The new edition you shouldn’t miss in France is A Bigger Splash one, Jack Hazan’s film about and with David Hockney. Appropriate release, soon followed by a DVD, at the time of the biopics reign : not academic nor falsely virtuoso, not documentary nor fiction, the film is as much biographical as it is reflexive, and confronts the hyper-realism of Hockney’s paintings to a skillful production in 35 mm.
Jack Hazan has only made a few films (five between 1969 and 1998) but at least two masterpieces. In 1980, Rude Boy, story of a young proletarian lad who becomes a Clash roadie, which achieve the exploit to be a gripping fiction and an absolutely true documentary about punk era and about Joe Strummer’s musical audacity and political greatness. But also six years before, in 1974, A Bigger Splash, same kind of movie which never tries to identify his nature : it recounts a short period of the life and art of David Hockney, at the time he paints his Portrait of an artist (a man standing in front of a swimming pool and contemplating a swimmer) and gets over a painful breaking-off with his former student, and soon an artist by himself, John Schlesinger.
Screened in 1974 in Cannes and Locarno (where it won the Silver Leopard), A Bigger Splash (by the name of Hockney’s most famous painting) is a success similar to Rude Boy : to be at the same time the best document ever about Hockney, a crucial artist who put himself deliberately at the heart of the aesthetical problems and fashions of his century (as Strummer did with even more fame), and an essay : an attempt to play, like Hockney in his pictures, with the relation between material and structures, between surface and space, bodies and images, representation and abstraction ; between the film and the world. Much more than a tribute : a film which works and put his subject back to work.
Bastien Hader
MK2 Beaubourg - Paris January 16th 2008
CNP - Lyon January 16th 2008
Majestic - Lille January 16th 2008
Odysée - Strasbourg January 30th 2008
Le César - Marseille February 6th 2008
Le Mazarin - Aix-en-Provence February 20th 2008
Café des Images - Hérouville February 20th 2008
Utopia - Toulouse February 27th 2008
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Magic Cinéma - Bobigny March 26th 2008
Utopia - Bordeaux April 2nd 2008
Le France - St-Etienne April 23rd 2008