Cinema of the Swimming Pool

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. 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.

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