Adolpho Arrietta

A twist on the myth of Pygmalion inspired by the living sculptures of Argentinian artist Alberto Greco (1931–1965), an acquaintance of Arrietta’s in Madrid in the 1960s. The ex-wife of a renowned sculptor convinces her lover to steal the statue her former husband has made for his forthcoming exhibition at the historic Yvon Lambert Gallery. Her lover sees no other option but to put a model there as a real sculpture, which ends up being acquired by a Brazilian collector. Played by professional actors Michèle Moretti and Howard Vernon, as well as amateur actors, such as the transgender community of Les Gazolines, and with counterculture icons Marie France and Hélène Hazéra, the film is a musical about cruising, partying and costume in the post-radical Paris of May ‘68, and a drama which straddles traditional marriage and new amorous forms.

“Jonas Mekas showed me this film when I was living in his house on Wooster Street in 1975. I met him after Les intrigues de Sylvia Couski won an award at the Toulon Festival in 1974; he was on the Jury and invited me to New York. He showed me The Brig because it bore little relation to what I knew of his work, his diaries. The film is more in the ilk of classical cinema, and I was surprised by how raw and hard-hitting it is. It is the Living Theater that acts in it, but I knew nothing; for me, it was so real that it seemed more like fiction than documentary. It was hugely emotional, a hard slap. After being with Jonas and his friends, for instance Flo and Ken Jacobs, and Andy Warhol, I was really stimulated and understood that my idea of film was not madness or extravagance. I had a great time and felt highly stimulated by them all”. Adolpho Arrietta

This film, with shades of Buñuel, is about the author of a book called Tam-Tam — played by painter Javier Grandes and with a likeness to Arrietta — who is in New York when really he should be attending a private party in Paris, his absence conspicuous while everyone is waiting for him. Tam-Tam is an altarpiece led by mysterious, attractive characters, denizens of the counterculture of the time, for instance writers Severo Sarduy, Enrique Vila-Matas and Michi Panero, trans designer Maud Molyneux and activist model Paquita Paquin, inviting us to lose ourselves in a never-ending Parisian soirée. Arrietta used a camera lent to him by Jonas Mekas to shoot the opening in New York. The glam-toned, dandyesque improvised dialogues and a visually baroque style speak of the mix between life and cinema. We hear a tam-tam in the background: “Is it the apocalypse”, one character asks. “We are the apocalypse”, answers the other.

Céline Sciamma’s directorial debut, Naissance des pieuvres,depicts the emotional and sexual awakening of three teenagers around an indoor swimming pool in a Parisian suburb. Marie, a fifteen-year-old introvert, becomes fascinated by Floriane, the charismatic captain of a local synchronised swimming team. Driven by this attraction, Marie tries to get closer to her while observing the complex dynamics of desire, friendship and power that develops between the young girls. At the same time, Anne, one of Marie’s friends, has her own experience of insecurity and affective search, shaped by the pressure to fit in and belong. As the relationship between the three intensifies, contradictions surface between the image they outwardly project and their real feelings.  

Standing away from the common places on adolescence, Céline Sciamma explores first love, burgeoning queer identity and the uncertainty of desire with an intimate, observational gaze, resulting in a sensitive and honest portrait of a time of transformation, in which each gesture leads to the passage from childhood to adulthood.

Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), a famous Hollywood actor, lives a life of pleasure in Hotel Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, drifting aimlessly between vacuous relationships, punctuated by film shoots and commercial duties. Cleo (Elle Fanning), his eleven-year-old daughter, stays with him for a few weeks due to her mother’s absence, forcing him to rethink his life.  

Sofia Coppola’s employment of swimming pools is carefully considered in the film — blue water in Somewhere is the only place where Marco can recover the meaning of his existence as the pool acts as a womb in which he finds balance. While living with his daughter Cleo and the reflection of these aquatic moments — diving under water, floating, playing or simply sunbathing with no real purpose — everything happens. Thus, Coppola explores in depth themes such as fame, loneliness and the complexity of human ties, putting forward an intimate and profound portrait full of the subtleties of life.

Gal Dove (Ray Winstone), a criminal for the British mafia, lives happily retired with his wife in an idyllic villa in southern Spain and a dazzling swimming pool. Their peace is shattered with the arrival of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a former gangster and criminal associate who wants to convince him to do one last job.  

If a swimming pool can be at the heart of suspense, then Sexy Beast is the quintessence. The reflection of blue water in Gal’s idyllic seclusion symbolises the artificial paradise that can be broken at any time. This first feature-length film by British director Jonathan Glazer (also the director of The Zone of Interest, 2023) starts with one of the most striking swimming pool scenes, a symbol for the impending danger about to reach this whitewashed haven of peace. The perfect vision of recreated beauty — luxury pools on the Andalusian coast — which, in the depths of pristine water, conceals an unsettling fear of returning to the past.

Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling), a frustrated English writer paralysed by writer’s block, is invited by her editor to spend a few days in her summer house in the south of France. While there she meets Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), the editor’s uninhibited daughter. The young girl’s hypersexuality clashes with Morton’s cold nature, an initial hostility which turns into a fascination with the private life of the young girl, serving the writer as inspiration for her new novel and tugging the story to an ambiguous game between truth and imagination.   

Being in crisis is wanting to be another person. Sarah wants to absorb the vitality of her young host, a process of metamorphosis triggered by the swimming pool. The pool is the film’s central character, the place where Julie shows her naked body and amorous acts, sending Sarah into a state of agitation. Through the pool and its water, the writer drinks in Julie’s wild passion. The aquatic enclosure thus acts as catharsis: the place where the subconscious of the writer flourishes, enabling her to unleash her creativity and free her fantasies. At the same time, water distorts the image, blurring fiction and reality; ultimately, the necessary medium to keep art afloat.

The body in water as an object of ideology. This is one of the major themes of the 1930s and this session, where Nazism and Anarchism dissolve into two different swimming pools. Two great films of counterposed ideologies which have gone down in history as examples of film’s power to represent a vision of the world. In Olympia, Part 2. Festival of Beauty, Leni Riefenstahl films the Olympic Games of Berlin in 1936, organised during the Third Reich. The camera leaves the athletics stadium to show the repertoire of modern sports — fencing, polo, cycling, pentathlon — before culminating in the Olympic pool with Adolf Hitler as the host, where the beautiful, disciplined, classical bodies of the swimmers bring to mind, as Susan Sontag wrote, the visual fascination that characterised fascism. Meanwhile, Jean Vigo, the son of an exiled Spanish anarchist, films French Olympic champion Jean Taris in a funny, playful exercise, where the swimming pool becomes a field of play without rules and where avant-garde film-making elements of the 1930s materialise, such as slow motion, superimposed images and dynamic editing. Two avant-garde films, two films on opposite poles that show, for a time, swimming not as an object of pleasure or desire, but as a space of contest from which to demonstrate the power of the twentieth century’s great ideologies.