For Neddy Merrill, the antihero of John Cheever’s short story, portrayed by Burt Lancaster in its film adaptation The Swimmer (1968)1, it’s the final insult.

At the film’s first glamorous, private pool, he sees “with a cartographer’s eye, a string of swimming pools, a quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county” and decides to “enlarge and celebrate” the beautiful day with a long swim back home across them, delighting in all their transformative - or restorative - powers.

“Being embraced and sustained by the light-green water seemed not as much a pleasure as the resumption of a natural condition.”2

The journey becomes less cross-country and more of a descent, with the final, public pool as his Ninth Circle of hell. Reduced to cadging 50 cents for entry, demeaned by a spot check of the dirty soles of his feet, he eventually muscles in to work his final, desperate length through the hoi polloi from which he’s designed an adult life at a stately distance.

Just four years earlier, Mikheil Kalatozishvili committed to film perhaps the most famous pool sequence in cinema history. His glorious one-take on the rooftop of the Hotel Capri in Havana for Soy Cuba (1964), not quite as ‘public’ a pool as the one in The Swimmer but nevertheless one open to the public in Castro’s revolutionary socialist state, could not be more tonally different.

A ranging demographic of guests drink, sunbathe, play cards and intermingle around the pool before submerging together, bodies interwoven in its cooling respite.

Somewhere beneath, or above, or plain oblivious to this ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ is the British experience. One where lords of the realm rub shoulders with the unemployed to grab our flighty British summer when it’s suddenly got its hat on and squeeze every drop out together.

1995 was a heatwave3. One of the hottest summers of the twentieth century.

That summer, director Lucy Blakstad created her first entry into the BBC’s Modern Times series with Lido (1995), a wonderful documentary that combines tremendous craft and attention with large-hearted curiosity about the lives of the swimmers (and spectators) who gather at London’s Brockwell Park Lido, a spot sometimes referred to locally as ‘Brixton Beach’4.

It’s available to watch on the BBC Archive YouTube, a treasure trove for docs and nonfiction pulled from the broadcaster’s history.

Signs of the Times, Modern Times & a British golden age

Blakstad was first hired by the BBC as a graphic designer and later earned awards for her tight, innovative work on idents. But an invitation from director Nick Barker provided a pathway into a different world - documentaries - on Signs of the Times (1992).

The series explored good and bad taste in the British home and the emotional relationship with personal objects, photographed by one of the nation’s best chroniclers of the charming, eccentric (and foolish): Martin Parr.

By researching and conducting the interviews in the series, Blakstad was able to start developing a process that “hasn’t changed. It’s perhaps been finessed”.

“Maybe it’s a naivety, maybe it’s just a curiosity. But it’s people-centred. I want to make films about people and what’s going on in their head and find the similarities.”5

It led to the next big break, her blend of soft interviewing skills and sharp designer’s eye abundantly clear, with another BBC series: Modern Times.

Founding editor Stephen Lambert, whose later work shifted to docu-soaps, reality TV and national tongue-waggers like Wife Swap, Gogglebox, The Traitors and Naked Attraction was keen to give one director “a chance to fly, a chance to experiment”6. (He later commissioned both Parr and Adam Curtis as directors in the series, and exec produced The Century of the Self (2002) and The Power of Nightmares (2004) for Curtis).

It took months to finally agree on the commission, but Blakstad’s vision was clear:

“I definitely want to do a film where people from all walks of life - I saw it like a platform - people all cross this one place. It could be a corner shop. It could be an airport. It could be a train station. I made a massive list of all the localities it could be. And swimming pool was on there. I thought that could be interesting visually. Then I thought, ooh, outdoor swimming pool - lido.”

Lambert wanted something with a beginning, a middle and an end and feared it could otherwise be “like watching paint dry”.

To which Blakstad joked, “exactly, you get it now!”

After an exhaustive trawl of lidos across the country, Brockwell Park presented itself as the most sensible, production-wise, and most likely to provide the diversity she wanted in its swimmers.

With the progress of documentarians like Nick Broomfield, Molly Dineen and Kevin Macdonald, the photography of Martin Parr, and the affectionate interview tracks in Nick Park’s Creature Comforts, it was undoubtedly a golden era of growth and exploration for British creatives and ‘Britishness’ in modes of nonfiction.

But the same could not be said for the watery world of the humble lido.

The British lido & Brockwell Park

Brockwell Lido opened in 1937 to replace the public bathing ponds in the park.

The 1920s and 1930s were the boom years in Britain, with hundreds of open air pools and lidos built. Before then, the only baths large enough for swimming were the thermae constructed during the Roman occupation7. Until the 1900s, swimming for fun was rare and ‘baths’ were primarily places to wash.

