‘Totally present’: swimming subjectivities and cinematic representations

During the last two decades, the growth in popularity of so-called ‘wild’ or open-water swimming has coincided with, and been promoted via, the parallel emergence of user-generated content platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. Parallel developments in accessible and more portable digital filmmaking technologies have both enabled this emergence and encouraged new aesthetic possibilities for representing these activities. While some academic attention has focused on the potential for the ‘first-person’ perspective of the GoPro to represent distinctive forms of ‘embodied’ and ‘immersive’ swimming experience, less attention has been given to the various other means employed by such films, which in most cases relate to more ‘classical’ techniques of film – and sound editing. Adopting an approach rooted in film-textual analysis methods, and with a focus on several non-fiction films – including Waterlog (2018), Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey from City to Sea (2019), Lido (1995) and The Ponds (2019) – this article looks to establish a ‘poetics’ of what in effect constitutes a new genre of film, arguing for a more varied set of filmic approaches in terms of conveying swimming’s subjective and embodied states.