A Bigger Splash is the name of one of painter David Hockney's best known works and part of a series of pool portraits of the artist's close friends, one of them his lover Peter Schlesinger, an artist in his own right. When in the early 1970s the relationship between the two men started to unravel it affected #Hockney so much it almost rendered him incapable of working.

“I paint what I like when I like, and where I like.”

– David Hockney

While going through Polaroids he found that two of the shots, one of a man #swimming underwater, the other of a man standing on a poolside, fell into the composition he was looking for. The resulting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) – where an unknown man can be seen swimming towards Hockney's fully-dressed former lover – bears similarities to Renaissance paintings where the composition of human figures, landscape, and perspective culminate in proto-cinematic storytelling.

 

Cinematographer and filmmaker Jack Hazan juxtaposes David Hockney working on Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) with speculative scenes about the creation of the work and the disintegration of Hockney's and Schlesinger's relationship. It did create a splash, in particular in its ordinary depiction of a homosexual relationship.

 

A Bigger Splash is of course not the only (pseudo) documentary about an artist and his or her life, but one of the very few honest ones. The struggle to create is not romanticised, nor is the intimate relationship between artist and muse a playground of lazy, perverse speculation. As Hockney creates, destroys, and recreates his Pool, so we all destroy our lovers to bloom again.

“No, Wagner! Stay in Hell where you belong!”

– Franz Liszt

“As I want it, so it will be!”

– George McWhirter Fotheringay

“Sir John MacDonald, Jacobite captain of cavalry. Aged, frequently intoxicated, described as 'a man of the most limited capacities'.”

– narrator

Rathbarney is a typical small Irish town inhabited with a bunch of eccentrics, including a few leprechauns and a ghost, who all live in general harmony with each other, mostly at the local pub. (via IMDb)

“I've not lived long enough in Ireland to appreciate the logic of that remark.”

– Jasper O'Leary

In a strange other #England – in the village of Chillingbourne to be precise – a train pulls into the station. On board are several people on their way to #Canterbury.

“You're not dreaming.”

– Thomas Colpeper, JP

When Alison disembarks, believing she arrived at the pilgrim's town, a stranger pours #glue in her hair. She's the eleventh, the policeman said. It's the glue man, the townsfolk know. Like the pilgrims of #Chaucer's poem, Alison and her fellow stranded travellers journey towards the closure of this mystifying case.

A Gen X-er, I grew up in a completely different world where so many films and TV that kids watched – if watched with today's eyes — were not particularly kid-oriented at all. I fondly remember Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and reenacting the Black Knight scene in the school grounds. Yul Brynner as a faceless, rampaging cyber cowboy in Westworld (1973)? Sure, bring it on! Not that the official kid's movies were “clean”. Did you spot the chicken decapitation in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)? Well, you will now.

“Once upon a time, or maybe twice, there was an unearthly paradise called Pepperland. 80,000 leagues beneath the sea it lay, or lie. I'm not too sure.”

– narrator

Alright, I'll keep it clean and suggest a dose of Yellow Submarine. A fantastic adventure starring The #Beatles (well, their likeness mostly) who are summoned to save utopian, music-loving #Pepperland from the music-hating Blue Meanies. Trippy fun, and lots to discover the older you get.

An American tourist visiting Dorset is tricked by a prostitute, then falls victim to a youth gang controlled by volatile con King – a still very green Oliver Reed at his meanest. The trickster is King's sister, who confides in the American hoping to escape her brother's incestuous advances.

“I'm strange, all right! I'll show you just how strange I am!”

– King

The couple elopes to a nearby island, closely followed by King and his gang, where they find a group of #children, all contently living in an underground lab, with #AutomaticDoors only they can control.

 

They are the damned.

Someone's playing cards.

“Why, you might end up by gaining a fortune… or losing your precious soul.”

– bookseller

A car accident.