“That mass washing of the 1800s and 1900s is worth noting because it laid a foundation for pool time being about leisure as well as lengths, about frolicking in the water too … the camaraderie of bath day lives on at modern lidos where time by the side of the pool is as much a part of the experience as time in the water. Munching snacks, reading novels, painting nails and scrolling through dating apps are big poolside favourites today.”

Christopher Beanland, Lido: A dip into outdoor swimming pools: the history, design and people behind them (2020)

Until this era, outdoor bathing opportunities had been restricted to men and boys. But in 1929, George Lansbury extended the popular swimming facilities at the Serpentine Lake to women too. Much was changing.

Herbert Morrison, the London County Council Chairman 1934-40, vowed to turn London into “a city of lidos”. And by 1951 there were at least 60 open air pools operating in the city: one per 120,0008.

But later decades were rough, and the 1980s the roughest. Outdoor pools were closing all around the world “mainly due to them reaching old age and needing expensive repairs, coupled with a huge drop in usage which tallied with new indoor leisure centres opening and a drastic drop in package holiday prices to sunnier climes”9.

In London, the Purely Way Lido, Croydon closed in 1979. London Fields Lido in 1988. Victoria Park Lido, the largest modern pool in London at 200 x 90 feet, closed in 1989 and was demolished in 1990 (now, a car park). And Finchley Lido followed in 1993.

Brockwell Lido was mothballed as part of cost-saving measures forced upon Lambeth Borough Council in 1990 but miraculously survived, thanks to the efforts of a Brockwell Lido Users (BLU) group.

At the time that Lido was filmed, the pool had been back in action for a year under the management of two former Council employers, Patrick Castledine and Casey McGlue.

Sir Josiah Stamp, the Governor of the Bank of England, declared at the 1936 opening of Morecombe’s new open air baths: “Bathing reduces rich and poor, high and low, to a common standard of enjoyment and health. When we get down to swimming, we get down to democracy.”10 And in the modern era, Brockwell could perhaps boast the most broad and democratic mix of all Britain’s lidos.

One of Lucy Blakstad’s first major tasks, as director, was to tap into this diverse cast.

“Once I’d got the OK to go ahead and do it, I sat down and I wrote down this shopping list - like a drama - if I could have my ideal six people to be in this film, who would they be? It’s never identical to what you go out and find, but it’s a very, very clear idea of what I’m looking for.”11

On that list, at one end of the spectrum, was “someone from Dulwich, privileged”. But she could never have guessed quite the level of privilege she’d discover.

Meeting the characters of the lido

The swimmers we meet in Lido are undeniably authentic, and the encounters feel spontaneous, but identifying them according to Blakstad’s shopping list of ‘ideal six people’ was a process that took two months of daily research at the pool - armed with notebooks and handycams - from 8am to 6pm.

As a rule of thumb, she might expect to find 1 in 15 of the people she shortlisted for interview genuinely interesting.

The first to make the cut is an unreconstructed pool attendant who tells us he feels “fucking rough” after a rugby club dinner the night before, followed by a strip club.

He’s somewhat of a throwback to pre-Thatcherite times, before the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and guidelines issued by the Health and Safety Executive made lifeguarding more stringent. Back then, “virtually any fit youth could turn up for a summer season and spend it sunbathing or chatting up the girls”12, including a young Sean Connery, who had a spell as a guard at the Portobello Baths in Edinburgh.

The next clutch we meet are a committed pensioner who frets about earplugs and devotes his mental energy during lengths to mulling over cryptic crossword clues, and a lesbian couple who tease each other about taking the first cold dip of the day.

With no great fanfare, we then see the “privileged” character that Blakstad sought. Robin Butler, soon to be Baron Butler of Brockwell, the Head of the Civil Service and later famous for the ‘Butler Inquiry’ into Britain’s intelligence on WMDs in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is out for a brisk pre-work recreational. With him, Andrew Turnbull, Baron Turnbull, private secretary to the last two PMs: Thatcher and John Major.

It says everything about Blakstad’s approach that this sequence of characters is presented so flatly: there’s no distinction between a hungover lifeguard, a slightly dotty pensioner, a vivacious lesbian couple and a lord of the realm. When her more ‘esteemed’ interviewees slip into ‘Newsnight mode’ with their answers, she disarms and deconstructs - “it doesn’t take too much effort to just pretend I don’t get it, or I don’t understand” - to liberate more natural, conversational responses.

“I’m good at getting people to chat, and I’m cheeky. If they go into boring politician mode, or boring architect mode, answering all the questions that they’re asked all the time I know how to throw in a curveball. Then they talk like normal human beings.”13

Several of Blakstad’s characters are Black or mixed race, or, like the Ulsterman she speaks to, people who’ve experienced social segregation and conflict. It’s perhaps hard to fathom but just 30 years earlier in St Augustine, Florida, the manager of the Monson Motor Lodge poured hydrochloric acid into the water when white and Black students staged an aquatic ‘wade in’ together14.

