particular attention to the repeated trial of this miracle by the sea nymphs. Kristeva considers the passage from Ovid in her work on the severed head. She notes: ‘Ovid insists upon the petrification of the plants that Medusa’s blood transforms into coral’.7 Playing with the word, she surmises: ‘The generic word coral could come from core, which means “young girl”, 5 6 7

Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (London: Penguin, 2012 [1955]), 114. Ibid. Kristeva, Julia, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 29.

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like Medusa; or it might be an allusion to Coré-Persephone, the queen of the dead, to whom the severed head of the Gorgon belongs …’8 She doesn’t associate the coral with the nymphs, and doesn’t allude to Ovid’s images of the nymphs testing this miracle. Her argument runs instead that this is a drama of the ambivalent passions of mother–child separation; she says of Medusa, ‘this slimy head, surrounded by coiled snake hair, evokes the female sexual organ – the maternal vulva that terrifies the young boy’.9 The Medusa only becomes bearable as icon; she is abject in her slime, reminding the boy viewer afraid of the female genitals of ‘that archaic nondifferentiation in which there is neither subject nor object, only the sticky, slimy ab-ject’.10 Water Lilies, with the reference to a slimy sea creature in the title in French (Naissance des pieuvres), takes us from jellyfish to octopus, méduse to pieuvre, Medusa to the birth of Venus (echoed in naissance). Ovid’s nymphs, metamorphic young girls, recalling coré, the Greek for young girl, and playing with coral, look forward for me to the scintillating swimmers of Sciamma’s film. It should be remembered that corals are not weed as Ovid (and Kristeva suggest); they are marine animals, they respond to touch. The miraculous transformations of the coral, the sensory rupture in the move from living organism to petrified skeleton, are recalled in a series of sense patterns in Sciamma’s work which play out the testing of hard and soft, abrasion and caress. In its initial attention to the spectacle and accessories of synchronized swimming, the film creates a series of brittle, coruscating sense impressions, where distorted sounds, and patterns of glittering light on the azure pool, match the cheap jewels encrusting the girls’ suits, the lacquer on their hair, the sheen of their make-up, their rigid nose-clips. But as the protagonist Marie (Pauline Acquart) also swims underwater, she glimpses a liquid world of headless, swirling, moving bodies, thighs, skin and spandex fabric.

8 9 10

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 31.

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III. The pool where Sciamma films is at Cergy in the région parisienne. It is the same pool that is filmed in Eric Rohmer’s My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (1987). Sciamma’s films adopt and reference Rohmer’s attention to the friendships and dream life of young girls, their romantic hesitations in real world environments. But where Rohmer’s Cergy, like his other new town and suburban spaces, is a space observed with documentary realism, Sciamma’s world is more saturated with affect, bathed in light and feeling. Water Lilies opens in the changing rooms of the pool. A moving camera, at girl height, circulates among the swimmers as they dress for their contest, the music of the soundtrack creating a mesmeric, drifting effect. We see body rehearsals of the gestures that will form the aquatic performance. The film’s spectacle is foreshadowed, trailed in this sequence, the light in the changing rooms already anticipating the unreal setting of the pool. The films cuts to Marie entering the viewing arena where she will find a seat to watch the show. We are cued to see the pool from her angle of vision. As the spandex-clad girls emerge in luminous green with sequins and stylized scarlet leaves, the film focuses on her friend Anne (Louise Blachère) who stands out from the other girls. The first shot of the pool is a beautiful photographic set piece recalling the images of children and shop mannequins taken by Bernaud Faucon. The pool is gleaming turquoise with reflected rose and mauve light. The performers walk in line along the poolside silhouetted against the pink-lit walls and reflected in the pool surface. If this sequence is pictorially perfect, its appeal is heightened by movement as we see the girls move gracefully in synchronized sequence along the edge, so that it is not only the image but its serial motion that captures the eye. The scene unfurls like an early motion study. After the end of the titles, we see three small girls in glistening water, just their heads above the surface. They are like tiny nymphs. Their performance is very brief, rudimentary, a prelude to the performances of the older teams. It is clear that Water Lilies is not a film of sporting spectacle, and it will not treat us to extended, expert swimming sequences. It is rather

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a film of mood and feeling, of the exquisite lustre that can coat the most quotidian, banal locations. It reflects cinema as space of affective rather than athletic adventure. We view Marie as spectator and witness her sudden attraction to the leader of another swim team, Floriane (Adèle Haenel). Marie is so absorbed she stays standing up watching the girls and has to be asked to sit down. We see Floriane’s team disappear into churning water, against the sound of Verdi’s Dies Irae. As the girls emerge we see their repeated, echoing gestures and then their metamorphosis as suddenly their legs break the surface. Any sense of the individual is lost as kicking limbs are seen in the foam. The girls then surface and turn again. The erotic trouble of the image is hinted at as Marie watches engrossed. Further there seems here enhanced reflection on cinema’s capacity to show bodies in parts and in close-up. The appeal and perversity of this seems highlighted as the sequences continue at different scales. We see impassive viewers behind Marie, and her own intense engagement. The viewer is drawn to awareness of the erotic in this everyday image, its sudden disclosure of body parts in fierce motion. The real object of Marie’s affection is exposed in the first close-up of a girl at the end of the sequence as Floriane salutes the crowd. If she is Venus here, her image is gently marred by a nose clip. The water of the pool ripples behind her silvery, moving. The very movements of the girls as they swim and the feelings aroused in Marie create a sense of enchantment.

IV. The film turns from the pool to the domestic bathroom, where Marie, in bathwater, bathes with her pet miniature turtle, a living creature whose dark prehensile moves contrast with the shining artifice of the pool arena. We first see the white enamel of the bath with Marie’s limbs outstretched and the tiny turtle swimming. She practices the moves of the synchronized swimmers with her legs, her limbs appearing behind a transparent fuchsia

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shower curtain, recalling the colours of the opening poolside scene. The film cuts straight from this bathroom setting, incubator of feelings, to an external shot of the municipal pool again where Marie goes to ask if she can sign up for synchronized swimming classes herself. In Water Lilies and in her second film Tomboy, Sciamma makes use of scenes of washing and intimate care in the domestic bathroom to explore what Sophie Mayer has called ‘the private parts of girls’.11 In Tomboy, as Laure (Zoé Héran) gets out the bath and dries herself we see her naked body, her bare pubis, a sign of the truth of her female gender which she attempts to hide as she finds nascent desire for a girl. In Water Lilies, the private space of the domestic bathroom becomes a rehearsal space for the public arena of desire found in the pool. Where Laure in Tomboy reckons with her boy identity in the bathroom mirror, Marie in Water Lilies tries out the gestures that may allow her to find her way into the swimming circles. A second bathroom sequence comes soon after Marie’s second visit to the pool. She is at a party with Anne and other members of the swim teams, male and female. Moving through the rooms, like the camera moving through the changing rooms in the opening sequence, Marie comes across Floriane in a pale turquoise vest top, her hair picked out in almost chlorinated green light. Floriane looks bored and languorous. She goes into the bathroom to be sick and Marie is there with her. The acid green light of the sequence, the mirrored surfaces, the flare of Floriane’s golden hair, recall the sense impressions of the pool. Yet there is something bilious, over-intense, abject here. Floriane flushes her vomit away and washes her face. She cleans her lips and chin with her hands, looking at her own doubled, light-rimmed reflection in the bathroom mirror. Seeing Marie watching her she questions her abruptly and Marie tells her that she saw her perform at the show. Marie is seen in profile here watching Floriane, and Floriane is seen watching herself and preening. She asks Marie for a piece of gum, tosses her hair and checks her reflection once more. Marie asks if Floriane can get her in to see future rehearsals and Floriane, spitting out her gum, reaches close 11

Sophie Mayer, The Private Parts of Girls (London: Salt, 2011).

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as if to kiss Marie, her mouth open. She asks at this moment: ‘Does my breath stink?’ There is a shot of the two faces in near contact, Floriane’s mouth only minutely distant. The scene is coloured by Marie’s incipient feelings. Fear and tenderness are here, the sensory loveliness of the near kiss and quick pain of Floriane’s question. We feel her breath up close, its heat and smell, and feel Marie’s conflicted affect. She is toyed with here as Floriane is in a heartbeat soft and brittle, seductive and cruel all at once. In the pool sequences that follow we see Marie trailing Floriane at the leisure complex, in the changing rooms and in the pool itself. We see rehearsals for the shows, the earlier glitz replaced by the earnestness of practicing girls in red swimhats. When Marie stands on the poolside, Floriane, always a temptress, invites her into the water to ‘see better’. Marie’s attention is drawn again not to the athletic moves but to the erotic spectacle. She swims under water and we observe her wonderment as she sees the uncommon depths of the pool, the moves of the white legs bisected from the upper bodies. In their flexibility, their rapid gestures, their weightlessness underwater, the legs, the tight red torsos, recall elaborate living sea creatures. The sound underwater is distorted. This intimate pool space holds an unconscious liquid world of turning bodies. Marie swims freely here, her own moves setting her apart from the repeated gestures of the swim team. Her own sensuality and freedom are captured in moments below the water and then the other girls swim freely too so the synchrony breaks up. The film cuts to Marie showering, crossing any dividing line between public pool spaces and private spaces of washing. The cleansing here seems also relief and reprieve after her emergence from the liquid world of her desire. Marie now shadows Floriane at competitions traveling with the team, allowing the film to pursue its aesthetic of swimming shots viewed from Marie’s eye view. The patterns of the film are pursued as we see Marie dreaming in her room at home, playing with her turtle in its little vivarium, as we see Marie and Floriane developing a strange, abusive friendship as they walk through various geometric modern precincts. The rhythm of their friendship is alarmingly intermittent, dependent on Floriane’s moves to attract and expel Marie, to draw her in only the more painfully to let her go. This culminates in a party at the swimming pool itself where we see a collapse of distinction between any of the spaces mapped in the film.

