Summer in Cinema: The Anatomy of Dazzlement

Key facts

• Jacques Deray's 'La Piscine' (1969) is set in Saint-Tropez and uses a pool as a gravitational center of tension.
• François Ozon's 'Swimming Pool' (2003) turns the pool into a mental space blurring reality and fiction.
• Lucrecia Martel's 'La Ciénaga' (2001) depicts a decaying pool in Argentina as a symptom of bourgeois putrefaction.
• Charlotte Wells' 'Aftersun' (2022) uses a Turkish resort pool as an archive of memory.
• Roberto Rossellini's 'Viaggio in Italia' (1954) uses Campania's landscape to corrode the protagonists' emotional stability.
• Michelangelo Antonioni's 'L'Avventura' (1960) negates the mystery genre as the disappearance of Anna is never solved.
• Dino Risi's 'Il Sorpasso' (1962) allegorizes Italy's economic boom as a collective hallucination.
• Nanni Moretti's 'Caro diario' (1993) turns the Aeolian Islands into a space of ironic self-analysis.
• René Clément's 'Plein soleil' (1960) uses Mediterranean light to enable moral dissimulation.
• Jean-Luc Godard's 'Le Mépris' (1963) uses Capri's Villa Malaparte as a philosophical machine.
• Éric Rohmer's 'Conte d'été' (1996) maps desire through moral dilemmas on the beach.
• Agnès Varda's 'Du côté de la côte' (1958) deconstructs tourism's artificiality.
• Ingmar Bergman's 'Sommaren med Monika' (1953) reveals the impossibility of salvation through a Nordic summer.
• Alfonso Cuarón's 'Y tu mamá también' (2001) uses a Mexican road trip to expose social divisions.
• Takeshi Kitano's 'Sonatine' (1993) features yakuza on an Okinawa beach awaiting inevitable violence.