Tag Archives: A Bigger Splash

POOL PARTY: SWIMMING POOL / A BIGGER SPLASH

POOL PARTY
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
August 5-14
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.focusfeatures.com

With New York City sweltering in a muggy, sweat-drenching summer with temps that have stayed in the nineties, Metrograph offers two things to cool you off that usually don’t go together: air-conditioning and swimming. But that’s just what their new series, “Pool Party,” does, consisting of seven films in which characters go for a dip, for good and for bad.

The series kicks off with François Ozon’s beguiling mystery Swimming Pool, in which Charlotte Rampling shows Ludivine Sagnier that she still has it, followed by Jacques Deray’s 1969 erotic thriller La Piscine, in which Jane Birkin shakes things up between Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. Burt Lancaster swims home through suburban backyard pools in Frank Perry’s 1968 adaptation of John Cheever’s 1964 short story “The Swimmer.” Selena Gomez and friends take a wild road trip in Harmony Korine’s 2012 Spring Breakers, meeting up with a metallic-smiling James Franco. Elsie Fisher finds more trouble than she bargained for as a middle school vlogger in Bo Burnham’s bittersweet debut, Eighth Grade. British artist David Hockney makes a big splash in Jack Hazan’s 1974 hybrid docudrama, A Bigger Splash. And Lucretia Martel traces the fall of a bourgeois family in her 2001 debut, La Ciénaga. Below is a deeper dive into two of the films; get those bathing suits on and jump in to beat the heat!

Jealousy and envy are at the heart of François Ozon’s sexy thriller

SWIMMING POOL (François Ozon, 2003)
Friday, August 5, 2:45
Sunday, August 7, 12:20
metrograph.com
www.focusfeatures.com

Charlotte Rampling is divine in Swimming Pool, François Ozon’s playfully creepy mystery about a popular British crime novelist taking a break from the big city (London) to recapture her muse at her publisher’s French villa, only to be interrupted by the publisher’s hot-to-trot teenage daughter. Rampling stars as Sarah Morton, a fiftysomething novelist who is jealous of the attention being poured on young writer Terry Long (Sebastian Harcombe) by her longtime publisher, John Bosload (Game of Thrones’s Charles Dance). John sends Sarah off to his elegant country house, where she sets out to complete her next Inspector Dorwell novel in peace and quiet. But the prim and proper — and rather bitter and cynical — Sarah quickly has her working vacation intruded upon by Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), John’s teenage daughter, who likes walking around topless and living life to the fullest, clearly enjoying how Sarah looks at her and judges her. “You’re just a frustrated English writer who writes about dirty things but never does them,” Julie says, and soon Sarah is reevaluating the choices she’s made in her own life. Rampling, who mixes sexuality with a heart-wrenching vulnerability like no other actress (see The Night Porter, The Verdict, and Heading South), more than holds her own as the primpy old maid in the shadow of a young beauty, even tossing in some of nudity to show that she still has it. (Rampling also posed nude in her sixties in a series of photographs by Juergen Teller alongside twentysomething model Raquel Zimmerman, so such “competition” is nothing to her.)

Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and Sarah (Charlotte Rampling) come to a kind of understanding in François Ozon’s Swimming Pool

Rampling has really found her groove working with Ozon, having appeared in five of his films, highlighted by a devastating performance in Under the Sand as a wife dealing with the sudden disappearance of her husband. Sagnier, who has also starred in Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women, is a delight to watch, especially as things turn dark. Swimming Pool is very much about duality; the film opens with a shot of the shimmering Thames river while the title comes onscreen and Philippe Rombi’s score of mystery and danger plays, and later Sarah says, “I absolutely loathe swimming pools,” to which Julie responds, “Pools are boring; there’s no excitement, no feeling of infinity. It’s just a big bathtub.” (“It’s more like a cesspool of living bacteria,” Sarah adds.) Ozon (Time to Leave, Criminal Lovers) explores most of the seven deadly sins as Sarah and Julie get to know each other all too well.

David Hockney works on his masterpiece in Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash

A BIGGER SPLASH (Jack Hazan, 1974)
Saturday, August 6, 2:30
Sunday, August 7, 5:00
Saturday, August 13, 7:15
metrograph.com

Coinciding with Pride celebrations throughout New York City in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in June 2019, Metrograph premiered a 4K restoration of Jack Hazan’s pivotal 1974 A Bigger Splash, a fiction-nonfiction hybrid that was a breakthrough work for its depiction of gay culture as well as its inside look at the fashionable and chic Los Angeles art scene of the early 1970s. In November 2018, David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction for $90.3 million, the most ever paid for a work by a living artist. A Bigger Splash, named after another of Hockney’s paintings — both are part of a series of canvases set around pools in ritzy Los Angeles — takes place over three years, as the British artist, based in California at the time, hangs out with friends, checks out a fashion show, prepares for a gallery exhibition, and works on Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) in the wake of a painful breakup with his boyfriend, model, and muse, Peter Schlesinger, who is a key figure in the painting.

