- A Bigger Splash
- United Kingdom1974
- Jack Hazan
- 106 DCP
- 18A
Screening Dates
- September 20, 2019 6:30
- September 21, 2019 8:50
- September 22, 2019 6:30
- September 23, 2019 8:50
“One of the finest films I have seen about an artist and his work.”
Martin Scorsese
In 2018, David Hockney’s iconic 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) became the most expensive work by a living artist ever sold at auction. (Its whopping $90 million sale was edged out this year by Jeff Koons’s Rabbit, fetching $91 mil.) A Bigger Splash, British filmmaker Jack Hazan’s radical 1974 docufiction hybrid, offers an invaluable glimpse into the tortured production of that pop-art masterpiece, and the personal crisis that surrounded it. Shot between 1971 and ’73, this innovative biopic — a beguiling mix of observational documentary, scripted drama, fanciful artistic excursions, and full-frontal male nudity — captures a creatively stalled Hockney in the aftermath of his breakup with muse and lover Peter Schlesinger, an American ten years his junior. Amid the heartache and hedonism is a candid portrait of an unabashedly gay artist and his social circle navigating the death of Swinging London.
“Among the most strikingly original films on a modern artist.”
Philip French, The Guardian
