“The Biggest Splash” of 2019’s Pride
An indelible portrait of a gay artist; a town turned rainbow
BY DAVID NOH
How did I live so long without seeing
Jack Hazan’s documentary portrait
of the artist David Hockney, “A Bigger
Splash?” First released in 1973,
it is a free-wheeling, richly rewarding and almost
shockingly intimate portrait of the artist
in his youthful heyday, proudly out at a time
when being gay in the UK was a criminal offense
and working on the painting “Portrait of
an Artist” (Pool with Two Figures),” which broke
the record for sales by a living artist when it
sold for $90.3 million last fall at Christie’s. The
fi lm has been gorgeously restored — it actually
looks like a Hockney, itself — and is enjoying
a theatrical and DVD release through Metrograph.
When I met the affable, charmingly down to
earth Hazan at the Ludlow Hotel, we quickly
bonded over our shared opinion of another
fi lm, “Last Tango in Paris,” which I had seen
the night before as part of a 100th anniversary
tribute to critic Pauline Kael, whose legendary
rave about it fi rst put the controversial fi lm on
the map. Hazan said that he was making “A
Bigger Splash” when the fi lm came out, which
he loved, and its improvisatory nature encouraged
him in the similar work he was doing.
“I thought, ‘I’m really on to something,’” he
recalled. “But then I saw it a few years ago and
was disappointed by how terrible it was, all that
Trotsky dogma and the Brando character was
just an asshole — you don’t want to know him.
At the time, it seemed revealing, but now... I
was really turned off and thought, ‘How could I
have been so wrong?’”
If nothing else, “A Bigger Splash” is truly revealing,
not only in the startling-for-its-timeand
even-now casual and copious use of male
frontal nudity, but its exposure of the artist in
most intimate moments, both working alone
and in the company of his nearest and dearest.
I told Hazan that he very well may have invented
the concept of reality TV, and he replied,
“It was 45 years ago, and it did not conform to
any genre which people were not ready for. It
was in the New York Film Festival, and I had
all these interviews lined up, but every one of
them got suddenly cancelled after they saw the
fi lm. Very shocking and disappointing to me.
The gay thing they didn’t want to know about
and, during the Q&A after my screening, all
I got was someone complaining about the car
horns on the soundtrack!
“In 1981, a guy named Mike Kaplan distributed
it in a very small way, one theater here
in New York and another in LA. I think it was
shown in the theater where they have the Academy
David Hockney in Jack Hazan’s “A Bigger Splash.”
Awards and fi ve people showed up. It has
to be presented properly, and I believe the print
was fading. I supervised the restoration this
time around. We pulled the negative from the
National Film Registry, which was damaged
here and there, and scanned every frame, four
or fi ve seconds per frame!”
Hazan lost touch with Hockney over the
years but saw him at his retrospective at the
Tate Gallery two years ago: “He jokingly said,
‘You should have told me you were breaking up
with your wife, and I would have come to fi lm
it!’ At the time, he was very upset by the fi lm
because he had no idea there was a narrative
to it and that was his breakup with younger
boyfriend, Peter Schlesinger, leaving him for
another. He was completely wiped out when he
saw it. I had warned him, ‘You might be upset
with this thing,’ and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah.’
He had no idea because when you make a fi lm
you fi lm it out of sequence.
“As his relationship with Peter the model
in that $90 million painting was collapsing,
there were all these other couples around them,
whose marriages were also collapsing. That was
supposed to be the idea. He had no problem
with the nudity, but the fi lm just disappeared
for a while and he had the negative. The turning
point was when he sent Ossie Clark Hockney
intimate and renowned fashion designer to see
it. Ossie was never particularly nice to me, only
METROGRAPH PICTURES
sometimes. He was a typical queen, but he said
to me, ‘This fi lm is truer than the truth. What
more do you want?’
“Then David went to his artist friend, Shirley
Goldfarb, the wife of painter Gregory Masurovsky…
She told him, ‘It’s the greatest fi lm
on an artist ever made.’ So then his friend,
who’s in my movie, Henry Geldzahler Mayor
Ed Koch’s Cultural Affairs commissioner had
a look and gave it his approval, so David had to
accept the fact that the fi lm should be released.
He realized that there was no way he could stop
it, it was shown at Cannes, and was a huge success
with the European press.”
Besides Hockney, the other star to emerge
from the fi lm is Celia Birtwell, his friend and
muse, the subject of his famed portrait of her
with Clark, her husband, with whom she collaborated,
“Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy.” A
side pleasure of his movie is footage he shot of
their fashion show, rife with glorious rainbowhued
garments and wonderfully louche-looking
models moving to rock music who, then, led elegantly
with their shoulders and swan necks
rather than today’s horsey stomping legs and
booty sashays.
Hazan said, “I saw her at David’s retrospective
at the Tate Gallery two years ago. She looked at
me and said, ‘Do I know you?’ And I said ‘You
➤ DAVID HOCKNEY, continued on p.43
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