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
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.”
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.
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).