Event
DAM Frankfurt - A Public Pool: More Than Just a Family Home. Implied Collectivity in the Film “The Swimmer”
A Public Pool: More Than Just a Family Home. Implied Collectivity in the Film “The Swimmer”
“The Swimmer” (1968) by Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack, original version with subtitles
October 14, 8:15
p.m. Film screening
at the German Film Institute & Film Museum (DFF)
Admission: 9 EUR / reduced rate: 7 EUR
The event takes place as part of the exhibition “Suburbia. Dreams of Home Ownership – Ways Out of the Housing Crisis” (March 21 – October 18, 2026).
Featuring an introduction and a subsequent discussion by and with Gabu Heindl and Drehli Robnik.
“Pool by pool, they form a river,” says the protagonist of *The Swimmer*—played by an athletic, bewilderedly grinning Burt Lancaster, who appears in nothing but swim trunks throughout the entire film. In this 1968 New Hollywood film, an advertising executive in his fifties decides to swim home. He does this by swimming—in a few hours—from one garden lot with a single-family villa to the next, traversing every one of the obsessively present pools in the sprawling neighborhood of Connecticut’s white upper-middle class. The place name fits: The “cut” is “Connection.” The same applies to Frank Perry’s stubbornly dreamy film adaptation of the novel *The Swimmer*: so much hip, stylized display of white male nostalgia for a lost childhood, joie de vivre, etc.; so much gentle bashing of consumer society and suburban habits. A pretentious pseudo-critical panorama, yet one that is only fragmentary. And yet, despite all this, what is separated here remains connected: Implicitly, as stubbornly as the plot, there is more at stake here—more sexist, racist, and class-based violence. But also more of other lives, other road movies, other forms of collective pooling of living space and water—more of a different kind of society beyond private property and its fears of loss.
Moderators: Jorun Jensen (German Architecture Museum) and Jan Engelke (Technical University of Munich) from the curatorial team
Gabu Heindl is a professor and head of the Department of ARCHITECTURE, CITY, ECONOMY | Construction Industry and Project Development at the University of Kassel. As an architect and urban planner, she runs the firm GABU Heindl Architektur in Vienna. Her practice, research, and publications focus on housing, public space, and issues of distribution in architecture and urban planning. Her most recent publications include the monograph *Urban Conflicts: Radical Democracy in Architecture and Urban Planning* (2020) and the research report *A Just City Is a Must!* (2022), as well as, co-authored with Drehli Robnik, *Nonsolution: On the Politics of Active Non-Solution in Planning and Construction* (2024; English edition 2026). Through her department at the University of Kassel, she leads the BMFTR-funded research project KOWOHÄUSER—Collective Housing, Financing, and Operating Models for Socio-Ecological Single-Family Housing Developments.
Drehli Robnik is a critic and theorist in the fields of politics, film, and history, as well as an edutainer and DJ (Sunday Disco) in Vienna. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam (2007). He has co-edited volumes on David Cronenberg, Siegfried Kracauer, and male violence in the domestic thriller. He has also published monographs on anti-Nazi films, Jacques Rancière, control horror cinema, pandemic feature films, and popular cinema and politics. Most recent publications: *Flexible Fascism: Siegfried Kracauer’s Analyses of Right-Wing Mobilizations Then and Now* (2024); and with Gabu Heindl: *Nonsolution: On the Politics of Active Non-Solution* (2024; revised English edition 2026). A book on penultimate truths in politics is currently being finalized.