Jack Hazan | The Bigger Splash / 1973

when the figures in the paintings get up and walk away

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Hazan and David Mingay (screenplay), Jack Hazan (director) The Bigger Splash / 1973

 

Before one can begin evaluating director Jack Hazan’s 1973 film on David Hockney, The Bigger Splash one needs to comprehend what precisely it is—although the word “precise” is not in the vocabulary of either the film’s director or his movie. Let us just say, if nothing else, one needs to know what it isn’t.

     At first one might be tempted to perceive the work as a kind of documentary. But almost immediately one can perceive that the film, although allowing the director amazing access into its subject’s life, does not proceed in any manner like a traditional documentary, many of which have been made about this artist. There is no attempt at overview, not talking-heads who recall the period, nor even any summaries made about Hockney’s career to date, although we do get some evaluations through the comments of Hockney’s gallerist John Kasmin, whose galley goes financial under during the filmmaking, and through the comments of museum curator Henry Geldzahler, who tries to convince the artist that he is a California artist who would be very unhappy in attempting to be a New York figure. Artforum described it, I believe mistakenly, as a “partly scripted, partly improvised quasi documentary about the English painter, then at the height of his fame and recently broken up with Peter Schlesinger, the subject of some of Hockney’s best-known works.” That isn’t to say that they are incorrect, but just not truly revelatory for how radical the work truly is.

      Philip French in The Guardian focuses on the films episodic structure:

 

“It's a film shot over three years in the early 1970s by a film-maker (credited as co-writer, director and director of photography) fascinated by Hockney's portraits, made with the artist's partial and reluctant participation, and without any specific scenario or agenda. From the semi-improvised, unscripted material, Hazan carved a story tracing the disintegration of the affair between Hockney and his lover and model, the Californian Peter Schlesinger. Incorporated into this episode narrative are members of the flamboyant, charismatic, hard-working artist's circle, most notably Henry Geldzahler, Patrick Proctor, Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark, the subjects of several key portraits.”

 

      The Bigger Splash might easily be characterized as episodic, as its frames and narrative events push up against one another without, sometimes, any fictional or even reality-based logic, Hockney at times simply going through the daily routine of his life, but basically feeling lost and unable to move ahead artistically, as he both seeks out and, at other moments, attempts to evade his good friends Patrick Procter, Celia Birtwell, Ossie Clark, and particular, gallerist Kasmin. It is almost like Hockney, after his many California visits, feels like a true fish out of water in his own home of London. Without Schlesinger in his bed. it’s clear he has no longer any direct links to the art he was creating and is unable to progress. Representing even a further rupture in his life, film director Hazan shows a scene with Schlesinger and another man in bed, one the several sexually explicit moments of the film which led to an X-rating in Britain and was held up in US customs, who found the cinema to be “disgusting and immoral” before finally allowing it to be screened at the 1974 New York Film Festival. 

      If there is any single focus in the film it is upon Hockney’s attempt to create one of his major works of the period, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” (sold in November 2018 for $90.3 million in auction), which he was suddenly able to create by representing his former lover Schlesinger both in and out of the pool, stealing from photographic images filmed at Tony Richardson’s English pool, but finally unable to get Schlesinger’s hair right, by visiting a drag show at which Schelsinger is working where he asks his lover to model for him just one more time.

      Critic J. Hoberman, generally one of the most reliable of critics, describes the film which portrays this breakthrough as being “a template for what, a quarter-century later, would be known as reality television. But even that definition doesn’t quite get to the heart of what Hazan’s film is, since in this work there is very little of the self-conscious referentiality of the TV works and certainly none of the mugging to and playing for the camera which characterizes the television genre of works such as The Kardashians. Hockney, in particular, remains his bemused and often confused self, moving through the London streets and his busy life with a kind of aloofness that you might imagine could never be represented on camera with his knowledge.

      But that is the point here. It is as if in this work the subjects of a documentary had all agreed to portray themselves, putting their own beings into clear danger by their very honesty. For those of us who know Hockney and some of the surrounding figures it is as if watching good friends sitting around the house, being captured through several long years by a sophisticated home movie photographer. And it is painful, as Hockney finally realized, just to see sometimes how close the camera caught the real personalities on film.

     There are such intense moments that one feels, often, a sense of embarrassment, particularly when, for example, Hazan’s camera actually joins the artist in the shower, or even when revealing Hockney’s pool-side fantasies of several nude men, along with his former lover, enjoying themselves, bottom’s up, beside one of his California swimming pools.

 

     Geldzahler’s sudden arrival in London, with his very personal and sage advice to his friend, but also with the clear intention of taking Kasmin’s central artist away from his London domain, is almost too painful to watch. As critic Glenn Kenny describes their important conversation:

 

“Cheerfully pompous, Geldzahler discourages Hockney from going to New York for too long. ‘You’ll be competing with Milton Avery and Edward Hopper…the great New York painters. Southern California…you have already established yourself as the great Southern California painter.’ Hockney absorbs all this but does not react.”

 

       And finally, there is the New York show itself at André Emerich Gallery on East 75th Street which ran from May 13 to May 31 in 1972, stuffed with some of the most iconic images of Hockney’s career, many of them containing the very images of the individuals we just encountered in the film. Hockey, at the center of the room, spinning around to view the many wonders he has himself created, seems finally joyful and satisfied, perhaps even a bit amazed by what he has finally wrought.

 

 

     Late in the film there is even a glimpse of my dear friend Betty Freeman, perhaps best known for Hockney’s painting Beverly Hills Housewife, but actually one of the most powerful financial supporters of US and international musicians and composers, host to dozens of Los Angeles “musicales” in her home, which my husband Howard and I often attended, featuring some of the very greatest of musical figures in the world, and herself a significant photographer, who joyfully mocks her false image in this film by taking up a feathered dusting brush, something I cannot imagine her doing in real life, and pretending to remove the debris from her first husband’s numerous animal trophies surrounding her own California swimming pool.

 

      Not only for me was this film perhaps too personal, almost claustrophobic given its photographic intrusion into a great artist’s and his dear friend’s lives, but in the end a work which Hockney himself felt was too close to own life, considering paying Hazan to destroy the negative. Friends convinced him otherwise, and today we have a film that reveals one of the most important moments of his career, both artistically and personally, without the usual discretion and blinders we necessarily encounter in any traditional documentary or historical representation of an artist. In The Bigger Splash, we get it fully fleshed out, so fully displayed in our faces that one feels almost as if he can feel the sunshine-warmed water splashed upon his own face, smell and even taste the chlorine. We feel we have sat down to personally converse with figures like Geldzahler, as I did in real life. We feel the anguish of art gallery director Kasmin (I am good friends personally with two of Hockney’s major current gallerists, Peter Goulds, his Los Angeles representative, and Jean Frémon, his Paris and European gallery curator), and even the gentle brush(-off) of Betty Freeman’s mockery of her own painterly designation.

 

 

     In Hazan’s film, unlike any others of its kind, the usually bland commentators become themselves the actors, arising from the screen to leave us after the final frame goes dark. It is as if all those brightly painted characters suddenly move out of their fames to join us in real life.

      As Los Angeles Times critic Robert Abele, in his 2019 review put it, “Private and odd, archly dreamy and intimate, A Bigger Splash remains one of the more uniquely hypnotic movies about the connection between presented life and pulsating art—although, given my own imprecision, I would have reversed the metaphor, describing the connection as one between “presented art” and “pulsating life.”

 

Los Angeles, December 15, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).