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Floriane is an alluring siren here in artificial light. She smiles at Marie and clasps her in her arms and almost as soon is glimpsed flirting with a boy. Marie confronts her in the changing room. They kiss properly now and Marie is smeared with Floriane’s lipstick. Floriane cleans her mouth once more and scornfully abandons her. As the last sequence unfolds, the boys at the party dance in frenzy, their pants on their heads and Floriane dances alone, in love with herself. Marie washes her mouth in the water of the pool. It is her own space now, beautiful in the semidarkness, almost still with no moving bodies or altered voices. She drops in fully dressed, a descent, a drowning, a cleansing, a rebirth. She swims up and emerges. Anne comes to meet her and jumps in too. As we watch Floriane in a trance, dancing to the music over the sequence, we cut to Marie and Anne in the water floating, their arms outstretched like a star. Their bodies mirror each other, their dark clothes recalling the turtle in the film’s patterning. In the last shot their faces are close, tender, momentarily aligned with one another. As she moves from the pool above and below the surface, to the bathroom, in and out the bathwater, Sciamma, I see in her films looking for alternative myths of desire, of affect, of ambivalence, of girl sexuality, of (to recall Kristeva) a female relation to the female body, its softness, the fear and tenderness it impels, its allure. The spaces of her films, the swimming pool, the bathrooms, offer so many arenas for sensory heightening and reflection on the relation of self to world. I see Sciamma’s sensory aesthetics and her feminist politics in intimate contact here.

V. In an article in Paragraph, ‘Synaesthesia and Film Spectacle’, Jennifer Barker explores the relay between the senses in moments of cinematic excess; her particular example is the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive. She draws on the work of Steve Connor, writing about his work on the senses:

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Emma Wilson Rather than ‘correlation’, Connor suggests it may be more appropriate to see the senses in terms of ‘commixture’. In his alternative model, ‘the senses form an indefinite series of integrations and transformations: they form a complexion. […] The senses communicate with each other, in cooperations and contributions which are irregular and emergent’.12

For Barker, following Connor, ‘moments of cinematic, sensory “excess” are sensual reminders of the degree to which vision is entangled with other senses’.13 In line with Vivian Sobchack, whose work has inspired her, Barker’s concern is with a phenomenological understanding of how we view, how the senses are involved with one another in this viewing process. What she doesn’t attend to, or isn’t interested in, is the way affect might also colour sense perception, so that the flow of emotive feeling is admixed in sensation, rinsing it, glossing it. This seems anticipated in Connor’s beautiful image of the senses forming a complexion (a combination of things, yet a mood too, surely, a colouring, a sensate surface), in his image of communication between the senses and of ‘cooperations and contributions which are irregular and emergent’. Water Lilies is a film of tight sensory control with its own palette, range of textures, surfaces and sounds. It has its own sensorium and this is tightly aligned with the perspective, the point of view, the corporeal sensation and affective state of its protagonist Marie. We feel in the film in her world. We enter that world at a moment of heightened receptivity, as Marie knows desire for the first time viewing Floriane emerging from the pool water. This receptivity, hyper-acuity, sensitivity, exposure, makes Marie and her viewer the more open, more responsive to the very play between the abrasive and the soft; the clean and abject. The spectacle of first love that emerges is one of intermittence, of hurt, of radiance. Love is shown, felt, to be lush and seering. Its intrusions and shape-shifting, its estrangement and grit, are part of the film’s feelings, its politics.

12 13

Barker, Jennifer, ‘Out of Sync, Out of Sight: Synaesthesia and Film Spectacle’, Paragraph 31/2 ( July 2008), 236–51, 238. Ibid., 251.

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VI. In her volume Intimacy, Lauren Berlant writes: ‘I didn’t think it would turn out this way’ is the secret epitaph of intimacy. To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way. […] This view of ‘a life’ that unfolds intact within the intimate sphere represses, of course, another fact about it: the unavoidable troubles, the distractions and disruptions that make things turn out in unpredicted scenarios.14

Water Lilies is a film which uses the intersensory immersion offered by textured moving image art to explore a first intimation of desire, a first aspiration for a shared narrative, for sexual intimacy. One political aim of the film, I think, is to make that desire felt, in its pain and rapture, to make a narrative possible for it. Like Berlant, Sciamma is attentive to troubles, distractions, disruptions, unpredictable scenarios; she makes these tangible through the sense patterns of her film, so that affect is attached to surface, substance, coral, softness. The intermittence of sensation tested by Ovid’s sea nymphs, is realized in the acrid sweetness of the film, its political attention to a girl’s sexuality and its affective intensity. I call this a film about love, not just enthrallment, because it is a film that pays attention to ways in which, with whatever abrasion, Floriane opens Marie’s world and reorganizes her senses. The film is saturated with feeling, ambivalence, conflict, intensity; it is not fixed and does not protect us from fear, sliminess, the abject. It is a film about being undone, by love and grief, about not remaining intact, about the force and beauty of intrusion and metamorphosis. It is a film alive to the ways in which emergent desires, and their interruptions, entering cinema, transform its politics.15

14 15

Lauren Berlant (ed.), Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1. I am very grateful to Clara Bradbury-Rance for her comments on this article.

Piotr Cieplak

16

Swimming in Post-apartheid Cape Town: Sea Point Days (2009)

François Verster’s documentary Sea Point Days (South Africa, 2009) introduces a complex of municipal swimming pools in Cape Town as its narrative, aesthetic and symbolic anchor. This essay will explore the swimming pool and its environs as a space where social, political and aesthetic forces converge, in the specific context of post-apartheid South Africa. A longterm project, Sea Point Days was shot and edited between 2004 and 2008. In the words of the director, a white, male South African, the film deals ‘partly with racial, social, religious and power relations, identity and perceptions in the not-so-new South Africa as experienced or displayed in a transformed public space.’1 Sea Point is a suburb of Cape Town, located on the city’s Atlantic seaboard, sandwiched between Signal Hill and the ocean. Initially racially mixed, it became one of the white-only areas under apartheid. Michele Paulse writes that ‘in the 1950s the National Party intensified the racial separation that for decades characterized life in South Africa. The Group Areas Act of 1950 legislated separate residential areas and in 1957 the government ordered the removal of people of colour from Sea Point.’2 Since the end of apartheid, the area has become mixed, characterized by its relative affluence (large numbers of people own second homes here)

1 2

François Verster, ‘2008 Director’s statement’, Sea Point Days website accessed 10 February 2014. Michele Paulse, ‘“Everyone had their differences but there was always comradeship”: Tramway Road, Sea Point 1920s to 1961’, in Sean Field, ed., Lost Communities, Living Memories: Remembering Forced Removals in Cape Town (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2001), 44–61, 55.

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but also rising levels of crime.3 Sea Point is an interesting place to explore in the context of the post-apartheid city and its public spaces as, on the one hand, it displays many of the tensions present elsewhere, but on the other, it lacks the charged and singular symbolism of other Cape Town areas (such as District Six where over 60,000 people were forcibly relocated during apartheid) or landmarks (such as Robben Island – visible from Sea Point – where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years). An ocean-side promenade is a significant and central feature of Sea Point, as is the Sea Point Pavilion, built in the 1920s, which houses a complex of municipal swimming pools. The City of Cape Town’s website informs us that the complex ‘consists of an Olympic-sized pool, plus two splash pools for children and a fully equipped springboard diving pool,’ which can accommodate up to 1,300 visitors at a time. It goes on to add that ‘on any given day in summer you’ll find a colourful mix of locals and tourists soaking up the sun (…) and people of all ages frolicking in the crystal-clear water.’4 While there is an obvious element of marketing-speak to this description, the pools do seem to live up to at least some of the hype and have been listed by the readers of The Guardian amongst the ten best in the world.5 The South African city during and after apartheid, as well as public space within it, has been widely discussed.6 Indeed, apartheid itself has

3 4 5 6

The area is not particularly more crime-prone than other parts of Cape Town. See Charlotte Lemanski, ‘New apartheid? The spatial implications of fear of crime in Cape Town, South Africa’, Environment and Urbanization 16 (2004), 101–11. ‘Sea Point Swimming Pool’, City of Cape Town website accessed 10 February 2014. ‘10 of the world’s best swimming pools: readers’ travel tips’, The Guardian accessed 10 February 2014. See amongst others: A.  J. Christopher, Atlas of Apartheid ( Johannesburg : Witwatersrand University Press, 1994), Patrick Bond, Cities of gold, townships of coal: essays on South Africa’s new urban crisis (Trenton, NJ, Africa World Press, 2000), A. J. Christopher, ‘The slow pace of desegregation in South African cities, 1996–2001’, Urban studies 42/12 (2005), 2305–20, Gordon Pirie, ‘“Reanimating a comatose goddess”: reconfiguring central Cape Town’, Urban forum 18/3 (2007),

