“The whole film is centred upon Hockney’s art”: A Bigger Splash reviewed in 1975

David Hockney has played a leading, or emblematic, role in the transformation of British life over the past fourteen years. His rise as an exhibitionistic, homosexual, unabashedly North Country working-class artist represents a variety of apparent liberations: from a metropolitan cultural establishment, from conventional sexual attitudes, from middle-class standards and mandarin tastes, and so on. 

This performance has been carefully reflected by the media, for which he became a key figure in the 1960s phenomenon known as ‘Swinging London’. He was one of four young Royal College of Art painters who were chosen to appear in the 1962 Monitor television programme Pop Goes the Easel (directed by Ken Russell), which overnight made Pop Art a nationally recognised fashion; in Clive Donner’s 1964 film Nothing But the Best, the ruthless business tycoon (Alan Bates), on the make and with an eye well-trained for balancing the trendy with the traditional, had a Hockney on his office wall; in Peter Whitehead’s documentary Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967), Hockney was interviewed as one of the prime movers of the current revolution in styles; in Tony Richardson’s Laughter in the Dark (1969), one of the last hoarse gasps of the Swinging London cinema, Hockney turns up to put the seal on a smart party.

This status as artistic and social luminary is obviously what makes a full-length movie about Hockney interesting and commercially viable. It is, however, the background to Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash and not what it is about. In 1966 Hazan made Especially at My Time of Life, a modest little film contrasting the work and life-styles of a group of artists painting and sculpting in adjoining London studios. It was a diffident, unebullient picture, despite the current ‘Swinging London’ ethos, that carefully stalked its subjects and took its tone from them.

Though roughly categorisable as a documentary, A Bigger Splash was apparently a case of Hazan directing the principals to act out their lives, rather than a cinéma vérité exercise by which a director follows his subjects around filming their every action and gesture. The result is often stiff and rather stylised in character, and resembles Hockney’s paintings in its combination of apparent naive simplicity of surface and elaborate formality of organisation. At one point in the film, Hockney recalls his father some thirty years ago setting out to sell a billiard table the family no longer needed. He put an advertisement in the paper giving the number of the local telephone kiosk. When David returned home from school, there was his Dad sitting beside the kiosk in an armchair he’d trundled down the street. The description and its bizarre, matter of fact ‘posed-unposed’ character sounds like a rather typical Hockney portrait.

Hazan’s film, made over a period of three years, begins in June 1973 in a Geneva hotel where Hockney is engaged in a sort of verbal mating dance with a new lover. It then moves back to May 1971, the point at which his long affair with the Californian Peter Schlesinger carne to an end. The picture traces the effects of this breach upon Hockney, Schlesinger and their immediate circle of friends, and also upon Hockney’s work. As old friend and assistant Mo McDermott remarks, ‘when love goes wrong more than two people suffer’; which is in a sense the leitmotiv of the picture. A Bigger Splash finally makes its way back to Geneva in 1973 and an announcement by Hockney that he’s going to get rid of all the pictures he’s done of Peter.

Hazan has decided with great boldness to centre the whole film upon Hockney’s art. Thus Peter Schlesinger is not only a present and passing lover but a representative of the Californian homosexual subculture which Hockney had started to paint from seeing pictures in physique magazines before ever going there. (Despite the immediacy of his work, Hockney often draws upon existing images from other painters, from the photographs of Muybridge and so forth.) So when he dreams of Peter enjoying himself away from him, the image Hockney conjures up (or that Hazan presents) is of naked boys gaily romping in a swimming pool in a Los Angeles garden, a scene so often painted by him in the mid-Sixties, and the series to which the picture ‘A Bigger Splash’ itself belongs. Later, when he has a more anxious dream of Peter being cut off from society, we see Peter alone trying vainly to enter the house depicted in the painting ‘Beverly Hills Housewife’.

All the characters in fact define their relationships with Hockney through the way he has painted them. His fellow artist Patrick Proctor is shown in his flat beside his portrait, which Hockney seems to be threatening to burn. The New York collector and connoisseur Henry Geldzahler persuades Hockney to come to New York to work (and to ‘compete’ with Milton Avery and Edward Hopper as an observer of Manhattan); he then creates in his flat a menacing tableau vivant of Hockney’s double portrait ‘Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott’. No reason is given, but it seems a way of rejecting the artist, making him feel an outsider. It is one of the picture’s many puzzles (and some might think it a weakness) that we cannot be sure just who is presenting this scene – Geldzahler, Hockney or Jack Hazan himself.

When Hockney disappears from New York, the news is brought to his friends, the designers Celia Birtwell and her husband Ossie Clark, and the latter drives off to the Tate Gallery to stand before Hockney’s double portrait of Clark and Celia as a way of communing with his troubled friend. When he conducts a business discussion with his dealer John Kasmin, it is against the background of a portrait of Kasmin; into this scene is cut the image of Kasmin pushing his face against a pane of glass, a photograph which was the basis for the original painting. To Hockney the image against the glass is a painterly problem, to most observers it would appear to be a metaphor for rejection or exclusion.

At the centre of the film is Hockney’s struggle over a painting of a figure standing beside a swimming pool in the South of France. This has been embarked upon as a major project to follow a half-finished portrait of Peter Schlesinger that Hockney destroyed after failing to complete it following the break-up of his romance. The new picture and the technical problems it presents come to preoccupy Hockney, and he uses the long-suffering Mo to stand in for the standing figure in the preparatory photographs. The figure is left blank in the painting until a chance meeting at a party between Hockney and Peter, who agrees to pose for some photographs that can be used to complete the painting.

In effect all these people live according to images they have created for themselves, and see the images created of them by Hockney as tokens or talismans. The narcissistic world of Swinging London lingers on. A key feature of many Hockney paintings is the way they are framed by curtains or borders; they are in fact pictures of pictures. Hazan has seized upon this aspect of Hockney’s work, putting it together with the artist’s ability to make the technical problems of art do service for the emotional problems of life. In doing so he has made a film which successfully merges its own form and style with those of its subject.