Two of Hammer's rarer features, the historical adventures The Scarlet Blade and The Brigand of Kandahar made their DVD debut recently. Thanks to StudioCanal, you can win both films on DVD in our latest competition. Details below. 

The Scarlet Blade, made in 1963, stars Lionel Jeffries, Oliver Reed and Jack Hedley and was directed by John Gilling.

In 1648 the civil war raged in England as the republican Roundheads clash with the Royalists, supporters of the deposed King Charles I. Allegiances split family loyalties, and intrigue, treachery and death overshadowed every household. Set against this troubled background the drama surrounds two families, the Beverlys and the Judds, and the conflicts that they face against each other and themselves.

An unlikely romance blossoms between two people from these opposing camps – one from the Roundheads, the other from the Cavaliers. Colonel Judd (Jeffries), a villainous anti-royalist loyal to Cromwell, is bewildered by his daughter Clare’s (June Thorburn) Royalist sympathies. Judd’s right-hand man Captain Sylvester (Reed) is an enforcer for Cromwell’s parliamentarians and also June’s boyfriend. Much to the consternation of Judd and Sylvester, Clare falls for Edward Beverly aka The Scarlet Blade (Hedley) a dashing Robin Hood figure leading the Royalist rebels.

John Gilling also directed The Brigand of Kandahar, made in 1965, starring Ronald Lewis, Oliver Reed and Duncan Lamont.

1880. British India. Robert Case (Lewis), a mixed race lieutenant, is unjustly discharged from the British Army. He joins the rebel Bengali tribesmen offensive led by Eli Khan (Reed) against the colonial enemy. They capture a foreign journalist and Case recounts his story of false accusation on trumped-up charges, instigated by the bigotry and racism of his commanding officers. Following a successful attack by the British against the rebels, Case is brutally shot by Colonel Drewe (Lamont), his accuser. The journalist returns home determined to report the true story of The Brigand of Kandahar.

Both films are presented in their original 2.35:1 scope ratio.

To win one set of both DVDs just email the answer to the following question, with your name and address:

Which three Hammer horror films did director John Gilling eventually make for the studio?

The competition is open until midnight on Sunday 19th February 2012.

It is suggested that the Oberhausen Manifesto, a declaration made by young German filmmakers at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen on 28 February 1962, was the impetus for the New German Cinema movement that rose to prominence between the late 1960s and the 1980s. Among the group that would eventually produce work within that period and would go on to receive international acclaim were Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff and Wim Wenders. The Tin Drum is certainly regarded as Volker Schlöndorff's greatest critical and commercial achievement. It is a key film in the New German Cinema, both epitomising a cinema that Stephen Brockmann, in A Critical History of German Film, describes as showing "the personal implications of politics" and underling the importance and success, with acclaim for The Tin Drum in the form of the Palme d'Or and an Oscar, of a national cinema to West German audiences.

Günter Grass's 1959 novel has been seen as a key text within Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the process through which modern Germany has attempted to learn to live with its past in relation to Hitler's rise to power and the Nazi co-option of cultural, religious and historical institutions. With Grass this was, at the time, a specific criticism and analysis of how Germany would legitimise itself again in its post-war rebuilding of society and politics in the 1950s and 1960s under the Christian Democratic Union government of Konrad Adenauer. As Peter O. Amds notes in Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's The Tin Drum: "Grass saw in the CDU government a continuation of the Nazi past...[and] the post-war period was neo-Biedermeier, a restorative time in which people turned away from politics and comforted themselves with materialism and prosperity." The Tin Drum was not only Grass's reminder to Germans that they had to reconcile themselves with their Nazi past but that in order to do so they needed to examine democracy in the form of the CDU's policies.

A landmark in postwar German literature, The Tin Drum is a magical-realist, picaresque novel that uses political satire to confront German society of the 1960s with the legacies of its past. Told over three books, the central character is Oskar Matzerath, a child of dubious parentage, with two presumptive fathers in Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, born to Agnes Matzerath in the Free City of Danzig in 1924.

At the age of three he refuses to grow up, after observing and then rejecting the antagonism within his petit bourgeois Polish-German family, and he throws himself down the cellar stairs in order to arrest his physical maturation. On his third birthday he receives the gift of a red and white tin drum, a symbolic object that stays with him throughout the story, and also discovers that his piercing cry can shatter glass.

Through his narration, and his eyes as a child-adult, we witness the Third Reich's ascendancy and its attempt to seize the strategically important city of Danzig. Political lines are drawn within Oskar's family and Alfred, a German, sides with the Nazis while Jan, a Danzig Pole, remains loyal to his homeland. Oskar then tells of the suicide of Sigismund Markus, a Jewish toy shop owner, during the Kristallnacht ransacking of synagogues and Jewish businesses in 1938 and of the defence of the Polish Post Office, one of the first skirmishes in the Second World War, where Jan is caught up in the battle for the building with his fellow Polish citizens holding off against attacks by the SS and local SA units.

Oskar's mother Agnes, who maintained an affair with Jan during her marriage to Alfred, dies and Alfred marries Maria, a young girl brought to Danzig by Oskar's grandmother to work in Alfred's grocery store. Both he and Oskar have a sexual relationship with her, then she marries Alfred and becomes pregnant, giving birth to potentially what could be Oskar's son or half-brother, Kurt. Oskar leaves and joins Bebra's circus troupe of dwarfs who have been officially co-opted by the Nazis to entertain the troops on the front line at Normandy. He begins an affair with Bebra's mistress, Roswitha, but this is short lived when she is killed during the Allies advance into France.