It’s often hard to know which scenes are pure documentary and which are staged for the camera as Hazan and his then-parter, David Mingay, who served as director of photography, tag along with Hockney, who rides around in his small, dirty BMW, meeting up with textile designer Celia Birtwell, fashion designer Ossie Clark, curator Henry Geldzahler, gallerist John Kasmin, artist Patrick Procktor, and others, who are identified only at the beginning, in black-and-white sketches during the opening credits. The film features copious amounts of male nudity, including a long sex scene between two men, a group of beautiful boys diving into a pool in a fantasy sequence, and Hockney disrobing and taking a shower. Hockney’s assistant, Mo McDermott, contributes occasional voice-overs; he also poses as the man standing on the deck in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), only to be replaced by Schlesinger later. There are several surreal moments involving Hockney’s work: He cuts up one painting; Geldzahler gazes long and hard at himself in the double portrait of him and Christopher Scott; and Hockney tries to light the cigarette Procktor is holding in a painting as Procktor watches, cigarette in hand, mimicking his pose on canvas. At one point Hockney is photographing Schlesinger in Kensington Gardens, reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which questions the very nature of capturing reality on film.

A BIGGER SPLASH

David Hockney works on his masterpiece in Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash

A BIGGER SPLASH (Jack Hazan, 1974)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, June 21
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

Just in time to coincide with Pride celebrations throughout New York City in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Metrograph is premiering a 4K restoration of Jack Hazan’s pivotal 1974 A Bigger Splash, a fiction-nonfiction hybrid that was a breakthrough work for its depiction of gay culture as well as its inside look at the fashionable and chic Los Angeles art scene of the early 1970s. This past November, David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction for $90.3 million, the most ever paid for a work by a living artist. A Bigger Splash, named after another of Hockney’s paintings — both are part of a series of canvases set around pools in ritzy Los Angeles — takes place over three years, as the British artist, based in California at the time, hangs out with friends, checks out a fashion show, prepares for a gallery exhibition, and works on Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) in the wake of a painful breakup with his boyfriend, model, and muse, Peter Schlesinger, who is a key figure in the painting.

Hockney was so upset when he first saw A Bigger Splash, which Hazan made for about twenty thousand dollars, that he offered to buy it back from Hazan in order to destroy it; Hazan refused, and Hockney went into a deep depression. His friends ultimately convinced him that it was a worthwhile movie and he eventually accepted it. It’s a one-of-a-kind film, a wild journey that goes far beyond the creative process as an artist makes his masterpiece. Hockney, who will turn eighty-two next month, has been on quite a roll of late. He was the subject of a 2016 documentary by Randall Wright, was widely hailed for his 2018 Met retrospective, saw one of his paintings set an auction record, and is scheduled to have a major drawing show at the National Portrait Gallery next year. In addition, Catherine Cusset’s novel, Life of David Hockney, was just published in English, a fictionalized tale that conceptionally recalls A Bigger Splash, which opens June 21 at Metrograph, with various Q&As and introductions by Hazan, Richard Haines and Alexander Olch, Nick McCarthy, Ryan McNamara, Matt Wolf, and Cusset from June 21 to 30. And if you can’t get enough of Hockney, Anita Rogers is showing “Films by James Scott, Etchings by David Hockney” through July 27, consisting of Hockney’s 1966 series “Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C. P. Cavafy” and Scott’s 1966 documentary short about the series, Love’s Presentation.

DAVID HOCKNEY

David Hockney, “A Bigger Splash,” acrylic on canvas, 1967 (Tate, purchased 1980 / © David Hockney; photo © Tate, London 2017)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through February 25, $25 suggested admission
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

There’s something very pure about the paintings of English artist David Hockney, so directly enchanting that Randall Wright’s 2015 documentary about him was simply called Hockney and the Met’s grand retrospective, which closes February 25, is titled David Hockney, no further description needed. I called the film “a wonderful documentary that celebrates not only the artist but his work and process, which comes alive on the screen, digital technology allowing the paintings and photographs to pop with their brilliant colors. If you didn’t appreciate Hockney’s talent before, this documentary will change your mind about it. And if you already were a fan of him and his work, this film will make you love him even more.” The same can be said of the Met show, including the digital aspect; the first major survey of Hockney in New York City in thirty years features the digital triptych “View through the Artist’s Bedroom Window, Bridlington” that reveals the development of a trio of images made on an iPad. Celebrating his eightieth birthday, the show comprises more than eighty painting, drawing, photographs, and video works as Hockney, over the course of nearly sixty years, goes from abstraction to realism, from portraits to landscapes, from 1960’s “Love Painting,” when he was still at the Royal College of Art, to 2017’s “Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden.”

