Made with Barbara Klutinis.

"POOLS is a pictorially and technically impressive sampling of spectacular swimming pools at W.R. Hearst's San Simeon and manages to validate itself from within, or at least within its own frame of identification."
- Richard T. Jameson

My aesthetics in co-making POOLS with Barbara Klutinis was to bring an experiential and physiological sense of the body to the members of the audience watching the film in terms of the locations, the swimming pools designed by the first woman architect to graduate from the School of Beaux Arts in Paris, Julia Morgan. I want the viewers to have the experience of swimming in architectural space for two reasons. First and foremost, I want to activate my audience, I want them to come alive, not be passive through watching cinema, and then to extend that "aliveness" into their lives through conscious expansive living and responsible politics. The second reason I swam and filmed in those pools was to break a taboo. No visitors are allowed to swim in these gorgeous examples of Morgan's work. At least by getting permission to swim there myself with an underwater camera I could extend through vision this extraordinary physical experience.

New 2018 print of Pools restored by the Academy Film Archive now available.