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been referred to as an ‘intrinsically spatial regime’7 whilst calls for ‘spatial reconciliation’ have been raised by scholars and city planners.8 Although Sea Point Days portrays an ‘unusual strip of land’ and ‘a space unlike any other in Cape Town,’9 the relationships, tensions and conflicts represented within this space are indicative of and relevant to wider societal dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa, and especially the post-apartheid city. While maintaining the specificity of its context (centred around the idea of a public space whose nature has been transformed), the film manages to capture moments in the lives of the (formal and informal) inhabitants of the area, their occasional bemusement at the reality around them, and the many challenges to the idea of a rainbow nation – ‘an attempt to blend together the disparate ethnic groups promoted separately by the previous government and give them a sense of common purpose’.10 Verster’s film explores very specific, functioning spaces (he does not, for instance, explore memorials to past oppression) and focuses on notions of past and present exclusion and inclusion (imagined and actual) in a country that, twenty tears after the official end of apartheid, remains one of the most unequal in the world. What also interests Verster are the different

7 8

9 10

125–51, Noeleen Murray, Nick Shepherd and Martin Hall, eds, Desire Lines: Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-apartheid City (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch and Annika Teppo, ‘A mall for all? Race and public space in post-apartheid Cape Town’, Cultural Geographies 16 ( July 2009), 351–79, Ivan Turok, ‘Deconstructing density: Strategic dilemmas confronting the post-apartheid city’, Cities 28 (2011), 470–7. Houssay-Holzschuch and Teppo, ‘A mall for all? Race and public space in postapartheid Cape Town’, 351. Antje Nahnsen, ‘Discourses and procedures of desire and fear in the re-making of Cape Town’s central city: The need for a spatial politics of reconciliation’, in Christoph Haferburg and Jurgen Obenbrugge, eds, Ambiguous Restructurings of Post-Apartheid Cape Town: The Spatial Form of Socio-Political Change (Lit Verlag: Munster, Hamburg, London, 2003), 137–50. ‘Synopsis’, Sea Point Days website accessed 10 February 2014. A. J. Christopher, The Changing Atlas of South Africa (Routledge; Taylor and Francis, London and New York, 2001), 232.

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types of human interaction that take place within these spaces. This interest takes many forms and works at different levels. Firstly, Verster focuses on the diversity and range of human subjects inhabiting the space, especially the promenade. According to the film’s synopsis, there: […] life is paraded most unapologetically in all its forms … Over-made-up powerwalkers speed past homeless persons kissing above the rocks and rent boys waiting for the next pick-up. Trendy teenagers eat ice creams as elderly ladies parade dejected pet dogs on elastic leashes. Black, brown, white, young, old, locals, tourists, rich, poor, Jews, Muslims, Christians, stylish, tasteless …11

Interestingly, it is argued, this diversity of people and behaviour is somehow ‘levelled’ when we get to the municipal swimming pools ‘as clothes are removed, bodies of all shapes and hues are openly on display – and different races come into close bodily-contact.’12 Verster goes on to add: Even in the not-so-New South Africa, the type of proximity and interchange amongst very different people found on the Promenade and at the Pool is unique. Personal and interpersonal identities are still far from clear in this country – and here they seem to be negotiated in unusual ways on a daily basis. In this everyman’s land between ocean and city, the most bizarre and unexpected things happen every day.13

There is a sense of orchestrated fleetingness when it comes to the film’s human subjects; perhaps with one or two exceptions, the viewer does not stay with people for very long. At the pool, we meet Abdoeragiem, in charge of filtration and two attendants, Kaiser and Xoliswa. We also encounter people from outside the swimming pool, including a child rapper, a white ward councillor called JP Smith, and Aubrey Ruiters, a homeless person roaming the streets of Sea Point (perhaps the most compelling character in the film). Verster also focuses on a number of white pensioners living near 11 12 13

‘Synopsis’, Sea Point Days website accessed 10 February 2014. ‘Synopsis’, Sea Point Days website. François Verster, ‘2008 Director’s statement’, Sea Point Days website accessed 10 February 2014.

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the Promenade. They make for fascinating subjects as, on the one hand, they are the remnants of white privilege propagated by apartheid, and on the other, are often vulnerable in old age. Some of them are very candid about their existence in the new South Africa, struggling to see their place in the country. Others are less open about their views. As mentioned before, these characters come and go – human beings, with their differences and similarities, constitute an almost collective protagonist of the film. Sea Point Days is not strictly observational, participatory or poetic (although all modes are present). It could best be described as a meandering, essayistic documentary. The film gives the impression of not so much seeking out most of its protagonists, but encountering them. Largely unconcerned with in-depth interviews and the chronology of the stories, the film moves through the lives and spaces that appear in front of the camera. Verster says: ‘I feel that I have made a leap in my own filmmaking in terms of being able to step away from the strict confines of theme, character and/or narrative.’14 Yet, the director – in this case also the editor – has a very firm grip on the messages conveyed during these encounters. Verster acknowledges that he takes a painfully long time to edit his films and adds: I always seem to find that I only understand my material once I am in the edit process – a question of being able to see how things really inter-relate, almost like in a Gestalt process, or what their ‘greater possibilities’ are.15

Editing in Sea Point Days is an exercise in power over images (Verster’s and those of others when it comes to archival footage). This process, in turn, is heavily reliant the use of visual, audio and narrative juxtaposition. As will be seen, the majority of the nods to the apartheid history of the area and the enduring economic inequality are inserted (sometimes literally) into the film, or implied, by the filmmaker, rather than emanating from the protagonists (although they are often initiated by the interviews). While 14 15

François Verster, ‘2008 Director’s statement’, Sea Point Days website accessed 10 February 2014. François Verster, ‘2008 Director’s statement’, Sea Point Days website.

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visually representing the space very comprehensively, Verster is highly selective with the interviews he includes in the film. They often take the form of poignant statements which are then worked and re-worked visually. The film is divided into five parts, and the title of each is derived from what the interviewees say. Generally, the use of spoken word in Sea Point Days is sparse. To be told, or, rather, suggested, the story relies mostly on images. Sea Point Days opens with a paraglider with the camera strapped to him, setting off from Signal Hill – one of peaks of the Table Mountain which towers over Cape Town. As the camera and the cameraman (with only his feet visible) descend, we are presented with a view of the city. The feeling is that we are entering from the outside, from a non-place; this impression will be amplified as the film progresses and it becomes clear that Sea Point is presented to us as a unique and indosyncratic, and to an extent self-contained, place, but also as a petri dish – a microcosm of social processes and tensions relevant to the rest of post-apartheid South Africa. Intertitles inform us that this part of Cape Town used to be reserved for whites only under apartheid. They go on to state: ‘Today, one of the few public spaces used by all the city’s people is the area’s promenade and municipal pools.’ From the perspective of the paraglider, we next see four swimming pools. Treated footage of the clouds follows, their colour altered. This slightly surreal transition is proceeded by archival footage of white kids playing on the beach, a black, or coloured, person walking by and looking on, and a pan of Sea Point as it was in the past. Another cut takes us back to the paraglider who now lands at Sea Point, once again in the present moment. Early on in the first part of the film (‘Every country has been through its bad phase’) we are presented with the recurring theme of the contrast between different types of water and the way in which it is contained. The symmetrical, precise, man-made appearance of the swimming pools is contrasted with the ruggedness of the Atlantic shore, with its dark water, waves, flotsam and seaweed. This contrast, the theme of seeming order (man-made and constructed) versus chaos (natural, beyond human control) comes back time and again, but it is only explored visually. The interviewees stay away from the subject, except for, perhaps, Abdoeragiem – the filtration man at the pool – who has an intimate, almost mystical relationship with

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water. In the first part of Sea Point Days, we see him taking a PH reading. While performing the measurement, he reveals that there is sea under the swimming pools and that the water in them also comes from the ocean and is purified and treated. Abdoeragiem adds: ‘When you listen to the sounds of water, it’s as if it’s crying.’ Similarly to other rhetorical devices in Sea Point Days, the water metaphor is not laboured – only hinted at; the viewer left to make her own connections. The sameness of water as the basic building material is at stake here. As are the different uses to which it is put. The water in the ocean takes a natural form – volatile, with impurities, shaped by currents and waves, disturbed by the jagged rocks jutting out of the seabed. Perhaps more importantly, the water in the ocean exists outside functionality, present not as a result of human intervention and design. The water in the municipal swimming pools is shaped, transformed and treated in ways that have been deemed favourable and appropriate for human pleasure and wellbeing. While crucial, the water in the swimming pools is just one component of a complex public space. While the rules of the ocean mostly describe the physical state of the water, in the swimming pools the rules are extended through societal procedures. There are timetables to be observed, tickets to be issued, and people to be admitted through turnstiles. There are codes of behaviour and, under apartheid, the law also had the power to exclude on the basis of the colour (or perceived colour) of one’s skin, thus handpicking some swimmers and excluding others.16 It is difficult to resist the extension of the implications of the close co-existence of these two types of water (or water environments) to South Africa’s society and the country’s history. While basic characteristics of humanity apply, it is the design of the way society works (and is filtered and constructed) that is of interest here – negatively under the racist regime of apartheid and positively, but often unsuccessfully, in the new South Africa.

16

It could be argued that the same (or similar) set of rules applies to the beach. However, in Sea Point Days, the beach is rarely (if at all) seen as a place exclusively of leisure. Rather, it is a place where the homeless bury their possessions for the day, where people go to drink, or where youths talk about their life in South Africa.

