Film

A Bigger Splash

Name: A Bigger Splash
Genre: Drama, Documentary
Released: 1973
Cast: David Hockney, Celia Birtwell, Mo McDermott, Henry Geldzahler, John Kasmin

Other titles called A Bigger Splash: the 2015 film.

Biopic

Jack Hazan's hybrid film follows David Hockney through creative paralysis after a romantic rupture, blending documentary observation with dramatized reconstruction. It's a portrait of artistic crisis and desire, intimate and sometimes uncomfortable, shot through with Los Angeles light and the textures of 1970s gay life. For anyone interested in how artists actually work, or how desire disrupts everything.

If you liked this

Nightwatching2007

Peter Greenaway's film about Rembrandt's creative process and sexual jealousy, similarly exploring how personal turmoil feeds (or stalls) artistic vision through richly layered imagery.

But Greenaway's maximalist style is deliberately baroque and can feel airless; some find it more exhausting than enlightening.

My Own Private Idaho1991

Gus Van Sant's dreamy portrait of young men, desire, and artistic identity in an American landscape. It shares Hazan's intimate approach to male intimacy and creative searching.

But The narrative drifts by design, which some read as poetic and others as self-indulgent or pretentious.

Mulholland Drive2001

Lynch's Los Angeles fever dream about ambition, desire, and the self; like *A Bigger Splash*, it captures how creativity and longing become inseparable in that landscape.

But It's deliberately fractured and withholding. If you want clarity, you'll leave frustrated.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Punishment Park1971

Both use hybrid documentary-drama form to capture a moment of cultural crisis and personal vulnerability; both refuse the comfort of a resolved ending.

Peter Watkins' documentary-fiction hybrid about state repression and creative resistance in America, shot in real time with real activists. It shares Hazan's willingness to blur document and drama, and his unease with institutional power.

But It's agitprop with a thesis, and the mockumentary form feels didactic rather than seductive. The political anger can overshadow the human complexity.

Sunday Bloody Sunday1971

John Schlesinger's film about a love triangle involving a woman, a man, and a younger artist they both desire. It's tender, precise, and unflinching about adult emotional complexity.

But It moves slowly and offers no neat resolution; some find its restraint cold rather than affecting.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer2017

Yorgos Lanthimos explores how desire and obligation can paralyze a talented person. Formally precise and deeply unsettling, it has the film's intensity about creative/personal crisis.

But It's austere, glacial, and designed to unsettle rather than comfort. The premise is cruel.

Woman in the Dunes1964

Hiroshi Teshigahara's hypnotic film about a man trapped in repetition and desire. Like Hazan's work, it uses landscape and visual abstraction to explore internal paralysis.

But It's intentionally monotonous and dreamlike—narrative propulsion is not the point, which alienates viewers seeking plot momentum.

Performance.1970

Roeg and Cammell's dazzling film about identity, desire, and artistic dissolution set in a bohemian London household. It shares the era, the aesthetic, and the exploration of how art and sex collide.

But It's cryptic and sometimes incoherent by design; the transgressive content (sexual and otherwise) still shocks.

Chungking Express1994

Wong Kar-wai's visual rhapsody on desire, loneliness, and artistic yearning in an urban landscape. Formally inventive and achingly romantic about creative solitude.

But The narrative is deliberately elliptical and weightless; some find it gorgeous but emotionally hollow.

Desert Hearts1985

Donna Deitch's portrait of desire between two women in 1950s Nevada, tender and direct where many films about same-sex love are coded or evasive. A quieter exploration of how love disrupts identity.

But The production values are modest and some find the pacing deliberate to the point of drag.

Masculin Féminin1966

Both capture a specific moment and milieu through fragmentary means; both treat desire as inseparable from artistic and political consciousness; both refuse neat narrative closure.

Godard's essay-film about youth, desire, politics, and boredom in 1960s Paris. Fragmented, formally restless, and obsessed with how personal feeling and social moment collide. Visually dazzling and philosophically urgent.

But It's almost aggressively intellectual, with long sequences of dialogue or intertitles that can read as tedious rather than revelatory.

La Jetée1962

Both use visual abstraction and formal innovation to explore internal states (memory, desire, creative block) rather than external action; both are deeply melancholic meditations on time.

Chris Marker's 27-minute science-fiction poem made almost entirely from still photographs and narration. It's about love, memory, and time as a form of paralysis. Formally radical but achingly emotional—proof that constraint breeds poetry.

But The photograph-only format is austere and can feel like a gallery installation rather than cinema. If you need motion and spectacle, you'll be frustrated.