The Brockwell Park of Lido by contrast, is not presented as a perfect rainbow coalition, but its commingling feels frictionless under the sun’s generous rays, even with the pool’s tribal groupings, and shorn of the sharp-elbowed lane swimmers that my London swimmer friends tell me sometimes spoil their sessions today.

Between the interviews that take us inside the lives and minds of the selected characters are neat interstitial edits of sharp photographic composition. “One of the reviews on Lido said ‘each shot is like a contemporary postcard’. It’s not like I got that from Martin Parr, I didn’t. It’s my graphics background and taking photographs all the time. But yes, obviously an influence”15.

It’s a dense package that, like the pool itself, feels teeming with life. One of Lido’s great achievements is that it was shot over 10-11 days, on 16mm, with around 10 rolls of film a day, and required great discipline in the prep and execution. But the end product feels like it could be one hot day’s joyful, spontaneous happenstance.

“The biggest compliment for me with the Lido film is that people said to me at the time ‘oh my god, you were so lucky that day you got to the lido, and all those fabulous people talked to you’. And that’s exactly the feeling I wanted.”16

“That split-second decision: which sector do I sit in?”

Spending an hour of overtime each day with her sound man meant Blakstad could go deeper on interviews, in a less self-conscious, audio-only environment.

But she was also keen to explore more intuitive, observational responses to the lido environment, “David Attenborough style”.

A different type of documentary might have told the story of Brockwell Lido as an architectural space. Its distinct blend of Art Deco and proto-Modernism was recognised by Grade II listed status in 2003 and boosted by a £500,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant for restoration the following year17.

But unlike the ‘attractiveness’ of many modern swimming constructions, infinity pools imagined for endless Instagram gratification (“the Patrick Bateman of swimming pools”18), Brockwell Lido’s strong horizontal emphasis is characterised by long thin lines and a robust understatement19 that leads swimmers into functional decisions: where should I sit? (Or at least put your towel down, if diving straight in.)

“People come and they’ll do that thing and then they look around. It’s a bit like walking into a theatre where they haven’t allocated your seat numbers or something. Then they point and then their partner goes ‘what about over there?’ They have to make that split-second decision: which sector do I sit in? And people gravitate to people sort of like them.”20

Entering the lido is an emotional, ‘psychogeographic’ experience: “you have an opinion about a space the moment you step into it. This has as much to do with the space as our hardwired instincts to determine if it feels safe”21.

That sensation might change, metre by metre, as you determine the exact spot that aligns with where you feel you belong.

What Blakstad observed Attenborough-like with her long lens, her swimmers confirmed in conversation. Two friends celebrating a ‘big’ (but youngish) birthday describe the lay of the land and how “we come into every category”: the ‘happening corner’, club-goers, single mums, the gay crowd, childless couples.

Some of the positioning is obviously functional - families and single parents wanting quicker access to the cafe and amenities - others more tribal.

But as things have ‘got hotter’, unwritten rules have melted away. Another young family describes the surprising spread of “the boobs”. Just a few days before, they were confined the pool side with “the gay boys and the dope smokers” but now seen bobbling about freely amongst the family section.

Considered this way, the lido is also something of a Foucauldian ‘heterotopia’, a different or other ‘world within a world’22.

Although a public space, it’s confined by a fixed entry point. Once you’re inside, there are rules to govern clothing and conduct. And, in another Foucaudian touchstone, the pool is a place of surveillance: although most of that ‘looking’ takes place between the swimmers, as they explore the politics of exposed bodies.

The human body: self-image and detachment

In the first open season of Blackpool’s lido, in 1923, only 94,403 of the 500,000 people who passed the turnstiles were bathers. In 1937, at Weston-super-Mare, 9d in every shilling came from spectators rather than swimmers: around 75% of the total revenue.23

At a time long pre-internet, when undressed images of the human form were scarce, the lido offered a particular, unique attraction.

Even now, in the era of AI, airbrushing, GLP-1s and proliferating porn, it represents an antidote of sorts: an escape back into body reality.

“… today the pool is the place you see the bodies of everyone and anyone in all their glorious individualism. Scars, scratches, fat, ripples, muscle, curves, hair, skin of every tone. The human body is as idiosyncratic and imperfect as every doctor dispassionately knows it to be.”

Christopher Beanland, Lido: A dip into outdoor swimming pools: the history, design and people behind them (2020)

For the characters of Blakstad’s Lido, pool-going can be a chance to flirt and ogle. But it’s also a space for comparison, self-reflection, a reevaluation of self-image vs. media representations of the human body, as two of her fuller-bodied interviewees discuss.

