Life Guard: a documentary film exploration of water as a public space (2014)

Undergraduate: Rachel Johnson

Faculty Advisor: Sabine Gruffat
Department: Art

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Through the method of the documentary film I investigated the importance of the public pool to the diversity of members of a community (Greensboro, North Carolina) seeking to define the roles of water as a public space. I focused my lens on the architecture of pools and the water itself as well as the community members, diverse in age, race, ethnicity, economic status and psychical ability, who frequented these spaces. Through direct observational cinema as well as documented interviews I collected over 30 hours of footage that I am still editing into my final film. My footage uncovered the flexibility and immense power of the water as a testing ground for relations between self and other and, to a greater degree the ability of the water to foster personal growth. For those most frequent swimmers whom I interviewed most, public access to an aquatic space was life changing and even life-saving. In water, we find a physical and psychological space to challenge ourselves to overcome what defines and limits on dry land. I have, at this point, compiled several segments that set the aesthetic, tone, and mode of representation I seek to create in the film. I navigate my own presence and privilege as an image maker through an intimate and performative mode of filmmaking that explores issues in a way that in which my subjective vantage point is rendered very present through the beauty I find in these spaces and people and my own attempts to interact with both.