David Hockney, “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy,” acrylic on canvas, 1968 (private collection / © David Hockney)

David Hockney, “Man in Shower in Beverly Hills,” acrylic on canvas, 1964 (Tate, purchased 1980 / © David Hockney; photo © Tate, London 2017)

Hockney was born in Bradford, England and has lived on the Yorkshire Coast and in the Hollywood Hills. He still paints every day, with a sparkling control of color, form, and space that instantly engages viewers making their way through the galleries, divided into “Early Works,” “Los Angeles,” “Pair Portraits,” “Sketches & Photocollages,” “Assembled Views,” “Roads & Landscapes,” and “Blue Terraces.” He didn’t hide from his sexual identity in his paintings, even though homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. Many of his classic works are on view: 1967’s “A Bigger Splash,” a spectacularly rendered backyard pool with a small home, part of a diving board, and two tall palm trees set against a blue sky, a bravura example of his use of line and geometric shapes; 1964’s homoerotic “Man in Shower in Beverly Hills”; 1980’s swirling, mazelike “Nichols Canyon”; and 1986’s chromogenic print “Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986, #1,” which focuses our gaze on the word “stop” three times, an instruction that we, and Hockney, have no intention of obeying.

But the show goes much deeper. “One of the surprises for me is how varying he was,” curator Ian Alteveer says in a Met video. “He, at a very young age, was expressing themes of queerness and of difference and displaying them very proudly in his work.” This is perhaps best exemplified by 1963’s “Domestic Scene,” in which a nearly naked man washes the back of a fully naked man taking a shower in a bucket, and 1960’s “The Third Love Painting,” which includes a large phallic object and a quote from Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard at the Close of the Day,” among other text. Meanwhile, the gems keep coming, from such double portraits as “American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman),” “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy,” “My Parents,” and “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy” to the Matisse/Picasso-inspired “V.N.” paintings and depictions of the Grand Canyon, art dealer John Kasmin, onetime lover Peter Schlesinger, artist Ron Kitaj, and his longtime manager and former companion Gregory Evans. You’ll leave the show feeling gleeful and chipper, ready to bask in the glow of the world outside while excitedly wondering what Hockney will come up with next.

HOCKNEY

Documentary celebrates the life and career of British artist David Hockney

HOCKNEY (Randall Wright, 2015)
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts., 212-660-0312
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater, Walter Reade Theater,
West 65th St. between Amsterdam Ave. & Broadway
Opens Friday, April 22
hockneyfilm.tumblr.com

“Why are you popular?” artist David Hockney is asked in an old interview in the 2014 documentary Hockney. “I’m not that sure,” the painter and photographer answers with a laugh. “I’m interested in ways of looking, because people will respond. Everybody does look; it’s just a question of how hard.” Award-winning director Randall Wright, who in 2002 made David Hockney: Secret Knowledge, examining the artist’s theories about the use of cameras and photographic-like visualization techniques in art going back centuries, this time takes a loving, more wide-ranging look at Hockney’s professional and personal worlds. Combining new interviews with old footage and home movies and photographs from Hockney’s private archives — which have never been made public before — Wright reveals Hockney to be an absolutely charming and engaging man with a genuine passion for life but not without his demons. “The paintings all related, whether superficially or intensely, on his life, and his trying to deal with his homosexuality, and trying to deal with his fantasies, and trying to deal with the issues of a sexual identity,” fellow British artist and longtime Hockney friend Mark Berger explains. “And he used wit to play with these identities. He was really like a little high school girl about it.” Wright and cinematographer Patrick Duval insert beautiful shots of many of Hockney’s paintings, slowly moving over the canvases as Hockney and, often, the subjects being depicted discuss them. Among the glorious works shown, from portraits and realistic paintings to more experimental, surreal, and abstract pieces, are “A Bigger Splash,” “Portrait of My Father,” “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy,” “We Two Boys Together Clinging Together,” “Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool,” “Beverly Hills Housewife,” “Celia with a Foot on a Chair,” and such Polaroid composites as “Still Life Blue Guitar 4th April 1982.”

David Hockney opens up his personal archives for illuminating documentary

The film reveals Hockney to be a Warholian-like figure with a much more open and fun-loving personality — complete with odd glasses, bottle-blonde hair with bangs, and a love of photography — enjoying the party life as he goes from his hometown, “dingy Bradford” in England, to New York and Los Angeles; he currently lives in England and California and still paints seven days a week at the age of seventy-eight. It’s quite a thrill to see Hockney at work in his studios, putting brush to canvas. “I paint what I like and when I like” is one of numerous Hockney quotes that Wright uses on title cards, setting them on different monochrome backgrounds and interspersing them throughout the film. Wright (Lucian Freud: A Painted Life) also explores in-depth Hockney’s relationships with such friends and/or lovers as Peter Schlesinger and Henry Geldzahler. One drawback is that the director identifies his interview subjects, Hockney’s friends, colleagues, and relatives, only by name, so it is not always clear what their relationship to the artist is; most viewers are not likely to know who Bachardy, Arthur Lambert, Tchaik Chassay, Melissa North, Wayne Sleep, John Kasmin, or even Ed Ruscha and Jack Larson are or how Margaret Hockney is related to David. (Larson is the recently deceased actor who played Jimmy Olsen on the Superman television series and became a collector of Hockney’s work, while Margaret is David’s sister.) But that’s only a minor quibble in a wonderful documentary that celebrates not only the artist but his work and process, which comes alive on the screen, digital technology allowing the paintings and photographs to pop with their brilliant colors. If you didn’t appreciate Hockney’s talent before, this documentary will change your mind about it. And if you already were a fan of him and his work, this film will make you love him even more.