It’s a theme that Blakstad’s returned to in both commercial and documentary work. She shot Dove’s first ‘Real Beauty’ campaign in the UK and a 1998 BBC2 four-parter Naked. More recently, she went deeper beneath the skin’s surface, directing an episode of Netflix’s The Surgeon’s Cut (2020) that explores the skill and mentality of Mexican-American neurosurgeon Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa.

If it’s true you “go to a lido to bathe and to be seen to bathe”24, there’s still a curious shift between the dry land stuff, spectating with neat coifs, tight trims and keen, unchlorinated eyes, and what happens to the body and mind once it enters the water.

Lido is brilliant at exploring this liminality through Andy Cowton’s soundscaping and the combined lens skills of cinematographer Mike Eley and underwater specialist Mike Valentine.

With sound, Blakstad “knew what I was looking for but I couldn’t really describe it. But I knew it would be a bit experimental”.

Cowton was an outside-of-the-box choice, known most for his work with contemporary choreographers like Russell Malliphant at Sadler’s Wells.

The layered sonic textures of Lido mix wild field recordings, contemporary tracks like Edwyn Collins ‘A Girl Like You’ and Rockers Hi-FI ‘Push Push’ as distorted by headphones and portable stereos, original, pulsing composition and plaintive jazz all occasionally submerged then brought back up to air in a rich and subjective evocation of the pool/ poolside state-shifting. The treatment allows for longer underwater takes that bring us into dreamlike suspension.

“There’s definitely something magical about being in water”, is the VO cue for the longest montage on the subject.

Somehow doubts about the body’s dry imperfections are left on the land. Weight disappears. A pregnant swimmer tells us that when she’s swimming, she “imagines that I’m suspended the same way the baby’s suspended inside me”.

On her own experience of pregnant swimming, and the reasons for swimming’s popularity during pregnancy, Blakstad said:

“The thing is, when you’re pregnant it’s such a weird feeling. In water, it just takes that weight, that massive weight that’s uncomfortable. And it just buoys you up. It’s blissful. It feels normal again.”25

Lido may never have wanted to have a beginning, middle and end. But there’s something thematically apt in that.

To view the public swimming pool experience like The Swimmer’s Neddy Merrill, as a tract in a journey, underestimates its powers. Its capacity to take you outside of the normal, larger society, a sense of regular ‘time’, the weighted expectations of the body (and its skin). To give transformation, not just transport.

“When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world.”26

Today’s edition of Shorts will focus on a documentary short about ballet, even if “no one cares about this anymore”1.

Readers of Game Tape might further contend that ballet isn’t a sport. They’re probably right. But its performers are most certainly athletes.

That’s one thing that Krzysztof Kieślowski’s observational eye (and ear) recognised in Seven Women of Different Ages (1978).

Kieślowski came to the larger cinema world’s attention with the Dekalog (1989), a cycle of ten films exploring moral dilemmas connected to the Ten Commandments, and the Three Colours trilogy - Red (1994), White (1994) and Blue (1993) - on the French national motto’s values of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Before Cannes, Venice, BAFTA and the Academy recognised his narrative features, he was a documentarian, shifting gears back and forth between the two art forms for at least a decade and borrowing from his documentary toolkit to craft works of fiction, tending to construct “around an idea rather than a story”2.

“I started to combine elements of both filmic genres – documentary and fiction – from the documentary taking the truth of behaviour, the appearances of things and people, and from fiction, the depth of experience and action – the driving force of this genre.”3

Krzysztof Kieślowski

Kinoteka & the significance of documentary

Back in March, the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival programmed a series of his docu shorts at London’s Ciné Lumière, a wonderful Art Deco theatre belonging to the Institut Français. I was lucky enough to attend with two of my favourite Substackers, Audrey (who recently wrote about another film screening there - Amélie) and Mazin.

Documentary, and specifically short-form docs, had an outsized importance in 1970s Poland. Their simple existence was political, playing a crucial civic role, since they could “depict reality as it was and not as the Communists claimed it to be”4. Surveying the titles of some early Kieślowski docs, you can see how, pieced together, they’d describe life in Poland: The School, The Factory, The Hospital, The Office.

Documentaries aired regularly on national TV and many were shot with the intention of theatrical release, attracting big audiences. From 1958, Polish movie theatres were obliged to screen short films, typically in the region of 15 minutes, give or take, before the main feature. Seven Women of Different Ages found a large viewership because it played before a major release5.

Kinoteka’s five-film programme showcased a range of Kieślowski’s modes and tones in the format. The programme opener, Talking Heads (1980), displays impish humour whilst at the same time providing a platform for greater philosophical depth.