In 1944, when Oskar returns to Danzig, he has to hide with his family as the Russians arrive and capture the city. His 'father' Alfred is shot by invading troops when he goes into seizure after swallowing his Nazi Party lapel pin to protect himself and avoid being revealed as a Nazi. At Alfred's funeral, Oskar decides to stop drumming and start growing again and throws his drum into the grave. After Kurt hits Oskar on the head with a stone, he starts to grow again and the family abandon Danzig.

"... all of a sudden he speaks into the camera"

At this point there is a parting of the ways between Grass's book and Schlöndorff's film adaptation. The third section of the book confirms that Oskar is narrating the story from the confines of an asylum, thus leaving the reader to question the veracity of the incidents related to them. Oskar is therefore an unreliable narrator in the novel but Schlöndorf chooses to end the film with the incidents of the second section of the novel and cinema audiences were left unaware of the actual source and circumstance of Oskar's narrative. In fact, in the original theatrical version released in 1979, Oskar's narration is ambiguously presented off screen, switching between the third person and the first.

In the director's cut, Schlöndorff restores a sequence, adding to one of the film's flights of fancy by recreating an orgy with Rasputin while Oskar's teacher Gertrude and mother Agnes read about his sexual exploits. In this scene we see Oskar look directly at the audience, into the camera, while continuing his familiar narration that threads throughout the film. Schlöndorff comments on this reclamation of the narrative in Geoffrey Macnab's recent article in Sight and Sound: "Here, all of a sudden he speaks into the camera. The fact that he is there reflecting on himself on screen provides the whole perspective to the story he is telling."

This is ironic given that the director's cut of The Tin Drum arrives in the aftermath of Grass's revelation, in his 2006 memoir Peeling the Onion, that at the age of 17 he was a member of the Waffen-SS, a Nazi fighting unit denounced at the Nuremberg trials. He had never made a secret of the fact that he was involved in the Hitler Youth movement and, at 16, had volunteered for duty on submarines but he had kept private his role in the Waffen-SS and only guiltily admitted the truth just as the memoir went to publication.

Schlöndorf, in Macnab's article, is rather pragmatic and sees this confession as yet another layer to the film: "He has been his own exorcist, like a lot of artists, through this trilogy and especially in this character of Oskar who is clearly a little schizophrenic. This is Grass's own childhood... that's what he grew up in and that's how he ended up wanting to partake in the war." In an odd twist the unreliability of Oskar as narrator is the role that many commentators have suggested that Grass must finally accept as his own.  

The Tin Drum opens with Oskar (the amazing David Bennent) narrating the story of his conception and birth and begins with his grandparents. An image of his peasant grandmother Anna (the younger version played by Tina Engel), huddled over a fire in the middle of a field and having picked potatoes as she watches tiny figures on the horizon, is one of many that places figures into epic landscapes. It is a motif that Schlöndorff uses repeatedly in the film; the impressive crane shot of Bebra, the circus dwarf, waving farewell to Oskar; the Matzerath family on the beach; the tiny figures of Bebra and his troupe on the Normandy bunkers; and a closing shot of a similar peasant figure tending a fire as Oskar leaves Danzig by train at the end of the film, are some examples that come to mind.

Much of the opening is also shot on a Askania silent camera, giving the footage an over-cranked, speeded up silent film and newsreel aesthetic as Oskar's future grandfather Joseph, an army deserter, seeks shelter under Anna's skirts from military police. This is later supplemented by several uses of the classic iris in/out motif that allude to the passing of time in silent cinema narrative as Kashubian peasant life makes way for city life in Danzig where we see Anna (the older version now played by Berta Drews) and her daughter Agnes (a psychologically unsettling performance from Angela Winkler) selling geese and the development of the love triangle between Agnes, Alfred (Mario Adorf) and Jan (Daniel Olbrychski).

... a deft accumulation of visual symbols and objects

There are also numerous film references that Schlöndorff uses, including the silent comedy introduction of grandfather Joseph, the mimicing and satirising of Riefenstahl's chronicle of the Nuremberg Rally, Triumph of the Will (1934) and Oskar's schoolteacher emulating the shot of the nurse's broken glasses and open mouthed scream in Eistenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) among them. As Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis note in Volker Schlöndorff's Cinema: Adaptation, Politics, and the "Movie-Appropriate" Schlöndorff finds an equivalent to Grass's manipulation of language, including the puns, allusions, metaphors and use of stream of consciousness in the book, and "Schlöndorff's use of leitmotifs demonstrates how the film maker can adhere closely to his literary model" by employing a deft accumulation of visual symbols and objects within the film.

The most permanent symbol is that of the red and white tin drum (the colours of the Polish flag), always present as soon as Oskar decides that he will not be part of the sinful adult world. As a symbol it bridges the child/man's obsessions, the way his identification switches from mother Agnes, and after her death, to his two 'fathers'. Its transformative power attempts to halt the affair between Agnes and Jan and heralds the deaths of Jan, in the Post Office attack, and then Alfred, when the Russians arrive in Danzig. In one scene, during the Post Office attack, the drum is perched on a cupboard, blazing with spectral light and causes the death of Jan's comrade and Jan's own eventual capture and execution.

