‘Starring David Hockney’: Authenticity and Filmic Performance in A Bigger Splash

Abstract

Regarded by some as an important experimental film on its first release, Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash (1974) has been neglected in subsequent discussions of both artist biopics and the wider issues. This essay undertakes a reappraisal of the film and shows how at the beginning of the 1970s it addressed many issues that continue to concern film theorists, including questions of performance and authenticity within the biographical film. It will be argued Hazan’s technique of blurring the division between reality and stylised performance results in a special mixture of authentic and fictional happenings that in turn provide a unique insight into both the personality and the creative process of the artist David Hockney. After the film’s Cannes premiere in 1974, David Robinson, the film critic of The Times, argued that it defied ‘comparison with any other art film or study in documentary biography . . . A Bigger Splash is a unique document and an astonishing first feature’ (1974: 37). Robinson was not alone in his praise; Ken Gay, writing in Films and Filming, not only thought it ‘[t]he outstanding documentary at last year’s London Film Festival’, but suggested that Hazan had ‘extended the art of documentary one step further’ (1975: 58). Such comments need to be seen in the light that around the same time two other important film biopics of artists by British directors with documentary backgrounds had appeared. Having opened up television documentary on the