The director was fond of organising structures so “the material is to be ordered in accordance with an idea”6. In Seven Women of Different Ages, he uses the days of the week (each day tells the story of a different ballet dancer of a different age). In Talking Heads, each ‘talking head’ interview is ordered by year of birth, starting with the most recent (1979) and progressing further and further back in time.

To each interviewee he asks:

‘What year were you born?’; ‘Who are you?’; ‘What do you most want?’

If asking these questions to a pre-verbal infant, at one end of the scale, raises a chuckle, the final interviewee’s words resonate with profound humanist optimism.

The centurion Kieślowski speaks to might be hard of hearing and requires the last question to be repeated. But the answer to what she’d most like is easy: “to live longer”.

Filmmaking is an art form, for Kieślowski, that’s driven by the desire for empathy.

“I am looking for a way of evoking in audiences feelings similar to my own: the physically painful impotence and sorrow that assail me when I see a man weeping at a bus stop, when I observe people struggling vainly to get close to others, when I see someone eating up the left-overs in a cheap restaurant, when I see the first blotches on a woman’s hand and know that she too is bitterly aware of them, when I see the kind of appalling and irreparable injustice that so visibly scars the human face”7.

Krzysztof Kieślowski

In the last sequence of interviews, we meet a woman who’s recently lost her husband, Stanisław. It’s heartbreaking to watch. She visibly struggles to summon an answer to the question of what she now wants in life, the camera sitting patiently, connecting us with the feeling, “the human face”, in the moment.

“Why invent plots if they exist in real life?”

At film school, Kieślowski wrote a thesis ‘Reality and the Documentary Film’ in which he put forward the argument “that in everybody’s life there are stories and plots. So why invent plots if they exist in real life?”8 For a long time he “felt reality was more interesting than anything that can be invented”9.

In the award-winning From A Night Porter’s Point of View (1977), we meet Marian Osuch, a night porter and obsessive fan of law and order who believes that “regulations are more important than people”. His antics are so farcical, the timing so undercutting and comic, that many audiences assumed his story was scripted. Just more evidence of Kieślowski’s student theory on the inventiveness of reality.

The quality of research is a secret superpower of these short films.

Kieślowski was obsessive in seeking out the right characters - in the right, real context - to explore the ideas that preoccupied him.

There’s little evidence to suggest he was much interested in sports per se, but different sporting contexts attracted him.

He produced a film about the Monte Carlo car race in which Krzysztof Komornicki drove a Polish Fiat, Before The Rally (1971). It enabled him to explore how bureaucracy stifled Poland’s technical and industrial progress.

Elsewhere, he searched for a group “who manage to achieve what might today be called success”, “something calculably good, something worthwhile”10 and considered the Japanese volleyball team who medalled Gold at Montreal 1976 as a possible subject. Julien Faraut eventually told this story in The Witches of the Orient (2021).

Kieślowski instead shifted his gaze from sports teams to the team of orthopaedic surgeons in Hospital (1977), their battles across 32-hour shifts with faulty equipment and fatigue in smoky offices in what he called a “film about brotherhood”11.

The life cycle of a ballet dancer

In some ways Seven Women of Different Ages is a companion to Hospital: a film about sisterhood. The most peaceful and happy moments are when each day is done - the moments in between - when the ballet dancers are playing, resting or socialising with their peers.

Individual days are constructed around the experience of a different dancer, with their ages advancing each day. It combines the neat formalism we see in Talking Heads (organised by year of birth) or Hospital (hours of the day) with a careful attentiveness to the face: the window to empathic connection but also comprehension of their evolving emotional states.

“The faces, not the elaborate routines and movements, tell the whole story. The expressions of the faces, their beauty as well as signs of fatigue, are more important for Kieślowski than short moments of artificial beauty during a performance in front of the public.”

Marek Haltof, The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (2004)

The Kinoteka screening was prefaced by a conversation between the curator and esteemed cinematographer Witolk Stok, a Kieślowski regular who lensed Seven Women of Different Ages. During the conversation, he said the director liberated his camera for this film to follow the dynamic flow of the dancers and tell the story in motion, seeing as words and dialogue were of secondary importance.

The youngest dancers on the first day, Thursday, are like putty. Their teacher flexes their limbs to reveal to them their bodies’ capabilities, while they smile serenely.

On Friday, the second day, the teacher is tougher on the dancers, peppering them with insults and criticisms. Stok’s framing regularly catches the featured dancer, Edyta, eye rolling over her instructor’s shoulder, exasperated that she can’t satisfy her demands.

The weekend days present to us dancers in their performing prime. But the experience feels lonely - isolated in the distance by Stok’s mise-en-scène - and physically intense, honing in on stretches and strain.