Incidentally, grandfather Joseph's shelter under Anna's skirts is another visual symbol that is repeated throughout the film. It suggests a both a desire on the part of the child, particularly male, to return to the womb, to cease to be part of the adult world and of the child view of the world. Oskar's point of view is one of eternal voyeurism from beneath, looking up at the adult world around him, trying to fathom out the contradictions between his Polish and German relatives and the original Kashubian stock from which he is descended. We initially see Oskar in the womb, reluctant to emerge into the world. Like his grandfather, he later seeks shelter under his grandmother's skirts during a party at home and at the wake for his recently buried mother; again in his encounter with Maria (Katherina Thalbach) at the beach hut which sees his magnetic attraction to the young woman's naked body, his head plunging straight for her vagina. Later, this underworld exploration continues in Maria's bed when Oskar seduces her under the bedclothes with fizzing sherbert licked out of her navel.

And it is worth noting the prevalent use of groups of three in many of Schlöndorff's compositions. Naturally, he frames Alfred, Jan and Agnes together but this often switches to various combinations featuring Oskar too where the pattern of the love triangle is later repeated in the three figures of Bebra, Roswitha and Oskar and in the three way affair between Alfred, Maria and Oskar. This is perhaps Schlöndorff's visualisation of the eternal procession of the trinity, even of 'faith', 'hope' and 'charity'. It also underlines the triangular nature of the three ethnic groups in the film - the Germans, the Poles and the Kashubians - and what Moeller and Lellis see as "the dramatic shifts that have occurred in how the two peoples (the Germans and the Poles) have regarded one another" throughout history and where, in the film, each of the three ethnicities must chose which side they are eventually going to be on as the rise of Nazism permeates their society. 

As well as this visual symmetry between the characters, we also have Oskar's role as observer and interpreter of the adult world. Schlöndorff has Oskar narrate much of the film, sometimes switching between first and third person, but there are also ways in which the director tracks Oskar in and out of frames in his role as observer. Many scenes in which Oskar is watching the unfolding events begin with his view point, the audience seeing directly what he sees, but often Schlöndorff will then position Oskar at the edge of the frame and then slowly pull back or move forward. The view point switches from Oskar to the viewer.

The audience takes over from Oskar as the observer and watches as Nazism feeds off what Stephen Parker describes as "the irrational impulses and destructive tendencies born of petty frustrations, greed and jealousies" of the adults around his central figure, adults naively manipulated by the monstrous reality distorting around them. It is Oskar's revulsion at this state of affairs which prompts his refusal to grow, the character with his red and white tin drum becoming the film's symbolic political rebel, a critique of petit bourgeois German nature and a mirror to the alienating effects on their ethnic friends and neighbours. 

Oskar is himself subject to this alienating process early on in the film. After he discovers his extraordinary ability to shatter glass, his is virtually crowned king for the day by the gang of local children he plays with and for a time he is the drummer boy that they follow. Schlöndorff underlines this by cutting from the rag tag gang and their leader to a Hitler Youth band marching down the street under attack from neighbours who see them only as an inconsequential irritant. Later, as a signal of the imminent reversal of this situation, when Danzig gradually falls under the shadow of the Third Reich, the gang of children turn on Oskar and he becomes an outsider, someone different to them and only fit for abuse.

When Oskar meets Bebra in the circus, his role of distanced observer is questioned and Bebra issues a call to arms: "Our kind must never sit in the audience. Our kind must perform and run the show, or the others will run us. The others are coming. They will occupy the fairgrounds, they will stage torchlight parades, build rostrums, fill the rostrums, and from those rostrums preach our destruction." A reflection of the imagery of the street gang and their drummer boy leader, and the idea of performance as defence, can be found in later sequences when Bebra marches his troupe and Oskar together over the Normandy beaches or has them entertain the Nazis in a French nightclub. Indeed, Oskar and Bebra share the creative/destructive impulses of those around them: Bebra makes glass sing, Oskar shatters it.

"... world history seen and experienced from beneath: gigantic, spectacular pictures held together by the tiny Oskar."

Oskar is often seen looking underneath or into space as if attempting to uncover a hidden truth or gain greater knowledge. As well as attempting to hide under his grandmother's skirts, he sits under tables to witness adultery or disrupts and subverts the Triumph of the Will style Nazi rally from under a rostrum. Schlöndorff's camera again emphasises the child viewpoint, angled low and looking up into the faces of adults or at Oskar's head height so that taller adults are simply represented in cut off form, sometimes headless in the frame. As ever, his point of view switches with alarming regularity.

At the start of the film, during the sequence in which he is born, rendered to great Gothic effect as Oscar is seen glaring malevolently from within Agnes's womb on a storm lashed night, we see birth from his perspective, with tilted angles and the faces of his two 'fathers' presented upside down. Later, his deliberate fall down the cellar steps is seen from multiple views, our view of him falling, his view of the cellar floor and then his view looking up from the floor as his mother and 'fathers' come to investigate. As Schlöndorff himself noted in Tagebuch zur "Blechtrommel": "I'm trying to imagine a film that... could become a very German fresco, world history seen and experienced from beneath: gigantic, spectacular pictures held together by the tiny Oskar."

Oskar is also the lynchpin around which much of the more baroque imagery of the film rotates. He is a trickster figure, the fairy tale picaro, a grotesque Tom Thumb who explores the Bakhtian carnival of life replete with its sexual degeneracy and gender chaos. The rituals of eating and the symbols of sex are at the heart of the film. This probably reaches its apotheosis in the sequence where Alfred, Jan, Agnes and Oskar are walking along the beach and a local fisherman, using a horse's head as bait, catches eels that he then offers to Alfred. The sight of the eels emerging from the head is one of the film's most visceral moments, perhaps symbolic of the unsavoury ideology lurking in this society, and Agnes's sickened reaction tips her over into an obsessive madness that begins in an argument with Alfred.