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Shots of Abdoeragiem checking the state of the water in the swimming pool recur in the film, as if the constructed, man-made reality has to be constantly measured and monitored. Sea Point Days abounds in contrasts and (more and less subtle, more and less effective) juxtapositions. Staying with the difference between the artifice of the swimming pool and the naturalness of the ocean, and extending it to the wider spaces they inhabit, it becomes apparent that contrast is, or at least can be, a product of perspective. While the four swimming pools, with their geometrical precision and different colours of treated water, look quite orderly when seen from a distance, they are in fact chaotic when they come alive with swimmers, especially children. We first enter the complex of swimming pools together with the punters (there are shots of various people paying for entry). This is followed by disjointed and chaotic scenes of children playing in the water. We are presented with many bodies (some of them shot underwater) – all quite shapeless. The vision of a pristine, ordered and designed space we have seen from afar, is shattered and the audience realize that this is both ordered and chaotic.17 As Verster points out, the swimming pools are a public space where different people come together. Attendance is voluntary but the ‘coming together’ is a necessity rather than a choice – for both the bathers and the staff. Racial tensions – even though alluded to jokingly – are present from very early on in the film. One of the first pieces of dialogue we hear is between the pool attendants preparing to go on duty. One of them says ‘that’s my Afrikaner’ and then adds: ‘We are the lords of the manor now.’ The comment is swiftly laughed off but the conversation continues in the second part of the film (‘No place for white man’) when the black pool attendant says: ‘to be honest this is my first white friend. I never had a white friend before.’ Together with his other black colleague, he then goes on to talk about negative perceptions and stereotypes of black people, which is followed by a cut to shots of kids playing in and around the pool, and then to and elderly white woman who hesitates as she considers whether

17

The film alternates between busy and very quiet times in the pool. It is not always chaotic.

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to enter the complex, eventually saying: ‘It’s not a good time to go in now – too much noise.’ There is a mouthwatering ambiguity about this scene (also present in many others in the film – one of Sea Point Days’s considerable strengths). It may be the case that the noise and bustle of the swimming pool are the real and only reasons for the pensioner deciding to stay away. Cleverly, Verster does not only juxtapose white with black but also young with old. However, the images and words that precede the scene give the viewer the option of assuming that the black bodies of children in the pool might be at least as much of a deterrent as the chaos. The portrayal of Sea Point’s white senior population produces mixed emotions. On the one hand, these are the people who would have, in one way or another, profited from the criminal system of apartheid. On the other, they are people in the final years of their lives, vulnerable and often openly bemused (sometimes willingly blind) at the way the reality around them has changed and is changing. The camera spends just enough time with them to put the viewer in the uncomfortable position of being at once sympathetic and critical.18 Sea Point’s pensioners are one of the groups represented in the film that link the complex of the swimming pools to the rest of the suburb/area. The swimming pool changes from a point of focus at the beginning of the film, to a point of reference, an anchor and somewhere we return to, after venturing into the street and, occasionally, into the houses of Sea Point. As noted above, the way in which the white retired and elderly are represented is steeped in an ambiguity – which is, however, sometimes dropped to powerful effect. In fact, the representation is punctuated by poignant instances which cast a doubting light on the rest of the images. One such moment occurs when Marleen Steinberg, an elderly white woman, looks out at the swimming pools from the window of her apartment and says: ‘We still have a good life here.’ This is preceded by a mixture of images of white pensioners swimming in the pools and archival footage. However, she then adds: ‘There is no place for white man in this country,’ thus providing the title for the second section of the film. Verster points out that 18

One of the men in Sea Point’s old-age home dies in the course of the film.

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‘as [a] filmmaker who has almost exclusively made films about “coloured” or black people, working with white subjects was an often uncomfortable experience.’19 The moments of poignancy and potential significance when it comes to white characters in the film are not only dialogue-related.20 In fact, most of them are visual and achieved through editing. Early on in the film, the scenes of life in a old-age home are intercut with shots of Aubrey Ruiters, a homeless black man walking the streets of Sea Point, stating: ‘I’m a South African, after all.’ Verster then takes us back to the old-age home. The protagonists of these parallel sequences are all vulnerable, albeit in different ways. The unspoken contrast here is in the way in which they are being looked after, but also the different ways in which they are being excluded. This difference underlines a lot of what is being suggested in the film: that economic and social inequality did not end with apartheid. South Africa is a place where the colour of your skin can still determine your future. As A. J. Christopher writes, ‘the legacy of the colonial and apartheid eras remain in many … spheres of life. The African and White experiences of the country remain different and unequal.’21 As the film gathers pace, towards the middle of its third part (‘If I were to die tonight’), the visual associations expected from the viewer become more striking and obvious. Two sequences that follow each other are particularly notable. The first shows a group of black children who come to the retirement home to perform for the residents. The pensioners seem to enjoy the performance. Verster cuts to archival footage of black dancers performing for a white audience (one assumes) under apartheid. To drive the point more strongly, the next scene shows one of the residents of the old-age home playing the piano, intercut with images of massacres in the townships. Suddenly, ambiguity and subtlety are dropped and the viewer

19 20 21

‘Interview with François Verster’, Sea Point Days website accessed 10 February 2014. Although it could be argued that these resonate the most because of the scarcity of words in the film. A. J. Christopher, The Changing Atlas of South Africa, 232.

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is confronted with something that has been implied and suggested, but not previously spelled out. This escalation of rhetoric coincides with a confrontation in another narrative strand of the film, between Aubrey Ruiters and a white ward councillor and campaigner to ‘reform’ Sea Point, JP Smith. At the begging of the third part of the film, we are introduced to the Yellow Bib Campaign led by Smith. This consists of a group of Sea Point residents (mostly but not exclusively white) walking around at night to make their presence known to prostitutes, drug dealers and, most troublingly, the homeless. Again, from a particular story about Sea Point, the film makes a comment on a bigger problem in the country. South Africa’s astonishingly high crime rates do not only alter and limit the lives of its citizens but also influence its geography, especially its urban space. Hein Marais writes that ‘security walls, electrified fences, sealed-off neighbourhoods and streets, gate communities and fortress-like cluster-housing complexes have redrawn the geography of cities and towns.’22 The first sequence of one of the Yellow Bib Campaign’s nightly vigils culminates with the group ordering a couple of people sleeping rough to move on. The homeless gather their things silently, while a local resident challenges the community police from the safety of his balcony, saying that these people had done nothing wrong and that none of the local residents has any complaints about them.23 Verster spends a relatively long stretch of time with JP Smith, who is an interesting if slightly unnerving character. He has a rather militant manner and proclaims his desire to make Sea Point a ‘better place.’ There is an impression that he feels very much at home in Sea Point and displays

22 23

Hein Marais, South Africa Pushed to the Limit: The Political Economy of Change (London and New York: Zed Books, 2001), 230. Interestingly, Verster used the images from the night time patrols (and his voice) to produce a programme for Al-Jazeera in their Witness (2009) series. The programme, entitled The Battle of Sea Point, is rather positive about the neighborhood vigilante group (and does not provide a particularly in depth or contextualized analysis). The challenge to the legitimacy of their authority posed by one of the black residents (described above) is edited out. The programme can be seen here: accessed 10 February 2014.

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the kind of authority that comes from something more than the mandate given by the local council. When asked about the legacy of the apartheid system he states: ‘I don’t have guilt,’ but also, in the same breath, adds that ‘commitment’ is very important. Verster maintains a veneer of seeming objectivity in his representation of the councilor, which is only occasionally, but poignantly, dropped. What these instances show (very effectively) is the difference in perspective, the almost ahistorical view of society held by white South Africans such JP Smith. Again, most of Verster’s points are made visually. Footage of crime and arrests (often taken from CCTV) is sometimes accompanied by surreal sounds, reminding one of films such Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983). However, Verster also includes narrative pointers to the differences in perspective about what Sea Point is and strives to be (through the eyes of its different residents). At the beginning of the film’s fourth installment (‘The world is such an unreal place’), we see a number of homeless people burying their possessions (mostly rags and bags they use to sleep at night) on the beach. The implications of the image are left unexplained for some time, while the film briefly focuses on a protest against the city’s planned Sea Point Pavilion Development, which would see a shopping centre and hotel built in the suburb. The demonstration is organized by white pensioners. We are subsequently presented with a scene in which Smith paternalistically chastises Aubrey for being drunk. By this point, the viewer has spent a significant amount of time with Aubrey, whose walking of the streets and various statements about his situation and aspirations in South Africa (Verster refers to him as a ‘street philosopher’) recur throughout the film. This confrontation, although not violent or even particularly meaningful, nevertheless serves to show that the residents of Sea Point (and perhaps a lot of the rest of South Africa) really do live in different worlds – their concerns are of a different kind. While JP Smith campaigns for clean streets and a reduction in crime, Aubrey struggles for survival. This is yet another facet of the colossal inequality that exists in South African society, rather than an expression of race-based animosity. This is then driven home even more poignantly when we see the sleeping bags and possessions of the homeless, buried in the sand on the beach, being uncovered and prepared

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for removal ( JP Smith is present in the scene). What for one citizen is a pile of rubbish, for another constitutes all her earthly possessions. The film then takes us back to the municipal swimming pools (we return to them briefly every few minutes) – the anchor, the centre of gravity of Sea Point Days. But by the time the fifth part of the film begins (‘When it’s spring again’), we are firmly back to where we began and see shots of people paying for entry to the swimming pool again. These are followed by footage of another gathering, under the now slightly ironic slogan: ‘Seafront for all’, and a concert. Verster says: I think it is a mistake to link ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. On a purely historical or political level, the audience also steps away from a documentary with a more immediate sense of urgency or, if not, with the idea that this is ‘their world’ and not a fictitious creation displaying moral or thematic possibilities.24

Nothing is resolved in Sea Point Days and, on the face of it, nothing has changed. Life goes on as before. This lack of resolution is at once natural and intentional; in line with Verster’s vision of what a film can achieve.25 But for the viewer, the swimming pools of Sea Point, though physically the same as in the shots at the beginning of the film, have become a space of uncomfortable and complex familiarity.