The stage performance recorded for Sunday is somehow anticlimactic, and less revealing, compared to the backstage and rehearsal-focused capture either side of it.

The day with the most arresting creative approach is Monday. It features a mature dancer, Ewa Wycichowska, who was a primaballerina, choreographer and director of the Polish Dance Theatre in Poznań.

Kieślowski - hard-bitten Marlboro Red smoker that he was - may not have been an athlete. But his powers of empathy found a connection with his subject.

“Throughout my childhood I had bad lungs and was in danger of getting TB. Of course, I’d often play football or ride a bike as all boys do, but because I was sick I spent a lot of time sitting covered in a blanket on some balcony or veranda, breathing in the fresh air.”12

Kieślowski’s childhood was itinerant at times as the family moved between sanitariums to treat his father’s tuberculosis.

Watching this dancer, he must have felt hyper-aware of her heavy breathing, with the demands the rehearsal routine asked of her. The sound recording captures and enhances it, launching straight into the scene with a heavy pant.

In several moments she stops, incapable of going on. It’s a hint of the body’s limitations. How overexertion and time, eventually, push an athlete beyond their safe zones. How, in their careers, eventually, they will hit a point that they can’t perform in the way their younger self did.

The penultimate day, Tuesday, depicts a familiar place for many sports: the bench.

Here an ageing dancer waits in vain at the casting for a new show to the music of Stravinsky. She’s no longer offered the best parts. Instead, forced to sit in the wings. A backup. An understudy. A role player.

It’s the transition that many once-great athletes struggle, psychologically, to make.

Wednesday is the final day. There is a subtle, and satisfying transference from the first day Kieślowski depicts. There, the smile is the pupil’s. Now, we catch the corners of the mouth raise with the instructor - once a dancer herself - who finds some satisfaction in guiding new talent.

Is there a small nuance of a moral here?

How lived experience can soften us, and open the channels of empathic connection?

After watching the Dekalog recently, I was convinced of Kieślowski’s genius.

Looking at his early docs, and a film like Seven Women of Different Ages, it only reinforces that belief.

He took seven days in a field of performance where he was no expert. And in his precise observation of an action, deciphered and depicted a universal idea. Just as recognisable in football, basketball, volleyball, or whichever sport you wish to name.

The life cycle - physical and emotional - not just of a ballet dancer, but an athlete.

Next week sees the opening salvo of BFI Southbank’s new season ‘The Cinematic Life of Boxing’.

Weaving between classic narrative features like Rocky (1976), Creed (2015), Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and Raging Bull (1980) are a couple of docs: the Oscar-winning blockbuster When We Were Kings (1996) and Ron Peck’s indie snapshot of the East London boxing scene, Fighters (1991).

Were it not for his ‘demi-cancellation’ or ‘soft exile’, or if his ‘quiet return’ had grown louder, you wonder if Bruce Weber’ Broken Noses (1987) might have joined the lineup.

Weber’s documentary work earned global acclaim the next year with his portrait of jazz musician Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost (1988).

Gorgeous and haunting in equal measure, it shows the last flickerings of a broken and beautiful talent who expired four months before the film was released, falling from a second-floor Amsterdam hotel room balcony. It earned an Oscar nomination and Critics’ Prize at Venice, but when Weber’s team learnt of Baker’s passing, they weren’t sure if they had the energy to complete it:

“When we heard that he had died we were in the editing room and had finished our final cut of the film. We were just going into printing it, making some changes, but it was pretty much our final cut. We all laid down on the floor and cried. We closed the door to the editing room and didn’t talk to each other for two weeks. We thought that we would never finish our film; we didn’t know how we would.”1

Chet Baker, Andy Minsker and ‘The Double’

The peculiarity of this pair of films is the sense it creates of ‘doubles’.

Before we see a single image in Broken Noses, the opening scroll prologue introduces a boxer called Andy Minsker who “looked like Chet Baker”.

Weber was first grabbed by the image of the musician when he picked up a copy of ‘Chet Baker Sings and Plays’ (1955) as a kid in Pittsburgh2. In the winter of 1986, he encountered Baker blasting his radio from a beaten-up sports car on Fifth Avenue in New York. The handsome, now hollowed-out man clearly lingered in his mind.

That scrolling prologue also mounts a defence of the director against accusations of impropriety on the set of his 1983 Olympian shoot for Interview magazine, a glimpse of more serious allegations to come in the Me Too era.

Weber’s aesthetic and success had long been bound to the bodies of athletes.

In the 1970s, he shot swimmers and tennis players, amongst others, for publications like GQ and SoHo Weekly News. After shooting a jeans campaign for Calvin Klein in 1978, he fully earned his reputation for “turning jocks into demigods”3 with the brand’s first underwear ad in 1982.