Her hysteria and refusal to eat the eels Alfed has cooked is only calmed by Jan's sexual ministrations but it ultimately leads to Agnes's gorging on eels and fish and a suicide after the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy. Peter O. Amds in Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's The Tin Drum sees this as "a perfect blend of those images that Bakhtin discusses under his 'banquet imagery'... eating, drinking, swallowing, wide-open physical orifices, primarily the mouth and the vagina in childbirth." The film is littered with such images, from Oskar's birth; his own penchant for screaming and shattering glass; the various community feasts and dinners; Agnes's fish-eating insanity, the rather phallic looking eels; and grocer Greff's soliloquy to the "tumescent, luxuriant flesh" of the potato. 

The Tin Drum offers us a Fellini-esque exploration of the rise of Nazism where the central character is ambivalent, destructive, grotesque and immoral and yet, as Naomi Ritter in Art as Spectacle: Images of the Entertainer Since Romanticism points out, "Oskar, the blue eyed dwarf, is both the perfect Aryan and the monster eliminated by the Nazis." His monstrosity is tempered by humanism, one in stark contrast to the lives within the economic and social structures now fertile enough for Nazism to flourish. It boasts an extraordinary performance from twelve year old David Bennent, whose magnetic eyes theaten to hypnotise the viewer from his first appearance in Schlöndorff's cinematic amalgam of the epic, the absurd and the intimate. A compelling, often blackly funny adaptation of what was considerd an unfilmable book, The Tin Drum's themes about generational and ethnic conflict, of cultures shaped by external repressive forces, are part of a film that Stephen Brockmann sees as "intended to demolish the myth of an unblemished, guilt-free beginning to post-war German history." It's not just post-war German history that we should be concerned with here, but that of post-war Western society itself and the nature of the forces that shape our future democratic consciousness.

About the transfer
The Tin Drum looks wonderful in this clean 1080p high definition transfer that retains the 1.66:1 screen ratio. Details of faces, clothes and objects is often gloriously rendered throughout the film and the contrast is robust, suitably inky and thick. The colour palette is captured extremely well, with reds popping out vibrantly amongst the browns, greens and blues and it certainly emphasises the superb, Expressionist cinematography from Igor Luther. It looks sumptuous. The lossless DTS Master HD 5.1 audio is crisp and clear, a great showcase for Maurice Jarre's equally bizarre score. Anyone wanting to upgrade or purchase this for the first time shouldn't be disappointed.
 
Blu-ray Special Features
Director's cut (2:43:12)
This fully restored, 1080p high definition transfer of the film includes 22 minutes of additional scenes that Volker Schlöndorff returned to the film after a Berlin film lab called him to ask him what he wanted to do with the 180, 000 feet of negative stored there. Sifting through the negative he decided to restore four scenes removed from the original cut for a Cannes Classics screening in 2010.
Theatrical cut (2:21:59)
Available on the Blu-ray and available in standard definition on the DVD.
Commentary with Volker Schlöndorff
Detailed and comprehensive audio track with the director that delves thoroughly into the making of the film and its rich tapestry of images and symbolism. He discusses the casting of David Bennent, the production itself, the abandoned sequel and some of the scenes he dropped from the film, including the now reinstated moment where Bebra and Oskar witness the murder of a group of nuns on the Normandy beaches. Well worth a listen. 
Interview with Volker Schlöndorff 2011 (24:13)
Schlöndorff talks in detail about the new cut of the film and how it came about. He discusses the process and emotional impact of returning to the footage and bringing David Bennent and other actors back to loop the original dialogue for some of the restored sequences. You'll learn about the United Artists two hour forty five minute version which they required to be cut to the contracted two and a quarter hour theatrical length. When contacted by the Berlin film lab, he went back to the screenplay and was able to source the missing scenes from the theatrical cut and return much of the footage to the film in what he saw as an essential act of underlining "the locus and focus" of the film.

DVD only Special Features
Volker Schlöndorff on the making of The Tin Drum - Cannes 2001 (8:56)
Schlöndorff discusses the character of Oskar and the medical precendent for young children to stop growing if they suffer a trauma. He recalls that through a contact at Munich medical school he discovered young actor David Bennent, the son of Heinz Bennent (who plays Greff in the film), and whom he would cast as Oskar. He also reflects on the inspiration, for the colour schemes used in The Tin Drum, found in German painter Lindberg and how he incorporated a sense of realism into the film. Finally, much of the interview describes the approach taken by screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière in adapting the Günter Grass book.

Grass apparently described the first draft as "too Cartesian and too rational" and asked Schlondorff and Carrière to consider injecting more irrational moments into the script because he didn't want the audience to believe "that history unfolds in a rational way." Schlöndorff suggests the reason why so much of the book didn't make it into the film and why the last third of the book isn't included is because this process would have resulted in a five-hour long film version. Grass objected to the film concluding with the end of the war in 1945 as he felt it perpetuated the "myth of the zero hour" that suggested that German history literally started from scratch at the end of the war when in reality those that had fought in the war were now bound up within the creation of the Federal Republic.
Volker Schlöndorff on the making of The Tin Drum - October 2001(16:22)
A further interview that covers Schlöndorff's work with Jean-Claude Carrière on adapting the book for the film. Again, he notes that Carrière managed to capture many of the dramatic punchlines of the book and that he also produced a wealth of drawings during the process of scripting. The conversation shifts to Angela Winkler and her portrayal of Oskar's rather strange mother and he also mentions the casting of Polish actors Daniel Olbrychski and Marek Walczewski; Heinz Bennent as the potato seller Greff; Mario Adorf as Alfred Matzerath and Charles Aznavour as the toy shop owner Markus.

