a Bigger Splash

David Hockney’s lovelorn youth remastered on film

Originally printed in Compass, july 3, 2019.

Does art reflect the world of the artist, or does the world of the artist reflect his art? In “A Bigger Splash,” an atmospheric 1974 film by Jack Hazan about British artist David Hockney’s creation of “Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures),” both are true at once. In dreamy sequences we watch the living subjects of Hockney’s life-size portraits — designers, collectors, all close friends of his — examine their likeness and slowly, giving in to the absurd duality, take on the same painted pose. Under Hazan’s experimental direction, Hockney’s younger years appear as a London Wonderland of mirrored images and eccentric characters — just replace Alice’s looking glass with a swimming pool’s rippling surface as boys dive in, the light on the water both distorting and revealing their bare bodies.

Bare bodies are aplenty here and with little fuss, in the way men will recognize from their own lives — hair shading upper thighs, unfocused eyes, pale skin moving and darker-toned flaccidity bouncing. Is it a startling sight to see a nude man sluggishly getting out of bed to follow his morning routine, leaving a lover snoozing in the sheets? Or alone, clumsily half stripping in the hallway during a walk to the shower? We know the answer, of course. Originally met with outrage following its debut at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and nearly banned as pornography from European theaters, this one-of-a-kind look at the lives of Hockney’s inner circle has now been vibrantly restored in 4k from the original 33 mm color camera negative, and is ready to be embraced by a new audience 45 years after its initial completion. 

But what is the film? To call it a documentary invites images of talking-head interviews and photo slideshows with voice-over narration. No, it’s more apt to say Hazan unwittingly created a precursor to produced “reality” television. Something along the lines of MTV’s 2000s show “The Hills,” which didn’t so much follow the lives of four young Los Angeleno women as it guided their lives into place, like an artist who instructs his subject to “pose naturally.” Hazan filmed one-sided phone calls with no one on the other line and restaged interactions that had previously taken place. He also scripted new scenes that exist outside of the literal, more like skewed memories that seem to swim up from the id.

These scenes, the film’s most earnestly erotic in their teasing nature, involve Peter Schlesinger, an American art student 10 years Hockney’s junior who ended their relationship in 1971. Sweetly, imperfectly beautiful in his early 20s, Peter is lean and lightly muscled. His tousled and flopping hair glimmers a bit too red in the light, his chin is marked with faded acne spots and his smile never quite settles comfortably. There is a hint of self-effacement behind his long lashes. He speaks very little, but he is the center of the film’s then-taboo imagery  — sunbathing nude in Palm Springs, attending a London fashion show dressed in a “Death in Venice” style sailor top, and planting awkward, exploratory kisses on the lips of a boy as they fully undress in bed. Peter is also the center of Hockney’s distress. Hockney’s life in the aftermath of their doomed relationship is as bitterly barren as living in the ruins of a broken marriage. Even the score that follows heartbroken Hockney is a cacophony of shrill, wailing strings that summons a mood of sinister intrigue and revenge.

What caused their split goes unspoken, and Peter lingers as a haunting presence, halting the painter’s creative process. He was the subject of a number of Hockney’s works, including “Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool,” and over the course of Hazan’s filming he becomes the dual subject of the massive acrylic “Portrait of an Artist.” Watching Hockney, anxious and obsessive, construct it with precision, selecting the poses from dozens of near identical photographs of his ex, tracing the lines, creating the texture of the hair, is to see, as it happened, without thought of the future, the creation of modern iconography by a living master. 

Hockney travels from colorless London to a densely packed New York swarming with smog and noise in 1972, ready to display the portrait of two Peters, and by then the real Peter Schlesinger has slipped out of frame. With bittersweet ambivalence the film suggests this as the artist moving on from love gone wrong. For Hockney’s true feelings, you’ll have to look to the painting. 

 “A Bigger Splash” is a Metrograph Pictures release, playing at Metrograph, an independent theater in Manhattan, N.Y., through the summer. It is at Time & Space Ltd. in Hudson, N.Y., through July 14.