A Bigger Splash (1973)
First screened in April 2012 / Most recently screened and reviewed in October 2024
Director: Jack Hazan. Cast: David Hockney, Peter Schlesinger, Mo McDermott, Celia Birtwell, Henry Geldzahler, Kasmin, Ossie Clark, Mike Sida. Screenplay: Jack Hazan and David Mingay. Twitter Capsule:
Spindly, semi-sunlit metafiction starring David Hockney, edited like a Roeg mystery and scored like a ghost story.
VOR:④
Lower-profile these days, but besides huge interest for Hockney fans, it's an original take on artistic process, gay desire, and self-representation.
I remember 12 years ago being entranced throughout by the strangeness and novelty of this particular docu-fiction hybrid, in which it's often unclear if pop artist David Hockney has allowed full access to his day-to-day errands and rhythms and exchanges and distractions while he struggles to produce new work or if he's starring in a scripted feature that imagines him in this predicament. I also remember finding the movie audiovisually hypnotic from the start.
I'm not sure I'd make equally strong claims now, though I still like the movie, more or less increasingly as it goes. The first 40 minutes or so felt draggier and more piecemeal on reacquaintance, with fairly obvious and occasionally dated reference points (Blow-up, Nicolas Roeg, maybe Paul Morrissey). What I experienced this time was a slow build as an artist's life or at least his creative drive is constantly in the processes of gathering and dissipating, and friends, lovers, and coworkers are simultaneously greedy for Hockney's presence and eager for some space from him. If relationships often feel ill-defined, that emerges more and more strongly as a character point, not a structural or storytelling gaffe.
When the final production of a key artwork, 1972's Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), arrives inextricably as a breakthrough and a depressive, sinister nightmare, this spindly and occasionally listless picture achieves a real impact... even as the many loose ends of Hockney's life preclude any clear sense of total culmination, much less of triumph. Watching A Bigger Splash makes all the clearer why Pedro Almodóvar summoned its imagery so blatantly and its spirit so pervasively in Bad Education, even if the tight Hitchcockian puzzlebox of that movie is at odds with Jack Hazan's peculiar mix of the sharp and the scattered in Splash. The movie is also quite a document of a certain type of gay sociality in the early 70s, in addition to being generically innovative and powerfully evocative—if sometimes on the verge of tonal histrionics—of the push-pull and beauty-misery of a unique artist's process. Grade:A–
