Hockney

There’s nothing pompous or pretentious in this endearingly candid, insightful and inspiring portrait of the British artist who found his true home — and made A Bigger Splash — in Los Angeles in the 1960s. As a spry, wry septuagenarian, David Hockney committed fully to the process, and his trust is rewarded with a warm and sympathetic film that should win him new admirers.

The boy from Bradford (his sister takes us around their working-class childhood home and fondly recalls early signs) never wanted for courage or conviction. There are anecdotes aplenty about his brio — the determination to go blond and have more fun, for instance — but the film’s greatest pleasure is just looking again at his work, and listening to this always curious, fluent, fluid artist musing on space, perspective, color and, for instance, the difference between photography (which freezes a fraction of time and takes longer to look at than it took in reality) and painting (which involves intense scrutiny and re-examination over a prolonged time). “It took me a week just to paint the splash…”

Director’s Statement (Randall Wright):
I wanted to create a strong sense of place in the two very different landscape that David calls home — the vast bright spaces of California, and the moody hills of East Yorkshire. The creative push and pull of these absolute opposite environments energizes David’s constant search for answers, both creative and personal. Also digital cinema is now brilliant for reproducing painting. The color accuracy, and image resolution is breathtaking. David’s paintings look stunning on the big screen. As David would be quick to point out, the two mediums, cinema and painting have a much closer relationship in the twentieth century than people realize. After the Second World War European humanist filmmakers saw themselves as continuing the figurative tradition of oil painting. And films were always significant to David. He moved to the Hollywood Hills, he befriended Billy Wilder, and of course he has experimented with films for the last thirty years, resulting in his recent multi-screen movies. Some of his latest paintings are massive and in a widescreen format. For me cinema offers the opportunity to deal with an artist in a very down to earth way, without commentary and the standard art world experts. In the dark we can really focus on powerful images without interruptions.

A wealth of intimate home-movie footage and an affinity for his subject invigorate Randall Wright’s unashamedly affectionate portrait of a British icon.

Mark Kermode, The Guardian