Randall Wright (2014)
This enjoyable documentary about David Hockney is stronger on the life than the work, which is expected to speak for itself. It does, of course – but the film might have been more eloquent if Hockney and some of the other talking heads had had the chance to say more about his paintings. If he were not a famous artist, the film wouldn’t have been made at all; but he’s such an engaging personality that he makes Hockney entertaining even without reference to the art – through his own interviews and the anecdotes that others tell about him. These are plentiful, right from the start – a recollection of Hockney’s belief in the superiority of crinkle-cut chips, an illustration of his notorious support for smoking. (In response to anti-smoking propaganda on an American street – in the form of a billboard and illuminated running total of the number of smoking-related fatalities in the course of the current year – Hockney wanted to rent the billboard opposite to proclaim ‘Death awaits you even if you don’t smoke’.)
Randall Wright interviewed his subject for the film but also incorporates recordings of earlier interviews with Hockney, who’s now in his seventy-eighth year. The register of his humour alters over the decades but its essence seems unchanging. His features and body language are less dynamic now but the light in his eyes, at every age, expresses wonderful vitality. Hockney compares photography as an art form unfavourably with painting but his love of moving images goes back a long way, to his childhood at the pictures in Bradford (‘we always called it “the pictures”’); and it’s a great advantage to Wright that he’s been allowed to use so much home-movie footage – not only of Hockney’s life in Los Angeles but also of family get-togethers in Yorkshire. There’s an implicit protective reticence in what Hockney recalls about people close to him. This has the effect of making what he is prepared to say all the more compelling. You’re left in no doubt how much both his parents meant to him, and how much he was affected by the loss of many friends, especially in New York, who died of AIDS.
The film moves through Hockney’s life but Randall Wright’s eschewal of a strictly chronological structure makes sense. It leaves him free to expand on themes in Hockney’s art that may have developed across many years. It also confirms the impressionistic nature of Hockney. Intertitles in the form of apothegms appear regularly throughout – all presumably written or spoken by Hockney at some time, although this isn’t made clear. The other contributing interviewees aren’t much explained either but it’s not a problem. I could have done with less wry-verging-on-cute accompanying music but I always wanted more of the art and of the man who made it.
25 March 2015