The photography, captured on location in Santorini, featured Brazilian-born pole vaulter and Olympian Tom Hintnaus. Adorning a forty by fifty feet billboard in Times Square4, it stopped traffic and shifted the future of image making for both lifestyle brands and sports professionals.

Weber’s 1984 Olympics shoot & ‘physique magazines’

The influence of classical statuary and atmosphere of eroticism in Weber’s presentation of athletes can trace its lineage to American ‘physique magazines’ of the 1930s-1960s. Nude and semi-nude images of men found homes in bodybuilding publications like Strength & Health and Your Physique before a wider range of “athletes, aspiring actors, well-built ex-marines, or models looking to augment their portfolios” were recruited for specialist magazines.

“Physique magazines didn’t need to announce themselves as gay, even if they had been able to. Their readers recognized what we now think of as a “gay gaze”: appreciative, even avid, but not uncritical; at once warm, cool, and knowing.”

Vince Aletti, ‘The Secrets of Physique Magazines’ (3 May 2025), New Yorker

With his profile now at a new high and his celebrity entwined with sculpted athletes, in 1983 Weber was invited to shoot nearly 250 Olympic hopefuls5 for the United States Olympic Special of Warhol’s Interview magazine. Amongst the household names like Carl Lewis captured by his Pentax 6x7 was a Golden Gloves champion and young featherweight prospect, Andy Minsker.

He didn’t make the 1984 Olympic team (for reasons speculated on in Broken Noses), but left an indelible mark on the photographer and soon-to-be director.

‘Boyishness’, ‘manliness’ and Mount Scott Boxing Club

When Weber and his crew pick up Minsker’s story a few years later, his 15-bout professional career isn’t over. He’s still in his mid-20s, and only hangs up his gloves for good in 1991. But the bouts have got sparser and his focus has shifted. He’s coaching and mentoring a bunch of scrappy kids at Portland’s Mount Scott Boxing Club, many of whom - a familiar trope - come from broken or abusive homes.

Much of the film’s energy and connective tissue comes from the relationship between Minsker and his mentees. Through these characters Weber “zeroes in on the construction and display of boyishness and manliness”6 as roles and relationships shift. In some scenes, Minsker feels like a revered idol to them. In others, a big brother. Much of the time, he’s just ‘one of the gang’, his goofiness more in keeping with a teenage boy than national champ. They’re happy to mock him with impressions, as much as the affection is clear.

The more-clearly-defined adults in the piece provide perspective. First we meet his father, another Olympic boxer manqué. Father and son amiably compare notes on their careers and share conspiracy theories on why Minsker missed out on the Los Angeles 1984 team. Mainly, they feel, due to racism: preferential treatment for Black fighters trained by Emanuel Steward (and backed by powerful white agents).

It’s one of many ‘double’ moments with Let’s Get Lost. Here, Chet Baker recounts how his father was a failed musician and that inspired him to take up the trumpet.

Later we meet Minsker’s step-mother.

Hers is the soberest take of the lot: “he’s still a child”.

It takes some haranguing from Weber, with an interview style sometimes “more histrionic than helpful”7 in both Let’s Get Lost and Broken Noses, to encourage her into something resembling a compliment: “he turned out halfway decent”.

To her, the abusive relationship with his birth mother and step-father left him stunted.

It’s perhaps the same sense of arrested development in Minsker that Weber explains attracted him to Chet Baker as a subject:

“He had an innocence about him that was really beautiful. He was kind of like a child. I’ve always been attracted to people who were like that, they could be 90 or 100 but there’s still a child in there.”8

Hard light, hammer blows

It feels fair to say that Weber isn’t much interested in boxing or, at least, that Broken Noses is less concerned with boxing than Let’s Get Lost is with jazz.

And yet, when Weber and his DoP Jeff Preiss roam around the Mount Scott gym, the flow and whip is impressive, circling the percussive rhythms of the sparring kids.

The hard light and graphic shadows, a trademark of Weber’s photography, spring to life in moving image, adding sculpted dimension to quiet, static portraits, dancing and rotating as light sources shift and his subjects bob and weave.

Beyond their sparring, the boys at Minsker’s gym provide amusing interstitial interviews. Their presence adds an air of something like white-trash-surrealism, more familiar from later ‘90s films such as Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997) and typified by an interviewee answering from atop his pal’s shoulders. Just because.

Elsewhere the mass of young bodies gives Weber the raw material to recompose famous homosocial scenes from his back catalogue.

As Minsker lies surrounded by his boxing recruits and answers a question from one (“When was the first time you got laid?” Erm…) it brings to mind famous past works like the Navy men of 1982’s ‘On Leave in Waikiki’.

