Great Highland #bagpipes, or a' phìob mhòr as they're called in Scottish Gaelic, are traditionally played on the battlefield. Peter Watkins' Culloden moves the senseless bloodshed from 1960s Vietnam to the Scottish Highlands of 1746.

“And wherever he went, he took with him his music, his poetry, his language and his children… thus within a century of Culloden, the English and the Scottish lowlanders had made secure forever their religion, their commerce, their culture, their ruling dynasty.”

– narrator

The most clearly it's seen in the men's eyes. That stare we recognise all too well from the many images that reached the west in the 60s, ever before and after.

Synchronous to the screening of a film that wasn't, Derek Jarman's Blue was broadcast on radio and television. Those who tuned into the radio could request a special card printed in that most spectral of colours, International Klein Blue, a blue that according to its creator Yves Klein, has “a quality close to pure space” and “immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched”.

“You say to the boy 'Open your eyes'. When he opens his eyes and sees the light, you make him cry out, saying 'Oh, Blue, come forth! Oh, Blue, arise! Oh, Blue, ascend! Oh, Blue, come in!'.”

– Nigel Terry

Submerged in #blue, seeing through what was left of Jarman's eyes, we live through the artist's life, and love, and loss. When you leave the theatre, put down that card, you're temporarily blinded by the physiological afterimage of a devastating disease. What remains is the voice of a filmmaker who lost his sight.

“It isn't Jesus. It's just a fella.”

– Charlie Bostock

In the barn of a remote Lancashire farmhouse, three children stumble upon a stranger. Confused, they conclude that the fellow must be the Second Coming of Christ. In the world of the adults, a man is wanted by the police.

“Good night, Gentle Jesus. Sleep well.”

– Charlie Bostock

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.