Take a dip in some of cinema’s most memorable swimming pools—those uncanny, aqueous environs where interior collides with exterior, the private flirts with the public, and time seems suspended above the watermark. Serving variously as sites of adolescent sexual awakening in coming-of-age portraits like DEEP END and WATER LILIES, symbols of suburban middle-class malaise in New Hollywood touchstones like THE GRADUATE and THE SWIMMER, and dangerously seductive backdrops for sun-splashed thrillers such as LA PISCINE and SEXY BEAST, swimming pools have proven uniquely cinematic settings—by turns glamorous, unsettling, sensuous, and surreal stages for provocatively charged, heightened human drama.

Featuring:
THE GRADUATE (Mike Nichols, 1967)
THE SWIMMER (Frank Perry, 1968)
LA PISCINE (Jacques Deray, 1969)
DEEP END (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970)
A BIGGER SPLASH (Jack Hazan, 1973)
A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON (Les Blank, 1974)
3 WOMEN (Robert Altman, 1977)
SHOWGIRLS (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)
WILD THINGS (John McNaughton, 1998)
LA CIÉNAGA (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)
FAT GIRL (Catherine Breillat, 2001)
SEXY BEAST (Jonathan Glazer, 2000)
WATER LILIES (Céline Sciamma, 2007)