For the opening of the new season, we propose a cycle with a selection of works that, crossing various genres and aesthetics, question the complexity of a character that has pierced the history of cinema: the swimming pool. Despite the glittering charm of their surfaces and the way they artificially interrupt the landscape and imprison nature for our pleasure, swimming pools have always reflected tensions and contradictions that we want to explore.

Art has chosen the swimming pool as a trigger to arouse emotions in those who observe it. In the case of cinema, even if it's only an extra for a few seconds, it has a magnetic, inexplicable quality that sticks in the collective memory. The dead man in the pool at the beginning of Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950); the tense scene of the potentially fatal outcome in Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942/Paul Schrader, 1982); the look of desire between the two protagonists in La mala educación (Pedro Almodóvar, 2004); or the indolent teenager floating in his pool in The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), which Sofia Coppola would later honour in The Virgin Suicides (1999), are examples of that.

For Sob a Superfície: A Piscina no Cinema, we have chosen films in which the swimming pool plays what we consider to be a central dramaturgical role. And we wonder: how do its colours and lights games stimulate encounters and separations, becoming spaces of fantasy, care and desire, but also often of inequality and violence?

The multiplicity of the cycle is presented through the film prologue The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968). This kaleidoscopic work, starring Burt Lancaster, brings together various elements that the programme intends to explore: the cinematography of the body in water, the fluid border between reality and dream, water as a portal to our existence, or its symbolism as a mirror of appearances and privilege.

The swimming pool as a place of fantasy and breathtaking choreographed movements is represented mainly in Million Dollar Mermaid (Mervyn LeRoy, 1952), a splendid aquamusical starring the 'Hollywood mermaid' Esther Williams, but also in films such as its predecessor, La natation par Jean Taris, champion de France (Jean Vigo, 1931).

The protagonists of the film La naissance des pieuvres (Céline Sciamma's first feature, 2007) are also learning to move like mermaids, but here the focus is on desire. The association between swimming pools and eroticism is part of a long tradition that intertwines with queer themes — as in this film and in the biographical work about David Hockney, A Bigger Splash (Jack Hazan, 1974) — but also with themes linked to adolescent sexual awakening, as in Entretanto (Miguel Gomes, 1999), Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970) or La terraza (Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 1963). The latter, a pearl of Argentinian cinema, tells the story of a group of high-society youngsters who rebel against the adults by locking themselves up on the terrace of a building in Buenos Aires.

The inclusion of Polish master Skolimowski's Deep End, in which the teenager Mike, newly employed at a public swimming pool in London, falls in love with his colleague, leading to a tragic end, was a certainty from the start of the curatorial project. With this film, two new layers of meaning emerge: how do interpersonal dynamics differ when a swimming pool is public? And how heavy can an empty pool be?

Empty or unused pools unfold into other stories and themes: ecology and the swimming pool as an element that brings a community together, present in Dogtown and Z-Boys (Stacy Peralta, 2001), a documentary about the Zephyr skaters. A drought in California had led to the emptying of swimming pools, which this community invaded and occupied to perform vertical manoeuvres that would change the sport forever. Another unused pool, sometimes full and sometimes empty, is the one in Les diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955), a major work of French suspense that illustrates another common representative link — the swimming pool as a harbinger of death. And because of this dichotomy of the presence/absence of the body, we have added Bill Viola's canonical video essay The Reflecting Pool (1979) to the same session.

Some of the more abstract or experimental itineraries include other artists' films dedicated to swimming pools, such as Pools (Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis, 1981) and Moon's Pool (Gunvor Nelson, 1973), or the sensitive testimony Nameless Syndrome (Jeamin Cha, 2022) and the utopian Army of Love (Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann, 2016), which revolve around themes of difference, healing and care.

Underlying many of the works is a critique of the social inequalities that swimming pools naturally entail, as an effective place of privilege created specifically for white people, as Diane Lima explains in Negros na Piscina, based on the photographic work of Paulo Nazareth (who described his first swim in the pool at his employer's house as 'a racial event, both because of the water conditions and the embarrassment he suffered'). Canoas (Tamar Guimarães, 2010) and Que Horas Ela Volta? (Anna Muylaert, 2015) put a roof over these stories, in an epilogue to an aquatic cinematic odyssey that we want to be shiny, but — as David Hockney said about his swimming pool — that allows us to dive in and see through its surface layers.