The controversial beach hut encounter between a naked Oskar and Maria (which made the film the subject of a protracted 'child obscenity' case in Oklahoma that was eventually settled in 2001) is also briefly covered and Schlöndorff recalls how he had to convince Katharina Thalbach with a series of drawings to demonstrate to her how her modesty would be preserved on screen. The drawings were later instrumental to Schlöndorff's winning of the obscenity trail 20 years later. He highlights the international crew of Italians, Greeks and French that worked on the film, also provides some background to Maurice Jarre's score, to David Bennent's drum-playing lessons and the visual effects used in the film. Finally, he discusses the attack on the Danzig Post Office and how it connects with Grass's own research for the novel.
The original theatrical trailer.
Booklet
Featuring brand new writing on the film by George Lellis and Hans-Bernhard Moeller, authors of Volker Schlöndorff's Cinema: Adaptation, Politics and the "Movie-Appropriate", as well as extracts from Volker Schlöndorff's diary, writing by Jean Claude Carrière and Günter Grass, illustrated with archival stills.

The Tin Drum
1979
Argos Films - Artémis Productions - Bioskop Film - Film Polski Film Agency - Franz Seitz Filmproduktion - GGB-14 - Hallelujah Films - Jadran Film
Arrow Academy Dual Format Blu-ray and DVD Edition / FCD510 / Released 30 January 2012 / Cert: 15 / 1.66:1 OAR / Colour / 1080p / Codec: MPEG-4 AVC Video / DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio - German / Commentary: LPCM Audio English / English subtitles / Region B

On 30 January, the BFI releases a dual format edition of A Bigger Splash (1974) to coincide with the Royal Academy's David Hockney show, The Bigger Picture, which celebrates the artist's fascination with landscape and presents his recent iPad drawings and a series of new films produced using 18 cameras, to be displayed on multiple screens. The 1974 film, directed by Jack Hazan, eschews much of the razzamatazz of the standard biopic or the strict trappings of factual documentary style and produces something that is part fiction, part fact, part documentary and part re-enactment. Its abstraction is perhaps a comment on how David Hockney was (and still is) partly a media construction while he also manipulates, in a very self-aware manner, the slippage between 'being an artist' and 'being himself' both in the public eye and in private.

Hazan, inspired by Hockney's series of double portraits in a catalogue shown to him by partner David Mingay, built the film up over a three year period. Starting in Spring 1971 and following in the wake of Hockney and his entourage, Hazan filmed them whenever time and funding permitted. He even re-mortgaged his own house to finance the film. Many of the sequences you'll see are scripted reconstructions (Hazan 'wrote' the film with Mingay) with Hazan often asking the artist and his friends to create and re-create specific sequences or restructure them to imply another meaning beyond that of the real incidents in Hockney's life. Hockney really didn't hold much truck with Hazan making this film and initially thought it all a bit of a joke, often making it difficult for Hazan to access both his private life and the whirlwind social scene that Hockney was part of. After he'd seen the completed film a distressed Hockney considered paying to have it destroyed, feeling that he had been betrayed and exploited not only by Hazan but by many of his friends.

"... his lover has left him, and he's deeply saddened by this. And that's the plot."

This re-construction/ de-construction aesthetic spreads throughout the film and charts the end of a relationship between Hockney and his lover Peter Schlesinger. It is an exploration of the depression that affected them both and of the effects on Hockney's friends and collaborators, essaying the frustrations that are evident in the production and exhibition of his work and the fortunes of gallery owners and curators such as John Kasmin, whose Kasmin Gallery we see, by the end of the film, was forced to close in 1972.

There are sequences that are fly-on-the-wall observations - for example, Celia and Ossie's fashion show for Quorum at Radley and footage of Andrew Logan's Alternative Miss World contest (in which Derek Jarman fleetingly appears) - mixed with staged material to enable Hazan to shuttle the film back and forth between 1971 and 1974, using this form of analepsis to offer up dissections of Hockney's life and the breakdown of his relationship with artist-model Schlesigner. Indeed, as indicated in Adam Roberts's 2006 DVD interview with Hazan, he filmed Hockney requesting Peter Schlesinger to come over and help him work on the painting 'Sur la Terrasse' and then with his partner David Mingay inadvertently discovered, in the footage they'd shot, the starting point for the film's 'story'.

"I soon realised that (…) Peter was obviously, had been, David's boyfriend. And things had obviously gone wrong. It almost seemed like it was a ploy on David's part just to see him, that he wanted to actually paint him again, just to have him there. Anyway, I went back to the cutting room with my partner. We discussed this, and he said, well, there's the story, there's the conflict: David Hockney, and his lover has left him, and he's deeply saddened by this. And that's the plot." This rejection comes across in the finished sequence, where Schlesinger recreates the pose of the figure in the painting, keeping his back to a self-absorbed Hockney and remaining silent.

Many of Hockney's paintings are restaged throughout the film and as an addition to this aesthetic, Hazan records the creation of Hockney's 'Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)' which he struggled to complete in 1972 after the relationship with Schlesinger had come to an end in 1971. It is itself a construction, a reconstituted memory that Hockney has to put back together after he decides to reject the first canvas he attempts to produce. Even the scene of the first canvas's destruction was a recreation of the original moment, a melodramatic restaging scored to 'Nessun Dorma'.