24 25

‘Interview with François Verster’, Sea Point Days website accessed 10 February 2014. ‘Interview with François Verster’, Sea Point Days website.

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

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Cartographies of Desire: Swimming Pools and the Queer Gaze

I have chosen to analyse four films featuring swimming pools which interrogate popular notions of masculinity associated with machismo.1 Two of these films, Ausente (Marco Berger 2011) and Tensión Sexual, Volume 1: Volátil (Marco Berger and Marcelo Monaco, 2012), are from Argentina; O fantasma ( João Pedro Rodrigues 2000) is from Portugal; and Do Começo ao Fim (Aluizio Abranches 2009) is from Brazil. In these films, the sensuous gaze that some characters cast upon male bodies equals that of the camera’s eye, initiating a form of cinematic cartography in which the topography that composes the male body is delicately detailed, creating a ‘map’ that shows the areas which in much mainstream cinema are obscured. Viewers are so accustomed to the silhouettes, curves and bulges of the male body being avoided in favour of a gaze which objectifies the female body that they do not even notice gaps in the map. An exploration of each part of the female body, a full cartography, is privileged in much mainstream mise-en-scène, which simultaneously naturalizes the absence of a sensitive and eroticized exploration of the male body. Queer cinema, by contrast, erodes the idea of an essence of things to demonstrate that popular conceptions of ‘the natural’ are social and cultural constructions. Swimming pools are one of the few places where this cartography of desire for the male form can be displayed without generating homophobic reproach, especially when the swimming pools are Olympic ones and the athletic bodies are those of professional swimmers. In this context, it is 1

Gus Sobero, Queer Masculinities in Latin American Cinema: Male Bodies and Narrative Representations (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 9.

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considered ‘natural’ for male spectators to watch male bodies sheathed in tiny swimsuits; heterosexual and homosexual gazes unite in a recognition of the beauty of the masculine. Swimming demands an almost complete nakedness, with Speedos showing more than they hide. In western society, masculinity is often symbolically understood by the size of sexual masculine attributes, hence skimpy swimming trunks work paradoxically. On the one hand, they highlight the physique of the person who wears them, but at the same time, they invite comparisons that can ‘reduce’ that person’s masculinity. As Jeff Wiltse explains, so revealing is this brief attire that this was one of the reasons underlying the racial segregation of white and black in public pools; the fear that black bodies might put white male sexual supremacy to shame, inviting visual comparisons which ‘would implicitly undermine one of the long-standing justifications for white supremacy.’2 This leads me to the Brazilian film Do Começo ao Fim. The film narrates the homosexual and incestuous desire of two Brazilian siblings, Francisco ( João Gabriel Vasconcellos) and Thomas (Rafael Cardoso), both professional swimmers at different stages of their lives. The siblings have a very close relationship of mutual protection and affection, so intimate that it starts to worry their parents, Julieta ( Julia Lemmertz) and Pedro ( Jean Pierre Noher). Their incestuous desire is repressed until a more mature age when it can no longer be contained. Swimming pools, and water as a material element of intimacy, will play an important role in the development of this sexual attraction. The first scene after the credits shows Francisco as a boy (Lucas Cotrin) swimming in a public pool, while he is observed by his brother (Gabriel Kaufmann) and their nanny Rosa (Louise Cardoso). Both Rosa and Thomas have a gaze charged with admiration (‘looks how well Francisco swims’ says Rosa). Thomas grows up in an environment in which it is permitted to look at the male body, encouraging a gaze that does not easily distinguish between admiration and sexual desire. Thomas watches Francisco with bright eyes and a smile on his face. His gaze can be read as one of early sexual interest,

2

Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 135.

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a fact that is more destabilizing if we keep in mind that they are only two small boys. A child swimming is a tender image to the spectator, but it belongs, from a subjective point of view, to Thomas’ gaze – which reveals more than just brotherly love. When Francisco leaves the water, the first thing he does is kiss Thomas on the head, which Thomas responds to by playfully pinching Francisco’s face, confirming their affection and intimacy. The scene which follows will continue their semantic relationship with water: the two siblings are in their home, taking a bath together. The shared water marks the intimacy that is growing between them. Thomas tells Francisco about his desire to be a professional swimmer when he grows up, a swimmer as talented as his brother. So intimate are these encounters in the water that Rosa complains that the two siblings spend too much time in the bathtub. Outside of their bedroom, Thomas is only able to look at his brother with open desire in the context of the public pools. Outside the intimacy of their shared moments in the house or in the swimming pool, their mutual affection will be demonstrated not by gazing, but by touching. Only with the disappearance of their parents, as the years pass and they become adults, does Francisco and Thomas’s desire culminate in a sexual act, now that the prohibition of the parents no longer exists. Immediately after the scene of the first sexual encounter between the now-adult brothers, we see a man swimming in a pool. The quick editing, along with the swimmer’s cap and goggles, does not allow us to identify him, but the audience presumes that he is Francisco. However, when the man leaves the water we see that the swimmer is, in fact, Thomas, now a professional swimmer. Water and swimming pools have maintained the brothers’ intimacy, to the point where the characters begin to visually overlap in the eyes of the audience. After sex the brothers are shown shaving with wet hair, again relating their intimacy to water. This connection through water is reinforced when the siblings are separated for the first time, when Thomas competes as a swimmer abroad. In one scene, Francisco looks at the sea with sadness, as though searching the water for his brother, and immediately after, there is a scene of Thomas swimming professionally in a pool. Both brothers try to make a life of their own as single men, getting romantically involved with other people, but without success. At the moment when they both come to recognize

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their failure, an insert shot of the two brothers as boys swimming in a pool indicates the intimacy that has been lost, but should return. The film closes with them together again. Wiltse argues that the complex history of the swimming pool will always be anchored to the intimacy that it provokes being undressed near an unknown Other, and the intimacy generated by the fact of sharing water.3 The homosexual protagonist in the Portuguese film O fantasma, Sergio (Ricardo Meneses), finds sexual pleasure in sharing the water that João (André Barbosa), his object of desire, has previously used. Water preserves the presence of the body that it no longer contains; water that has touched the desired body is erotized. Sergio is a closeted young homosexual whose work is to collect trash from the streets in Lisbon. He is ashamed of his homosexual feelings, so his encounters with men are anonymous, haphazard, brief and emotionless. They are also wordless. Sometimes, black leather covers Sergio’s entire body, more as a way of preserving emotional distance in a skin-to-skin encounter, than as a fetishist practice. To open up to normalized homosexual relationships is very difficult for him, to the point that, when he finds, by chance, a handcuffed and gagged man inside a car (presumably kidnapped or assaulted), instead of helping him escape, he masturbates him. Because of his denial of his own feelings, he only can satisfy himself watching, stalking, or pursuing men, or in smelling, licking and touching objects that have been touched by other men, especially by João. He becomes, in his alienation and solitude, the titular ‘fantasma’ – ghost. On a work night, Sergio enters João’s house to collect some garbage, and they meet. From the garbage, Sergio rescues João’s old motorcyclist gloves, later masturbating with them. Starting from that moment, Sergio will stalk João as a real ghost. He will search his garbage for more intimate objects to take home, will watch him from a distance, and even enter his house at night. Among João’s discarded things Sergio will find a pair of Speedos, which he now wears under his own pants, as a way of getting

3

Wiltse, Contested Waters, 3.

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intimate with the man he desires. He begins to take showers and masturbates without taking off the Speedos, to increase his contact with João. As Schmidt argues, ‘the Speedo brief has played a role in glorifying the male body.’4 Competitive swimmers like João use these briefs, which frame their bodies in classic Apollonian perfection. Speedos ‘encourage male eroticism’ and work here as an index of João’s perfect swimmer body.5 Sergio cannot get rid of the Speedos, since the garment and the male body are so strongly related; as Schmidt argues, ‘the swimsuit needs the body to play a leading role.’6 When this intimacy does not satisfy him enough, Sergio goes to the club where João swims. Entering furtively at night, he undresses completely and dives into the water of the swimming pool which, moments before, held the object of his desire. As with the brothers of Do Começo ao Fim, the water works to establish intimacy. The difference is that the brothers of the Brazilian film consummate their love, whilst Sergio will end the film transformed into a ghost, trapped by his inability to openly express his sexual feelings. Swimming pools, and the showers and changing rooms of swimming clubs, are spaces of intimacy and sexual tension (see Figure 17.1), which Marco Berger explores in Ausente. The film tells the story of Martin ( Javier De Pietro) a young student in an Argentinean high school, who falls in love with one of his professors, Sebastian (Carlos Echeverria). Martin decides that he will try to seduce his professor. To do so, he concocts a series of excuses that will allow him to spend the night in Sebastian’s house. But when Sebastian realizes Martin’s intentions, the relationship between professor and student falls apart. Martin will be a constant threat in the professor’s life (even though the boy does not wish him any harm), because Sebastian lives in the constant fear that an underage student might denounce him. When Martin dies in an accident, the threat is lifted but relief fails to materialize. Sebastian feels only guilt, because Martin’s constant desiring gaze 4 5 6

Christine Schmidt, The Swimsuit: Fashion from Poolside to Catwalk (New York: Berg, 2012), 116. David Coad, The Metrosexual: Gender, Sexuality, and Sport (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 116. Schmidt, The Swimsuit, 115.