“Getting to show your crushes to the world”

If Weber’s story in Broken Noses isn’t one of boxing, what is it?

The great Pauline Kael’s opinion of Let’s Get Lost was that it was “shamelessly true to the (perhaps universal) experience of infatuation”9. From Weber’s own comments, that might ring true to his art in general:

“Sometimes, when I’m traveling around … I end up photographing people I just met or people that I had a crush on. Isn’t photography a little bit about getting to show your crushes to the world, whether it’s a tree or a girl or a guy or an animal?”10

Those comments from a 2016 Time interview literalise uncomfortably in the light of the 2018 allegations of sexual harassment against Weber. But the ‘crushing’ on Minsker in Broken Noses has multiple perspectives.

He might lack the “theatrical aura” of Chet Baker but his “animal magnetism” is amplified by self-confidence. He speaks unwaveringly about the trust his charges have in him, how they look up to him and brag about him to other coaches and competitors.

In a later scene with his coach Ed Milberger - one of several odd flourishes in colour - a fawning barmaid at The Drum Lounge interrupts the conversation.

She saw him fight at the Olympic trials in 1984 and “can’t believe it”, that the Andy Minsker is here, eliciting goofy giggles from the boxer before asking for an autograph … and a kiss.

If Minsker is a “crush” of Weber’s, Broken Noses makes clear, he’s not the only one.

At the climax of the last al fresco fight scene, with Minsker in the corner of his young battlers, we hear a final voice over fragment. The closing notes of Joni James’s ‘Too Young’ fade and Weber poses a question. Since he and his crew first met Minsker, ‘what has everyone always said?’ He has no idea. “That they’ll never forget you”.

Boxing and ‘doomed youth’

“There is very little afterlife for a fighter who has failed to succeed. Not only do most boxers—who remain independent contractors without pensions, unions, or comprehensive health insurance—wind up dispossessed, but, unlike other sports, where minor-league organizations, local television markets, and large coaching staffs offer opportunities for ex-players, boxing offers only a few iffy prospects to its battered alumni in the same grimy environments where fighters first took their steps to glory or failure.”

Carlos Acevedo, Sporting Blood: Tales from the Dark Side of Boxing (2020)

As much as Weber built his success as a photographer on the bodies of athletes, it’s not clear how much he cared for their stories. Their ‘narrative arcs’, and where they ended.

Their youth and idealised muscularity offered much to his camera and the brands that could attach themselves. But although Weber has claimed to equally photograph older subjects, the world’s seen little evidence. Or perhaps shown little interest. What happened to his athletes, in time, we’ll never know.

In Andy Minsker, though, still young, did he see something else?

Did he feel some kind of premonition - a vision of ‘doomed youth’ that didn’t just recall the 1950s images of Chet Baker but a flash forward to the husk of the man in his late 50s now?

The circumstances aren’t clear, but Weber conspired to bring together his two subjects, the doubles, in Let’s Get Lost. We first glimpse Minsker in Baker’s studio, a bandana-clad enthusiastic bystander (with Chris Isaak completing the trio).

Near the end of the film, Weber’s gang are in Cannes for a screening of Broken Noses. Baker holds court, carousing with young models, the camera spinning as drunken and giddy as the guests. We get one brief interaction between Minsker and Baker, where Baker appears to jokingly call him a “fiend”. The one-two feels almost like a glance into the looking glass of the future.

Broken Noses is a far from perfect film. It’s ‘experimental’ in a dead-on sense: a new director is trying things out, like sudden splashes of colour, or Minsker in a flower bed reading from Richard II. Some of these things simply don’t work.

I’m quite taken by Kael’s thesis on the relationship between the two films:

“My guess is that by the time Weber finished “Broken Noses,” and dedicated it to Baker, he’d realized that it was a warmup, and that his real subject was the young trumpeter who had fascinated him since he was sixteen and bought his first Chet Baker record.”11

If the one film was a ‘warmup’ for the other, is it also possible that the one life feels like a warmup for the next too?

That Weber, the photographer obsessed with youth, fresh-blooming flowers and glistening sports cars, could feel an impending doom for Minsker - a future that resembled the broken, lonely end days of Baker?

This was his only narrative work on an athlete, but Weber expressed an affection for at least one other sports film: Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963), in which Richard Harris’s rugby league player takes a battering:

“I find the bleakness in it really romantic. It meant a lot to me in a lot of ways – it gave me the courage to do what I believe.”12

If Weber feared the worst, then Broken Noses is a gift.

Perhaps he was well aware that boxers, once broken and used up, are forgotten.

And the film was his small effort to make sure the world would never forget Andy Minsker. Because he couldn’t.