75 Years of Contemporary Films: A Bigger Splash (15)
Jack Hazan’s genre-bending documentary follows artist David Hockney as he struggles to complete a painting featuring his model and lover with whom he has just broken up.
It is June 1973. In Geneva, the young British painter, David Hockney, entertains a new boyfriend, Joe. In London, David’s close friend Mo McDermott, tells how things have changed since the break-up of the long affair between David and a young Californian artist, Peter Schlesinger. David’s output of work diminishes as he finds it difficult to accept that the relationship is over and he leans for emotional support on his close friends such as Mo, the famous fashion designer Ossie Clark and his wife Celia Birtwell…
This is the backdrop for this intimate portrait of the artist, his friends, his muses and the vibrant world they inhabit — in a singular film that is both gripping and meditative.
After the screening Jack Hazan will discuss the making of the film and working with David Hockney as his subject.
“…it will live up to its title – for it’s far more than a documentary record of one artist at work. Paints and canvas play their part in it all right, but not as much as the emotional ties between people – and the emotional separations. For this is a revelation of the As you watch it you think it is about Hockney’s frustrated attempts to complete a painting of his friend Peter Schles-inger. But when the last scene falls into place you see that in fact it’s about the ending of a close relationship between two men – a once indispensable need that has now served its purpose. The intimacy is felt – never expressed. But the interior splash it makes in Hockney’s outwardly phlegmatic life and among his friends creates the overpowering sense of disturbance rippling through every scene.” Evening Standard
“A Bigger Splash sketches an interesting context and a notion of dominant patterns and preoccupations: the importance of the continuing relations between Hockney’s friends and the drawings and paintings he has made of them: the way he continually revisits the same places: his fascination with light and water: and his carefulness and consistency both in evolving a painting style and staying within the orbit of certain friendships. These attributes, plus the tenderness which Hockney conveys, render his disorientation at the end of a relationship credible, while the wry, distancing nature of his visual humour – a style at once personal and remote – attest to the need to come to terms with Peter’s departure by continuing obsessively for a while to paint his ex-lover.” Monthly Film Bulletin
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