This video is an outtake from David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, an award-winning documentary by filmmaker Bruno Wollheim.
Watch the full film here: vimeo.com/onde...
“I don’t look through the camera anymore”. Even if David has subsequently gone back to the camera, it is always as a critique of Photography, of its distortions, and especially of its normative status, its claim to show the world as it is. “Photography is all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralysed Cyclops” is an oft-quoted phrase of his.
There is an irony and ambivalence here. Photography has always exerted a hold on Hockney’s art and has been its ever-present measure, an on-off love-hate relationship that never disappears.
For the 2006 catalogue of his Yorkshire paintings, David chose a quote from Alberto Giacometti that he could just as well have uttered himself:
“The true revelation, the great shock that destroyed my whole conception of space and finally put me on the track I’m on today came in 1945, in the newsreel theatre Actualites Montparnasse…
I went in, saw the film, left the theatre, I was in the street again, in a café …I saw - influenced by the drawings I was doing at the time - unfocused black spots that moved. I looked at my neighbours - and suddenly I saw them as I had never seen them before.
Everything was different, the special depth and the things, and the colours and the silence…
It was, if you will, a perpetual enchantment of everything… From that day on, because I realized the difference between my way of seeing in the street and the way photography and films see things, I wanted to represent what I saw.”
I like the smoker’s still life of lighters in the foreground.
Filmed over three years with unprecedented access, A Bigger Picture captures Britain’s most beloved painter at work. David Hockney’s return from California to paint the East Yorkshire landscape of his childhood - outside, in all weathers, through the seasons - culminates in the largest picture ever made outdoors. It’s an inspiring story of a painter in creative dialogue with nature and photography, and a revealing portrait of Britain’s most popular and celebrated artist.
“This wonderful film … will be of lasting importance for future generations who want to understand Hockney’s art.” Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4
“Bruno Wollheim’s portrait of this forthright magus is an unqualified, life-enhancing joy from start to finish.” - The Sunday Times
“This film may well be the best anyone will ever make about Hockney’s process.” - The Times, London.
“As gently hypnotic and fulfilling as one of Hockney’s own works.” - Time Out
“This impressive documentary is almost cinematic in its scope… both majestic and intimate” - The Observer
Watch the full documentary here: vimeo.com/2248...
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