All this points to a film that pre-empts much of the scripted reality television, or 'dramality' as it has come to be known, that exists today and where acting out storylines planned in advance by producers and directors has become a common practice. The Hills, running on MTV from 2006 to 2010, is often mentioned as a notable example as are the recent The Only Way is Essex (2010 -), Geordie Shore (2011 -) and Desperate Scousewives (2011 -). Back in 1974 this was quite an unusual way to structure what was essentially a piece of documentary film-making and A Bigger Splash is 'dramality' rooted in the US underground film-making culture of the late 1960s and Hazan's own experience as a cinematographer and documentarian. 

The film opens with a telephone ringing, a sound symbolic of the conversations, negotiations and demands that often permeate the film, as Hazan bombards us with press cutting after press cutting, with colour supplements and newspaper coverage about the Hockney milieu all accruing the evidence of the cult of David Hockney, postulating that this has become a reality warped out of shape by saturation media coverage of the artist during the late 1960s and 1970s.

There is a staggered zoom into the the 1967 painting 'A Bigger Splash', a close up of the splash itself suggesting that the end of the relationship with Schlesinger has disrupted the once calm waters that Hockney and his friends enjoyed. The subjects of the film are then treated as 'stars' and named in conjunction with a montage of Hockney's etchings and drawings of his friends, presented as if they were actors. It is a film 'starring David Hockney' and, after Hockney saw a screening of the film in February 1974, even he objected to being categorised as a film star. It underlines one of the film's themes, an attempt to define the limits to which Hockney's self-invention can reach.

After the opening titles, we are told that it is June 1973 and Hockney is in Geneva. Hockney is seen talking to, and describing to us in a very flirtatious manner, handsome American Joe MacDonald, who was part of the Hockney entourage and would, like Schlesinger, model for the artist. In parallel, we switch to Hockney's loyal friend and assistant Mo McDermott waking up and, as we watch him shave, confirming that Hockney had phoned him and told him the relationship with Schlesinger was over. McDermott's observation, "When love goes wrong, there's more than two people suffer" succinctly summarises the film's ambitions as Hazan uncovers the shifting nature of friendships, both platonic and sexual, as they are affected by this bombshell.

It becomes a melodrama in which we see Hockney working through the turmoil of having his Powis Terrace flat in Notting Hill renovated, attempting to overcome his loneliness after the breakup with Schlesinger, and cope with an alienating trip to New York - all filtered through visions of his figurative portraits recreated as tableaux and dream sequences about the paintings of the young men that he observed gathering at the poolsides in LA. Much of the film is structured around a series of conversations, whether two people are facing each other on a couch, sat in a car, or chatting in a bathroom. Domestic spaces are the centre of gossip, contemplation and decision making. Hazan frames them simply, often using a single master shot to observe these moments.

Throughout Hazan does not proselytise about homosexuality and presents such desire in a significantly normalising way, as he recently reminded Little Joe magazine: “In this film our characters are gay and they behave normally - as a heterosexual couple would act. Which was novel to people. Back then, people didn’t know how gay people behaved with each other, even what a gay relationship was.” A Bigger Splash was one of the first British films to emerge after a period in which gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity had either found representation within the American underground film movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, in innovative works by Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol for example, or been tentatively acknowledged as cliched stereotypes in mainstream Hollywood films.

"an art/gay nexus" 

For example, as well as A Bigger Splash's blurring of fiction and reality and its treatment of gay identity, there is a very self-reflexive Warhol-like moment when Hockney sits in his bedroom and watches himself on a closed circuit video camera. As John Wyver observes in his notes to this release, Hazan does pick up on many of the techniques, including fixed, locked off shots of people in domestic settngs, that were "most certainly learned from another group of films... Paul Morrisey's Flesh (1968) and Trash (1970) both produced by Andy Warhol, as well as the later Heat (1972)."

Underground cinema also certainly shared what Richard Dyer refers to as "an art/gay nexus... [where homosexuals were]... half-in, half-out of art circles themselves... [circles] who share their social marginality" and much of A Bigger Splash concerns itself with the superficial worlds of the art dealer, the gallery owner, the artist and the model that Hockney inhabited.

Contemporaneous to Hazan's film were adaptations of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1970), Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band (1970) and the Isherwood inspired Cabaret (1972) and in Europe Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) and Death in Venice (1970), all of which performed variations on the politics of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity in the 1970s. Hazan's film exists tangential to these films and in fact Hockney's friend, curator and art critic Henry Geldzahler, who features in the film, told Hockney that their mutual friend Anthony Page had described A Bigger Splash as 'like a real Sunday, Bloody Sunday.' Early in the film we also see Schlesinger at the Quorum fashion show, sitting in his reserved seat, and where, dressed in a sailor suit with his curly long hair, he looks like Björn Andrésen's Tadzio from Visconti's film.

Although it perhaps doesn't share the visual aesthetics of a Kenneth Anger film or describes gay identity as filtered through Hollywood, there is some commonality in how certain performance codes are used to express it. Jack Babuscio, writing in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, says Hockney: "exhibit[s] a special feeling for performance and a flair for the theatrical... by wit, a well-organised evasiveness, and a preference for the artificial Hockney manages a breakthrough into creativity."