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Figure 17.1 Marco Berger explores the showers and changing rooms of swimming clubs as spaces of intimacy and sexual tension in Ausente (Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales/Oh My Gomez! Films, dir. Marco Berger, 2011).

had, in fact, awoken in Sebastian homosexual feelings that, with Martin’s death, he can no longer restrain. Martin is now ‘absent’ but Sebastian will carry a permanent wound. The film begins with the camera lovingly framing the physical topography of the male body, broken into fragments, in a series of haptic shots. This begins with a close-up of a foot, cutting to another extreme close-up, so close, in fact, that it is impossible to discern which part of the human body is being filmed. We assume that it is a fragment of a male body, but we do not know to whom these human parts belong. The figure being filmed is just a body displaying his ‘manliness’. The close-ups continue: a hand, a shoulder, some eyes, some fingers, some lips, a chest, a glimpse of Speedos, a back and a bottom, a knee, a nipple, and in this way, the male body is deconstructed. As Robert Neveldine observes in Bodies at Risk: Unsafe Limits in Romanticism and Postmodernism, when a male body is the object of the queer gaze (and the image of a male body being slowly inspected by the

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eye of the camera almost always generates a destabilizing gaze, at the very least), this challenges heteronormative codes which seek to deny ‘any possible identification between subject and object, and to redirect the look to an object deemed the correct commodity for males in general, the female.’7 But here, the majority of gazes are male, and what is looked at are male bodies. The body broken into fragments is that of Martin, who is taking a medical test, in order to participate in swimming classes. The gaze should be that of the doctor who examines Martin, but this clinical gaze, denied its proper context, is erotized. The following scene takes place in the pool, in the swimming class. As the students swim, Martin lifts his head out of the water to look furtively at someone who is outside the frame. Furtiveness is a component of the queer gaze.8 It could be argued that in swimming pools, to look upon another body submerged in the water is legitimated, as mentioned in reference to Do Começo ao Fim. However Martin, the one who is looking, is inside the pool. Sebastian is outside, not even wet. He is there to watch the boys, not to be looked at. Berger, however, incites a queer gaze that is anything but furtive at the film’s beginning, with the fragmentation of Martin’s body. As an audience, we are not given the possibility of looking in another direction, since there is nothing to be observed other than the boy’s body. The relationship of continuity between an ‘ideal’ (male, heterosexual) spectator and an ‘appropriate’ object of the gaze is broken. To complicate matters further, the male body we see is ‘feminized’, following the terms of popular discourses, in that it is presented as both passive and consumed by other male gazes.9 Overall, male gazes carry the narrative in Ausente. The excuse which Martin will use to leave the class relates to his eyes: dust supposedly gets in the boy’s eye and he must leave to prevent irritation. Sebastian 7 8 9

Robert Neveldine, Bodies at Risk: Unsafe Limits in Romanticism and Postmodernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 176. Ibid. Robert Richmond Ellis, ‘Looking queer in the autobiography of Terenci Moix’, in Susana Chávez-Silverman and Librada Hernández, eds, Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 257–74, 259.

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helps the boy, at whom he had never cast more than a casual look previously. The next swimming pool scene has Sebastian giving more attention to the boys that swim in it. By this point he has discovered Martin’s plan and now refuses to gaze directly at him. But this time it is he who cannot avoid casting furtive glances at the boy – furtive, thus now charged with queerness. When Martin leaves the water, the gaze that frames him corresponds both to the eye of the camera and to Sebastian’s perspective. Martin, before leaving for the showers, looks at the camera, at the audience, and to Sebastian, whose perspectives are shared. At the film’s climax and with Martin already dead, Sebastian will enter the swimming club at night, in a similar manner to Sergio in O fantasma, with the hope of finding some trace of Martin, some memories, in the pool. He finds only a phantasmatic image of the boy, whom he asks for forgiveness for having rejected him in such an abrupt way. The sad moment in which Sebastian communicates with a mental image of Martin is the only time in the whole film in which Sebastian smiles. These themes are also present in Tensión Sexual, Volume 1: Volátil, an anthology film which Berger co-directed with Marcelo Monaco. The second segment, ‘The cousin’ is about the sexual tension that exists between a boy (again played by Javier De Pietro) who is visiting the house of a friend, and his cousin (Maximiliano Franco), who is also staying at the house. The film does not feature any scenes of dialogue between the boy and the cousin, his object of desire, even though the two of them share the same tiny bedroom. The cousin walks around the bedroom nude or only in underwear, and the boy is always casting furtive looks in his direction. In one scene, the camera traces the cousin’s body, replicating the boy’s gaze, pausing on his penis. Again, we are not given the possibility of looking away, and are not accustomed to seeing the male body subjected to this kind of cinematic cartography. The scenes in which the sexual tension and queer voyeurism ascend to the maximum are those around the swimming pool (see Figure 17.2). After swimming, the cousin leans back on the edge of the pool sunbathing, whilst his wet clothes stick to his body, accentuating the shape of his penis. His wet crotch occupies the centre of the frame. The boy furtively observes him, and again the camera replicates his gaze; we admire the male

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Figure 17.2 Sexual tension and queer voyeurism build around the swimming pool in Sexual Tension: Volatil (Swift Productions/TLA Releasing, dir. Marco Berger and Marcelo Mónaco, 2012).

body glistening at the sun by the pool. The only open moment of intimacy between the two characters occurs in the pool, when their bodies touch each another in the context of them playing silly games and laughing. Outside the swimming pool, sexual activity again becomes furtive as the cousin, reciprocating the boy’s desire, stands discreetly pressing his crotch against De Pietro’s character, as he sits at a table with others present. The narrative function of the swimming pools in these films is to assist in bringing about a queer cartography of desire. These films deploy and explore a gaze loaded with desire for men, shown nude or semi-nude in and around swimming pools. The cinema and the pool are both spaces in which the gazes of the subject, camera and audience overlap at the sight of male bodies submerging in and emerging from water.

Notes on Contributors

Axel Andersson, a Swedish historian of media and culture, is the author of A Hero for the Atomic Age: Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki Expedition (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010). Andersson studied at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Pennsylvania and gained his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence in 2007. He currently works as a film and art critic. Sheri Chinen Biesen is Associate Professor of Cinema History at Rowan University and author of Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). She received her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, MA and BA at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinema, and has taught at USC, University of California, University of Texas, and in England. She has contributed to Film and History, Film Noir: The Directors, and Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Christopher Brown lectures on film and screenwriting at the University of Greenwich. He holds an MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures at the University of Cambridge, where he went on to complete a PhD. His articles have appeared in journals, including Film Criticism and the Quarterly Review of Film & Video. In 2013 his feature film script Knock-Out won the Best Screenplay award at the London Independent Film Festival and the Cordelia Award for Best UK Screenplay at the BlueCat competition. Piotr Cieplak is a lecturer in documentary practice in the School of Arts at Brunel University in London. He was previously a senior teaching fellow in African film at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and the 2010/2011 holder of the HarperWood Studentship for English Poetry and Literature at St John’s College,

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Cambridge. Combining theory and practice, Piotr’s work focuses on cultural memory, documentary film, photography and screen representations of Africa. He has a particular interest in the representation of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath in photography and documentary film. Clara Garavelli is a lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research interests include contemporary Argentine video, Latin American cinema and video, and the limits of the moving image. She has written critical texts on these subjects in national and international publications. She is an editorial board member of the Spanish Film Journal Secuencias. Revista de Historia del Cine (UAM-Maia Ediciones) and she has worked as Jury member of the International Festival in Video Art (FIVA) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2012 and 2013. Rose Hepworth is a graduate of the MPhil programme in Screen Media and Cultures at the University of Cambridge (2007) and was awarded her PhD at Cambridge for a thesis assessing the figure of the avatar as self-portraiture in narratives by women across media platforms. She is currently a Research Associate in the Computational Creativity Group at Goldsmiths, University of London. Pam Hirsch lectures on film, literature and the history of the women’s movement at the University of Cambridge, including teaching on the MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures. Her recent articles have appeared in publications including Feminist Media Studies and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. She has a particular interest in the representation of adolescents both in literature and on film. Her most recent published article, ‘Written on the Body: A Reasonable Exit?’, deals with similar issues of class, gender and culture as those in Deep End, especially how they are inscribed on the body. Monika Keska is a researcher from the University of Granada. Her thesis was on  the  works of Peter Greenaway. In 2011 she obtained a postdoctoral Mobility Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education to develop her research project on the influence of Francis Bacon’s painting

