Category Archives: People

A Bigger Splash: the only way is Hockney

31.01.2012 posted by Category: Film, People, Visual arts
A Bigger Splash: the only way is Hockney

BFI Video has this week released Jack Hazan’s 1974 feature about David Hockney and his circle, A Bigger Splash. Available as a dual format DVD and Blu-ray, this fascinating and complex film has never looked better, not least because Hazan returned to a 35mm CRI for a new digital transfer. The timing is good too, for this study of life, love and sex among the Hockney set of the early seventies offers a very different picture of our ‘national treasure’ from the persona conjured up by the current Royal Academy show. The BFI has done an exemplary job with the release, as is pin-pointed by Anthony Neild’s thoughtful discussion at The Digital Fix. Included on the discs are two other shorts about Hockney – Love’s Presentation by James Scott, made in 1966, and David Pearce’s Portrait of David Hockney, 1972 – to which I’ll return in a future post. Meanwhile, included below is an extract from my essay commissioned for the booklet accompanying the BFI release.
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Ken and me

28.11.2011 posted by Category: Film, People
Ken and me

Like many others, I was sad today to learn of the death of Ken Russell. There are already tributes aplenty online, including Derek Malcolm’s Guardian obituary, a Telegraph obituary, some excellent short interviews with those who worked with him, and an artsdesk Q&A with Jasper Rees about his photography and early films. Film Studies for Free has a great page of links titled ‘Pity we aren’t madder’ (it’s from Women in Love) to academic engagements with the films. My thought here is simply to record the place that Russell had in my life. I’m sure a similar storycould be told by ten or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. But perhaps its particularity gives it an interest. In any case, it’s one very small way of saying ‘Thank you’.
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‘That prince of editors’

26.10.2011 posted by Category: People, Visual arts
‘That prince of editors’

I have been immensely saddened this evening to learn of the death, at the age of 74, of the designer, illustator and art critic Peter Campbell. You may know of him as the man who, since 1992, has created the fortnightly cover of the London Review of Books. Diana Souhami’s delightful tribute to Peter that is her Guardian obituary points out that for the first four years these covers often featured one of his monochrome photographs. But since 1996 they have been the delicate, poised colour illustrations that have been among the magazine’s most distinctive features. Peter also designed the magazine’s generous layout (and its just as generous Bloomsbury bookshop) and he contributed a regular column of thoughtful art criticism distinguished by his precise observations and unshowy intelligence. I cherish the two watercolours of his that hang on my walls, and I am happy to say that he was a friend of mine.
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