As well as Hockney's 'performance' the film also focuses on the naked male body, whether it's Mo McDermott getting out of bed, Hockney taking a shower or the eroticised poolside, golden hued fantasies of Schlesinger with other young men. The most explicit moment in A Bigger Splash is the sex scene between Schlesinger and another man which was constructed long after the breakup with Hockney and bore no relation to Schlesinger's own personal relationship with photographer Eric Boman. Again, this reconstruction was only possible because Schlesinger had demanded he be paid for his participation in the film, underling the idea that he was an 'actor' in a drama.

According to Hazan in the 2006 interview with Adam Roberts, the sex scene was inserted at a later date into the film and was intended "to introduce a bit of... conflict, if you wish, between the film and the viewer, the film and the audience" as he felt that audiences that had previewed the film "didn't really know these people were gay." He was concerned that the audience could only see the stereotypes of the day, wherein many of the men in the film displayed "effeminate characteristics."

The scene provoked some typically hostile responses from newspapers who simply took the scene on face value as an attempt to spice up, for the gay contingent of the audience, what Alexander Walker in The Evening Standard perceived as a film about "a world that's small and sad." The film faced a difficult time when presented to the censors. It was shown during Critics Week at Cannes in 1974 but was then banned for a short period in Paris and Hazan had to battle with the BBFC who initially were reluctant to certify the film but then granted it an X rating. Even in 1988, Channel 4 made the decision to remove the sex scene for its initial broadcast of the film.

David Thompson gave the film a very positive review in The Times after the Cannes showing and Jack Babuscio was another of the film's few champions and could clearly understand the film's intent: "Hockney responds to his gay 'stigma' by challenging social and aesthetic conventions in life and art, Hazan's concern is to show the various ways in which his subject's private life affects his art – or how art records personal experience and determines our future. Thus, the film relates to the artist's work in much the same way as the paintings do to life."

Hazan's use of the double portraits in the film is an attempt to say something about the relationship between the artist and real life. Scattered throughout are tableaux vivants that mimic several of the double portraits, including the celebrated 'Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy' (Ossie Clark takes the cat to the Tate to see the painting) and one of Henry Geldzahler and his boyfriend, Christopher Scott. Hockney visits the couple in New York and finds them in their apartment in the exact pose they held for the double portrait. Frozen, they do not respond to Hockney's call, perhaps a signal that the artist has become caught in the artifice of his own his self-doubt and self-absorption. Later, in a strange fantasy sequence Peter Schlesinger finds himself in a recreation of 'Beverley Hills Housewife' featuring arts patron Betty Freeman. It's a bizarre, rather unsettling moment, culminating in Schlesinger pressed naked against a window watching a couple tuck into a meal.

Perhaps these encounters with the subjects of his work and the alienating quality of the sequences underlines the film's intense study of a London demi-monde emerging from the final hedonistic years of the 1960s into the grey, unforgiving and more paranoid world of the 1970s. Hazan accompanies this feeling of melancholy with shots of the rather dour, empty streets of Notting Hill and the bustling, anonymous blocks of New York. It's very apt that one scene of Mo McDermott desperately phoning Celia to try and track down the missing Hockney in New York is shot in front of a poster for Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue, a black comedy about an unemployed executive attempting to make sense of life in Manhattan. 

Hockney's entrapment in his own world and a frustration about how he escapes from it (whether he goes to New York or LA to achieve this is debated in the film), accompanied by an austere score from Patrick Gowers, is perhaps A Bigger Splash's most enduring and powerful achievement. It is also a film with a intriguing puzzlebox construction about the real and the unreal, fact and fiction that importantly also paved the way for a British gay cinema that would come to flourish in the early 1980s.  

About the transfer
Shot on 35mm and in Eastmancolour, the 1080p high definition transfer of A Bigger Splash is vivid and colourful. It perhaps doesn't provide copious amounts of depth but it is a solid, detailed picture. This can get very grainy, particularly in the scenes where Hockney is chatting to Celia, a scene where Celia is talking to Mo on the phone and in the orange light of the sex scene, but they are very moody, atmospheric sequences and perhaps deliberately shot as such. However, the paintings, the studio interiors and domestic spaces look very strong and detailed. 

Robust colour is one of the benefits of this transfer with gorgeous reds and blues particularly standing out. Water and reflected light, flesh tones and close ups of faces in the pool sequences look particularly good. Some of Hockney's close ups provide loads of details in his face and clothes. The mono soundtrack is crisp and clear and as much of the film relies on subdued conversation it copes with this well and showcases Gower's score into the bargain. Overall, very good and worth an upgrade to Blu-ray.

Special Features
Love’s Presentation (James Scott, 1966, 25mins)
A fascinating black and white documentary that observes Hockney preparing and drawing the etchings in his Powis Terrace studio to accompany the 1967 publication of 'Poems of Cavafy' by Paul Cornwall-Jones of Editions Alecto. Studying at the RCA in the early 1960s, Hockney was introduced to the work of Greek-Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy and he'd already made several etchings having been inspired by his poems. As we hear and see in the documentary, his travels to Beirut provide the architectural background to a portrait of Cavafy and the rest of the imagery comes from drawings of pairs of young men in his Notting Hill bedroom and from a source he often returns to for his figurative work, male physique magazines. His reason for choosing to illustrate the love poems written by Cavafy is because, "I suppose I know more about love than about history."