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on visual and narrative systems in film and literature. Her research interests include the relationship between cinema and contemporary art. Sophie Mayer is the author of The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love (Wallflower, 2009), co-editor of There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (with Corinn Columpar, Wayne State University Press, 2009) and of Lo personal es político: Essays on Feminism & Documentary (with Elena Oroz, INAAC, 2011). She is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound, and an affiliate of the Cambridge Screen Media and Culture MPhil programme. Matilda Mroz is Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Greenwich. Prior to this, she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and the Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. She is the author of Temporality and Film Analysis (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), the co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity Press, 2013) and the Associate Editor of Studies in Eastern European Cinema. Alex Naylor teaches at the University of Greenwich and lives in London. She received her PhD from University College London in 2007 with a thesis on the topic of discourses of affect in 1930s American horror cinema. Her current research focuses on the relationship of censorship to Hollywood film genre, production trends and tastemaking as well as on gender and the transnational and participatory culture in North American anime/ manga fandom communities.  Chris O’Rourke is a Research Associate at University College London. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was part of the first intake of Cambridge’s MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures. He has published on various aspects of silent film and is currently working on a project about the early history of cinema in London. Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns is a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) – Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina). He teaches seminars on American Horror Cinema and Euro

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Horror and has published articles on Argentinian and international cinema and drama in publications as Imagofagia, Stichomythia, Anagnórisis, Lindes and UpStage Journal among others. He has published articles in the books Undead in the West, edited by Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Ripper; To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post 9/11 Horror, edited by John Wallis and James Aston; and The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joseph Darowski, among others. François Penz, an architect by training, teaches in the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art at the University of Cambridge and also on the MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures. He is Professor of Architecture and the Moving Image and a Fellow of Darwin College. He co-founded Cambridge University Moving Image Studio and more recently the Digital Studio (www.expressivespace.org) for Research in Design Visualisation. Edward Saunders is a researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna, Austria. He studied at University College London and the University of Cambridge. His PhD thesis in German cultural studies (Cambridge 2013) looked at literary and visual representations of the city of Kaliningrad, Russia (formerly Königsberg). His research interests include urban studies, life-writing, literature and film. Micah Trippe undertook the MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures at the University of Cambridge, where he went on to complete a PhD. He is the Development Consultant for the New York African Film Festival and a Screenwriter for Alpha1Media. His research interests include French city symphonies, music videos, and the films of Jean Vigo. He has published previously in Research in Urban Sociology and Visual Anthropology. Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. She is Course Director of the MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures.

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Her recent books include, as co-editor, Cities in Transition: the Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (Wallflower, 2008) and, as sole author, Atom Egoyan (University of Illinois, 2009) and Love, Mortality and the Moving Image (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is currently developing a project on women artists and filmmakers working in France, The Sleeping Muse.

Index

Abranches, Aluizo 229 Adventures of Gerard, The 128 Alfredson, Tomas 58 All These Women 19 Almodóvar, Pedro 10, 11, 149, 150, 151, 155 Alphaville 7 Amiche Le (The Girlfriends) 80 Anderson, Michael xv Anderson, Wes 19 Anlian, Yao 4 Antonioni, Michelangelo vi, x, 5, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88 Aquatic Frolics ix, 29 Arletty 101, 103 Arnold, Jack 58 Arroseur arrosé, L’ 101 Asher, Jane xii, 122 Atalante 128 Ausente xiv, 17, 229, 233, 235 Avventura, L’ 82 Baal, Karin 67, 68 Bad Education (La Mala Educación) 10, 11, 149, 150 Bancroft, Anne 43, 45 Bardem, Javier 168 Barrault, Marie-Christine 17 Beer, Erica 127 Berger, Marco xiv, 17, 229, 233, 235, 236 Berger, Senta xvi Bergman, Ingmar 19 Bergson, Henri 10, 170, 173 Berkeley, Busby 14

Bernal, Gael Garcia 3, 10, 150 Bigger Splash, A xiii, 147, 148, 151 Bin, Li 4 Binoche, Juliette 11 Birkin, Jane 104, 112 Blümner, Bettina 73 Bogdanovich, Peter xiii, 2, 140 Bone 12 British Pathé ix, 26 Brosnan, Pierce 15 Buchholz, Horst 66 Cameraman, The ix, 21, 23, 29, 36 Capra, Frank 8 Cardoso, Louise 230 Cardoso, Rafael 230 Carné, Marcel 101, 103 Casanova, di Federico Fellini, Il (Fellini’s Casanova) 80 Cat People v, 10, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 58 Cates, Phoebe 15 Chase, Chevy 15 Cheever, John 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97 Children of Glory 16 Chionetti, Carlo 82 Ciénaga, La (The Swamp) 194, 196, 199, 201 Clark, Larry 204 Clouzot, Henri-Georges 12 Cohen, Larry 12 Confessions 12 Coppola, Sofia 2 Côte d’Azur and Saint-Tropez, La 106

246 Cotrin, Lucas 230 Cousin, Cousine 17 Craig, Daniel 16 Crawford, Joan 16 Creature from the Black Lagoon 58 Cuarón, Alfonso 3 Cukor, George x, 15, 37, 38 Daisy Miller 2 Dallesandro, Joe 18 De Pietro, Javier 233, 236, 237 Deep End vi, xii, 4, 8, 12, 19, 121, 123, 128, 131, 240 Delgado, Luis Maria xiii, 19, 158, 161, 162 Delon, Alain xi, 101, 104, 118 Deray, Jacques xi, xii, 7, 101, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114 Deserto rosso, il (Red Desert) 80, 81 Diaboliques, Les 12 Dickson, William Kennedy-Laurie 25 Didion, Joan 6 Diop, Ousseynou 18 Dirty Harry 6 Djaoro, Youssouf 5 Do Começo ao Fim 230, 233 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 51 Doermer, Christian 66 Dogtown and Z-Boys vii, xiv, 8, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 189 Don’t Look Now 58 Dor, Karin 15 Dors, Diana xii, 125 Drei (Three) 4, 61 Dunaway, Faye 16 Eastwood, Clint 6 Eclisse, L’ (Eclipse) 80, 84 Efron, Inés 13 Electric House, The 23 Ertl, Hans 62

Index Escrivá, Vicente 158 Esteso, Fernando 19, 160, 161, 168 Fast Times at Ridgemont High 15 Fellini, Federico 5, 80 Fonda, Jane 3 Footlight Parade 14 Foucault, Michel 8, 182, 183, 189 Frechette, Mark 77 Fun with Dick and Jane 3 Gente del Po (People of the Po Valley) 78, 81 Gilbert, Lewis 15 Goda, Krisztina 16 Godard, Jean-Luc 7, 8 Golden Eye 15 Graduate, The x, 15, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 89, 184 Grant, Cary 38, 39 Great Beauty, The 2 Greenaway, Peter xiii, 11, 149, 151, 154, 240 Grido, Il (The Cry) 80, 81 Guinness, Alec xv Haenel, Adèle 208 Halbstarken, Die 3, 8, 61, 66, 67 Halprin, Daria 77 Hard Luck 21 Haroun, Mahamat-Saleh 5 Harris, Richard 82 Hazan, Jack xiii, 148, 149, 151, 155 Headless Woman, The 13, 192, 202 Heat 18 Heckerling, Amy 15 Hepburn, Katherine x, 15, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 45 Héran, Zoé 209 Hoffman, Dustin 15, 42, 43, 44 Holden, William 2, 95

247

Index Hôtel du Nord 101, 103 Howard, John 39 Howard, Terrence 4 Husson, Eva 187 Huston, Danny 11 If I Know You 187 Intervals 152 It’s a Wonderful Life 8 Ivans Xtc. 11 Janssen, Famke 15 Jason Leigh, Jennifer 15 Jaws 58 Kaufmann, Gabriel 230 Keaton, Buster 21, 23, 28, 29, 36 Kid From Spain, The 14 Kieślowski, Krzysztof 11 Koma, Diouc 5 Kotcheff, Ted 3 Kristeva, Julia 131, 192, 205, 206, 211 Kulle, Jarl 19 Ladd, Alan 16 Lancaster, Burt xi, 89, 91, 160 Landa, Alfredo 158, 160 Landismo 158, 161, 162, 163, 167 Lanoux, Victor 17 Last Picture Show, The vi, xiii, 133, 140 Lazaga, Pedro 157 Legally Blonde v, 37, 40, 41, 45, 46, 47 Lemmertz, Julia 230 Let Me In 58 Let the Right One In 58 Lewton, Val 49, 50, 51, 52 Living London 27 Lochner, Anita 122 Logan, Joshua 95 Lola rennt (Run Lola Run) 70 Luketic, Robert 37

Luna, Diego 3 Lvovsky, Noémie 204 Making A Splash xiii Mambéty, Djibril Diop 18 Manhattan 187 Manolo La Nuit 160 Marks, Laura 178 Martel, Lucrecia vii, 13, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201, 202 Martinez, Fele 150 Massari, Lea 82 Mastroianni, Marcello 83 Matsu, Takako 12 McCarey, Leo 14 Men Who Swim 17 Metamorphoses 205 Mitchell and Kenyon 26 Mommie Dearest 16 Monaco, Marcelo 229, 236 Moreau, Jeanne x, 83 Morrissey, Paul 18 Morton, Samantha 19, 90, 137 Morvern Callar vi, 19, 133, 137, 141, 142 Moulder-Brown, John xii, 19, 122 Mujer sin cabeza, La (The Headless Moman) 192, 196, 198, 199, 202 Murray, Bill 19, 79, 216 Muybridge, Eadweard xiii, 152, 153, 154 My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend 207 Nakashima, Tetsuya 12 Natation par Jean Taris, La 184 Negro, Giorgio x, 85 New Bathing Pool 26 Nichols, Mike x, 15, 37, 42, 43, 46, 184 Niña santa, La (The Holy Girl) 191, 192, 194, 196, 199 Noher, Jean Pierre 230 North by Northwest 87

