Docufiction of painter a bizarre, bold hybrid
Jack Hazan’s ’73 film of Hockney in L.A. like being in dream
The early 1970s were an amazing time for the art of nonfiction film.
During that time, there rose a new breed of documentarians in Japan (Noriaki Tsuchimoto, Kazuo Hara, Shohei Imamura) who used slambang muckraking tactics to reflect shocking truths about the country back to its people: the effects of mercury on a fishing town poisoned by it, the struggles of those with cerebral palsy, the history of postwar Japan as told by a bar hostess.
In America, Liane Brandon revealed new depths of the woman on camera in the unforgettable 20minute confessional monologue “Betty Tells Her Story” (1972). Orson Welles (a genre unto himself) revealed the paranoia around modern images in “F for Fake” (1973) and “The Other Side of the Wind” (shot in the ’70s and finally released in 2018).
And in Germany, Werner Herzog was on another level of miraculous imagemaking with the “ecstatic fictions” of “Land of Silence and Darkness” and “Fata Morgana,” both released in 1971.
Into this dazzling landscape, we can add Jack Hazan’s “A Bigger Splash,” a fascinating portraitonfilm of the acclaimed English painter David Hockney.
Originally released in 1973, it comes to us again in 2019, after being largely forgotten and unfairly ignored among the mainstream press on its release. It’s now scheduled to be screened at the Roxie on Friday, July 12, in a 4K digital restoration by Metrograph Pictures, the new distribution branch of the hip New York City cinema.
Hazan’s film is a bizarre hybrid of documentary and fiction, in which he films Hockney painting his overrated, writhinginlonging Los Angeles masterwork “Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures)” from 1972. (You might have heard about it last year when it sold for $90.3 million at a Christie’s auction — the highest amount ever paid for a painting by a living artist.) But it also features blatantly scripted scenes in which Hockney hobnobs with his artworld friends, including the textile designer Celia Birtwell and the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler.
It also follows around Hockney’s muse at the time, the painter Peter Schlesinger, who would be the subject of many of Hockney’s most wellknown canvases, including “Portrait of an Artist.” Hockney had recently broken up with Schlesinger, so watching the film feels slightly creepy and naughty, as if one is eavesdropping.
“A Bigger Splash” has this magnificent chilly Warhol vibe to it. But I don’t mean the Andy Warhol pop art canvases that are on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Like Wayne Thiebaud or Manny Farber, Hockney is always wrongly tagged with the pop artists, even though he and “A Bigger Splash” are too dumpy and involvingly melancholic for the kind of distance that Warhol’s paintings stoke. Instead, I mean the Warhol on film, especially “The Chelsea Girls” (1966), in which snatches of strikingly banal conversations are picked up as the film drags its knuckles across the ground at a drugged, hypnotic pace. Like Warhol’s films, “A Bigger Splash” is reality TV avant la lettre, but rougher and coarser in texture than anything “Big Brother” has to offer and closer to the real world than “The Real World.”
Hockney’s paintings have a dumb Rousseau look to them, but the surrealistic mystery that plagues each of Rousseau’s shapes (a quality rarely there in Hockney, who falters when it comes to seeing the wonderful weirdness of L.A.) comes out in torrents in “A Bigger Splash.” Hazan stages a series of surreal scenes where Schlesinger walks silently among pink ladies, bevies of naked poolside white male hunks and a Met curator with a big tongue. Along with the Schoenbergian score by Patrick Gowers — looping, melting, cacophonous strings — the whole movie has the quality of being beamed to you from an artist’s mind in deepREM sleep. People talk and talk, and very clearly, but you often can’t make what they’re talking about.
Hockney himself, meanwhile, comes out as a cool, radiant presence who regards his breakthroughs in color as if he was giving up daily bus fare. Hazan presents him as a Wildean whisperer of the highest degree: his facial mannerisms (when he scrunches his face and his glasses lift) are stupendous, as are his mismatched blueandred socks and his hedonistic English drawl: “She didn’t like New Yawk, she thought it was a bit oogleh. And everybody looked ... too frumppeh.” Even when Hazan’s camera follows the nude Hockney into a shower stall, he has the air of a whisperingly private man.