James Scott's film (edited by Barney Platts-Mills with whom he co-founded Maya Film Productions, later to produce Bronco Bullfrog and Private Road ) observes Hockey etching into the wax surface of copper plates, dipping them in a bath of acid to bite the lines into the plate, then using aquatint techniques to produce tonal qualities and finally preparing them for high-pressure printing. As well as a fascinating exploration of Hockney using very traditional techniques to produce his fine line illustrations, we hear him on the soundtrack, explaining the methodology but also wandering off tangentially to muse about his own life.

There are some parallels to A Bigger Splash's exploration into his personal aesthetics and his affinity for America where he can get etching plates with plastic backing that speeds up the process and where he bought his camouflage pants in a Jack Frost surplus store in Santa Monica. It's also worth noting that this film and those of Pearce and Hazan often repeat the imagery of Hockney staring full on into the camera, underlining the performative aspects of him 'being' an artist.
Portrait of David Hockney (David Pearce, 1972, 13mins)
A much more abstract piece as Pearce constructs Hockney's daily activity by first observing at odd angles the periphery of life in the flat, the presence of Peter Schlesinger and time in the studio where one of his most evocative works is taking form, 'Mr and Mrs Clark with Percy'. There is a soundtrack dominated by off-screen telephone calls, conversations and musings as the camera takes quick shots of the objects and people in the flat. Schlesinger is seen briefly through the leaves of a potted plant, Hockney is observed working on the painting (and wonders why Ossie Clark chooses to put his cat in the picture rather than his baby).

The film is a fitting companion to Hazan's feature, capturing something again of the milieu in which Hockey worked in the 1970s and the difficulty in separating the personality, work ethic and loneliness of the artist wherein he says off camera (as it frames his blonde hair and owl-like glasses in close up), "you see, the way I look at myself is completely different from the way you look at me." Is he talking to Peter, or someone else, or to us in the audience?
Original film trailer
A very ominous voice over, sounding rather like Richard Burton, promotes the film as a kind of film-noir art thriller. "What makes him run?" it intones gravely about Hockney. "All he wanted was to be left alone to paint" it booms as each of Hockney's associates is paraded to us as a suspect in the collapse of the artist's world. Its pulp fiction aesthetics chime rather well with Hazan's ambiguous feature as it jumps backwards and forwards in time and attempts to pin down Hockney the man and Hockney the artist.
Interview with Director Jack Hazan (2006 - DVD only, 28 mins)
Adam Roberts's excellent and insightful interview with the director that originally appeared on Salvation's 2007 DVD release.
28-page illustrated booklet with essays and film notes
The superb booklet contains a John Wyver essay that explores further the way reality is manipulated in the film, the comprehensive Philip French review from Sight and Sound, a revealing biography of Jack Hazan from Michael Brooke and further notes on Love’s Presentation by William Fowler and archive notes on Portrait of David Hockney.

A Bigger Splash
Buzzy Enterprises and Circle Associates Ltd.
UK 1974
BFI Dual Format Edition / BFIB1137 / Released 30 Janaury 2012 / Cert 15 / Colour / English language, optional English subtitles / English PCM Mono 48k 16-bit / 105 mins / Original aspect ratio 1.85:1 / Region free

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year is Michael Truman's Go to Blazes (1962) and the London Comedy Film Festival will be giving a special screening at the BFI on January 29th, the day before its first ever release on DVD. Described by StudioCanal as a 'classic British comedy' and 'a lost gem', it emerged in the wake of a number of similar films, often attempting to capture something of the Ealing spirit, which cast the criminal class as rebellious heroes, forever seeking ways of continuing their habitual behaviour and subverting the establishment. In this genre we can see Go to Blazes as a companion to comedy films like Too Many Crooks (1959), Two Way Stretch (1960), The Wrong Arm of the Law (1962), Crooks in Cloisters (1963) and The Big Job (1965).

Go to Blazes was a production made at Elstree by Associated British Picture Corporation. ABPC not only made films at British studios but it also had the power to distribute them through the partnership it had with Warners and the ABC chain of cinemas which they owned. By the late 1950s, its film production was on the wane and it had turned its attention to television production at Elstree. Through its commercial television arm, ABC, it would go on to produce The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Avengers among many others and would eventually merge with Rediffusion to form Thames Television. Similarly to Rank, ABPC produced or co-financed a number of low budget films per year using a contract system of actors. It had its most notable successes in the early 1950s with The Dam Busters (1954) and Ice Cold in Alex (1958) but by the end of the decade was concentrating on comedies and 'teen' films.

"I'll certainly never watch The Sensorites in quite the same way again," muses Toby Hadoke on Looking for Peter, a gem of a documentary that accompanies this month's release of the rather unloved Doctor Who serial from William Hartnell's first year in the role. In light of the backstory that emerges from Hadoke's research then certainly the details of writer Peter R. Newman's early life, including his wartime role as pilot and parachutist and experiences in Burma, add contextual colour to the themes of his Doctor Who story.

A former actor and director in repertory theatre, and writer for radio, his route to working on Doctor Who began with the television play Yesterday's Enemy, sadly no longer available in the archive, which was transmitted by the BBC on 14th October 1958. It featured a distinguished cast including Gordon Jackson, Barry Foster, Lee Montague, Burt Kwouk, Alex Scott and Terence Brook and tapped into Newman's war experiences, exploring the rather taboo subject of British war crimes. Newman explored the moral complexities of war that affected both sides of the conflict as British troops take over a jungle village in Burma and shoot innocent villagers in an attempt to 'persuade' a Japanese informer to surrender. However, when the Japanese recapture the village, the British commander and his troops are subjected to equally barbarous methods to force them to give up vital information to their enemies.