248 Nostalghia vi, 169, 170, 173, 175 Notte, La (The Night) x Nyman, Michael 152, 153 O fantasma 229, 232, 236 Olympia Fest der Schönheit (Olympia Festival of Beauty) 61 Onofre 161 Osterman Weekend, The 9 Ostrow, Lew 59 Ovid 200, 205, 206, 213 Ozon, François 10 Ozores, Mariano 160 Pagnol, Marcel 106 Pajares, Andrés 161 Palmy Days 14 Pauline 203, 206 Peckinpah, Sam 9 Pepi, Luci y Bom y otras chicas del montón 150 Pepito piscina vi, xiii, 19, 157 Peralta, Stacy xiv, 8, 181, 185, 187 Perry, Eleanor 90, 93, 94 Perry, Frank xi, 2, 16, 89, 93, 94, 160 Pescados (Fish) 201 Philadelphia Story, The v, x, 15, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 47 Photo Drama of Creation, The 33 Picnic 95 Piscine, La vi, xi, xii, 7, 12, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119 Polop, Lara 161 Polson, John 11 Pool, The 11 Potter, Sally 200, 241 Pratt, Tony 129 Pride 4 Prinzessinnenbad 73

Index Quiller Memorandum, The xv Ramis, Harold 15 Ramsey, Lynne 138 Randolph, Jane 56 Rebel Without a Cause 67 Rece do gory 128 Reed, Donna 8 Reeves, Matt 58 Reinhold, Judge 15 Riefenstahl, Leni x, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 75 Rodrigues, João Pedro 229 Roeg, Nicholas 58 Rohmer, Eric 207 Rois, Sophie 71 Ronet, Maurice xii, 104, 106 Rose, Bernard 11 Ross, Katharine 43 Rule, Janice 97 Rushmore 19 Sant, Gus van 204 Schipper, Sebastian x, 71 Schneider, Romy 101, 104 Sciamma, Céline 18, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 211, 213 Screaming Man, A 5 Sea Point Days vii, 6, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 227 Sedgwick, Edward ix, 21 Segal, George xv, 3 Shanghai Dreams 4 Siegel, Don 6 Simon, Simone 49, 50, 57 Skolimowski, Jerzy xii, 4, 121, 127, 128, 129, 131 Skyfall 15 Smith, Kent 49, 57 Somewhere 2

249

Index Sorrentino, Paolo 2 Spielberg, Steven 58 Star Is Born, A 21 Stewart, James 8, 38, 39, 40 Striesow, David x, 71 Sunset Boulevard 2, 11, 12 Sutherland, A. Edward 14 Swanson, Gloria 2 Swimfan 11 Swimmer, The vi, xi, 2, 8, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 99, 160 Swimming Baths 26 Swimming Pool 10, 12 Sychowski, Boris 11 Sylvia Scarlett 39 Tacchella, Jean-Charles 17 Taris 18, 184 Tarkovsky, Andrei vi, xiv, 8, 10, 169, 170, 171, 174, 175, 180 Taylor, Rod 77 Teenage Wolf Pack 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 76 Tensión Sexual, Volume 1 Volatil (Sexual Tension Volatile) xiv, 229, 236 Three x, 61, 62, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76 Three Colours Blue 11 Tomboy 203, 209 Touki Bouki 18 Tourneur, Jacques 10, 49, 50, 51, 56, 57, 59 Tressler, Georg 3, 61, 67, 68, 75 Truffaut, François 203 Turismo es un gran invento, El (Tourism is a Great Invention) 157 Tykwer, Tom x, 4, 61, 70, 74, 75, 76 Universal 51, 52, 55

Vacation 15 Vasconcellos, João Gabriel 230 Verde empieza en los Pirineos, Lo (Smut Starts at the Pyrenees) 158 Verdú, Maribel 14 Verster, François 6, 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227 Vigo, Jean 18, 128, 184, 203, 242 Virilidad a la española (Virility, The Spanish Way) 161 Vitti, Monica 80, 81, 84 Vogler, Karl Michael 125 Waggner, George 51 Warhol, Andy 18, 146 Water Babies ix, 26 Water Lilies vii, 18, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 212, 213 Water Polo – Worthing Swimming Club 25 Water Wrackets 152 Waterboys 8 Wellman, William A. 21 Wells, Orson 52 Wenders, Wim 72 Williams, Dylan 17 Williams, Esther 14, 17 Witherspoon, Reese 45, 46 Wolf Man, The 51 Xiaoshuai, Wang 4 Y Tu Mamá También 3, 13, 14 Yaguchi, Shinobu 8 You Only Live Twice 15 Zabriskie Point 5, 77, 78, 83, 87 Zed and Two Noughts, A 152, 153

NEW STUDIES IN EUROPEAN CINEMA With its focus on new critical, theoretical, and cultural developments in contemporary film studies, this series develops rigorous analytical debate within an innovative, multidisciplinary, and transnational approach to European cinema. Through a mixture of edited collections and single-authored volumes, the series aims both to re-evaluate established critical thought and to identify and explore new trends and theories that will inform cinema studies over the coming decades. It provides an international forum for lively and controversial debate embracing all aspects of European cinema from a broad range of theoretical perspectives. The New Studies in European Cinema series thus makes a key contribution to a subject whose importance to contemporary culture and identity is fundamental.

Vol. 1

William Hope (ed.) Italian Cinema. New Directions. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-282-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7209-3

Vol. 2

Wendy Everett & Axel Goodbody (eds) Revisiting Space. Space and Place in European Cinema. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-264-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7193-3

Vol. 3 David Montero Thinking Images. The Essay Film as a Dialogic Form in European Cinema. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0730-7 Vol. 4

Ewa Mazierska Polish Postcommunist Cinema. From Pavement Level. 2007. ISBN 3-03910-529-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7533-5

Vol. 5

Forthcoming

Vol. 6

Wendy Everett (ed.) Questions of Colour in Cinema. From Paintbrush to Pixel. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-353-8

Vol. 7

Rosanna Maule (ed.) with Julie Beaulieu In the Dark Room: Marguerite Duras and Cinema. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-354-5

Vol. 8 Leila Wimmer Cross-Channel Perspectives. The French Reception of British Cinema. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-360-6 Vol. 9

Lucy Bolton and Christina Siggers Manson (eds) Italy on Screen. National Identity and Italian Imaginary. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-416-0

Vol. 10

Matthias Uecker Performing the Modern German. Performance and Identity in Contemporary German Cinema. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0972-1

Vol. 11 Rosemary Stott Crossing the Wall. The Western Feature Film Import in East Germany. 2012. ISBN 978-3-03911-944-8 Vol. 12

Pietari Kääpä The National and Beyond. The Globalisation of Finnish Cinema in the Films of Aki and Mika Kaurismäki. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-966-0

Vol. 13 Ben McCann Ripping Open the Set. French Film Design, 1930–1939. 2013. ISBN 978-3-03910-311-9 Vol. 14 Fiona Handyside Cinema at the Shore. The Beach in French Film. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-0834-2 Vol. 15 Maurizio Cinquegrani Of Empire and the City. Remapping Early British Cinema. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-0823-6 Vol. 16

Orlene Denice McMahon Listening to the French New Wave. The Film Music and Composers of Postwar French Art Cinema. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-1750-4

Vol. 17 Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch (eds) The Cinema of the Swimming Pool. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-1783-2

new Studies in European Cinema

The swimming pool frequently appears in film not merely as a setting but as a dynamic site where social, political, cultural and aesthetic forces converge. What is it about this space that has so fascinated filmmakers and what kinds of cinematic investigations does it encourage? This collection features essays by an eclectic, international range of film researchers. Amongst the works analysed are classics such as The Cameraman (1928), The Philadelphia Story (1940) and La Piscine (1969); cult hits such as The Swimmer (1968) and Deep End (1970); and more recent representations of the pool in Water Lilies (2007), Sea Point Days (2009) and Ausente (2011). The pool is considered as a realm where artifice meets nature, where public meets private, where sexualities morph and blend; and as a space that reconfigures the relationship between architecture and narrative, in which themes of pollution, spectacle and reflexivity find unique expression. Approaching the swimming pool from a wide range of methodological perspectives, the essays in this collection stake a claim for the enduring significance of this exciting cinematic space.

Christopher Brown is Lecturer in Filmmaking at the University of Greenwich, where he teaches film and screenwriting. His articles have appeared in publications including Film Criticism and the Quarterly Review of Film  &  Video, and he has won several awards as a screenwriter.

Brown and Hirsch (eds) The Cinema of the Swimming Pool

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Edited by Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch

The Cinema of the Swimming Pool

Pam Hirsch is Lecturer in English Literature and Film History and Theory at the University of Cambridge. She is the convenor of the undergraduate course Film, Culture and Identity and teaches on the MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures. Her most recent articles have appeared in publications including Feminist Media Studies and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.

www.peterlang.com

PETER LANG