"A Bigger Splash" film still, courtesy of Contemporary Films London 56.
What did I just watch? A scripted piece of video art? A mockumentary? A faux-fly-on-the-wall picture carefully guided by the director’s lens and pen? I have a lot of questions about A Bigger Splash, the opening screening of DART documentary film festival 2019, but my first question is this: can we even call it a documentary?
Jack Hazan’s 1974 film, which follows Britain’s preeminent living artist, David Hockney, during a turbulent period of his career was revealing, witty and poignant in equal measure, but given the director’s deliberate obfuscation of the lines between fact and fiction, to strictly label it a documentary would be slightly amiss. Even without knowing a thing about the film’s history, it was clear there was some directorial manipulation at work. It’s how much that really matters that I want to answer.
A Bigger Splash sees Hazan tag along with Hockney over a few years at the height of his pop-art powers, living a life of eccentric debauchery and rampant creation in a bleak, grey, early 1970s London. From exhibition to exhibition, party to party, short trip to idyllic Southern France to open-ended stay in a particularly seedy looking New York, Hockney and his inner circle of artistic confidants (washed out remnants of London’s heady swinging sixties) idly spend their days doing a little bit of art and a lot of talking about it. But it’s not so much the chit chat we are drawn to—the dying embers of Hockney’s relationship with young American photographer, Peter Schlesinger, and the effect that this had on the artist’s creative output, is where the film’s real pull is.
A Bigger Splash 1974 Trailer
Hockney met Schlesinger when he was teaching at UCLA in the 1960s, that iconic period when he thrust himself into the pop-art pantheon with his witty, post-kitsch depictions of sun kissed Californian pool-side decadence. Those were, presumably, happier times for the sardonic Yorkshire-born artist and his absurdly beautiful young muse, as A Bigger Splash shows that relationship in freefall, its dregs a slushy, awkward silence. Schlesinger appears strangely absent from the picture, mute even, despite commanding the screen for much of it. He poses morosely for Hockney with his back turned or head bowed, an ornament or still life for the artist to profile. Hockney looks equally jaded by this point and says as much, pining for an escape from his South Kensington circle to New York, Paris, maybe, or back to California.
It’s this dynamic of late-relationship tension that defines the film’s narrative. Hazan presents it as inducing a breakdown in Hockney’s work, a slow artistic malaise which hits its depths as the artist viciously takes a knife to one of his own pictures, butchering it in an apparent frenzy while Schlesinger is off cavorting with other lovers. But this also sets Hockney up for redemption: the troubled artist using personal strife to produce one of his finest ever works, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (which last year sold for $90 million, the most expensive painting ever sold by a living artist).
What this dynamic really highlights, however, is how disingenuous this “documentary” really is. A fly-on-the-wall work following an artist around his daily life this is not. It’s undeniably, unashamedly scripted: the intimate shots of Peter’s sexual encounters could hardly have been spontaneous, and Hockney’s maniacal knifing of his canvass, presented as the nadir of his plummeting psychological spiral brought on by Schlesinger’s infidelity, was, by all accounts at the time, no such thing. After filming Hockney for over three years, orchestrating situations and conversations all the while, Hazan put the footage together without any care for presenting the truth. People who were there confirm he used the edit to place subjects and events completely out of context, creating a narrative of artistic entropy, of jilted lovers bound together in art, of a turbulence that was never really there.
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), David Hockney, 1972, taken at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Photo by Regan Vercruysse (CC BY 2.0).
But how much does any of this (the truth) actually matter? If you treat A Bigger Splash more on the art film end of the cinematic spectrum, not very much at all. Disingenuous it may well seem, but Hazan is not trying to trick his audience: the scripted parts of the film are blatant, and if you’ve seen Hazan’s other work—notably the part-rockumentary, part-fiction film about The Clash, Rude Boy—you already know to take his “truth” with a healthy pinch of salt. It’s easy to differentiate between the film’s fictional and candid parts, making Hockney’s ad-libbed chat all the more illuminating, particularly at the opening and close. And with all that in mind, Hazan’s boundary blurring becomes less suspicious and more like a clever, knowing game.
One thing there is nothing fake about is Hockney’s creative process. The artist at work is a gurning caricature of himself: an absurdly bespectacled, bug-eyed, blond mopped mess. For the less artistically well-read observer (ie. me), it’s interesting to see Hockney frequently favor camera over brush, documenting his surroundings and carefully orchestrating shots for hours on end that he will later sew together in a final work. It’s how Hockney makes Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), a creative process which seems less organic than I expected, more of a collage or patchwork. After hours taking pictures by a pool, trying to recreate the 1960s SoCal vibes, Hockney returns to London and paints the stunning French Riviera landscape and shimmering underwater figure from an array of the shots he took. He then superimposes a separate profile of Schelsinger standing in Kensington gardens onto it, which leaves us with the iconic work. So, what appears as a literal landscape piece is in fact Hockney playing with fact and fiction as much as Hazan.
The director’s treatment of other things beyond artistic processes make it equally compelling. Filmed just four years after homosexuality was made legal between two men in the UK, Hazan is brave and brazen in his treatment of male love. The full lipped Schelsinger clearly drew the director’s eye: at one point we seem him nakedly writhing with an anonymous male lover; at another we are treated to the pre (or post) naked fun of a pool-side orgy; and he even takes us into a smokey, underground, drag runway show, compared with such hilarious irony that it makes Ru-Paul look like an amateur. The conservative, pearl clutching, stridently anti-LGBT swathes of early 1970s Britain would not have seen anything like this, making making Hazan’s treatment of homosexuality all the more powerful watching today.
Fake news A Bigger Splash may be, but in the end, it really doesn’t matter. Hockney got over his initial reservations about how revealing and intimate the film was, and so my alarm at its concocted story bears little consequence on the work as a whole. In fact, the film is in many ways an odd sort of precursor to the mockumentary craze that blew up in the UK in the mid 1990s (Chris Morris, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais et al.). Playing on the boundary between truth and fiction opens up a whole world of ambiguity and preconceptions to be subverted and toyed with—Hazan was just 20 years ahead of the times.
Harry Stott.
Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond. You can read more of Harry's articles here.