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.

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.

There's a moment in Silent Running, Douglas Trumbull's directorial debut of 1972, when the main character Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), now alone on the space freighter Valley Forge, contemplates his situation and idly glances at his Smokey the Bear Conservation Pledge. And that's not a euphemism. The Pledge, a poster from a 1954 campaign, is pinned up on the wall of his room. It features Smokey, the mascot of the US Forest Service, who became a children's favourite through campaigns, cartoons, books and toys and asked successive generations to look after the forests and animals.

That moment is symbolic of Lowell's desire to return to a simpler, more innocent life, one where mankind and nature live in harmony. One where mankind hasn't devastated the Earth and shot the remains of the planet's fragile ecosystem into deep space. Daft as it may sound, but Lovell wants to be a child running through the forests of Earth again, protecting the environment as all good little boys and girls were asked to do by Smokey. During his darkest moments of self-doubt, he even imagines himself back on a restored Earth.

The 1960s, the 'Sixties', the 'swinging Sixties' are all such overworked, resampled, redited constructions that it is now becoming harder and harder to understand the real implications of that titular decade. As Gerard DeGroot so succinctly puts it in The Sixties Unplugged: "Nostalgia for the Sixties is strong because so much did not survive. Revolution was never on the cards. The door of idealism was opened briefly and then slammed shut, for fear of what might enter."

Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood's film Magic Bus examines one of those brief moments of idealism and mythology, when writer Ken Kesey decided to take a group of men and women, his 'Merry Pranksters', across America, from West to East in a 1939 International Harvester school bus and to the shining beacon of post-war American optimism, the 1964 World's Fair. As much as the film chimes with DeGroot's claim that the door of idealism closed, the film is also about the opening of those Huxlian 'doors of perception' as it traces Kesey's involvement in drug trials of LSD and how, as former Kesey associate and 'prankster' Robert Stone reveals, this "psychic liberation turned out to have been developed by CIA researchers as a weapon of the Cold War."