Digital Video magazine — May 2012
A Bigger Picture: Documenting David Hockney’s Creative Vision

Award-winning documentary film director Bruno Wollheim brought his acclaimed 2009 documentary David Hockney: A Bigger Picture to U.S. audiences recently, with screenings and discussions at cultural institutions around the country, including the Smithsonian, Columbia, Yale and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The tour coincided with a major exhibition of Hockney’s most recent work at the London Royal Academy of Arts, which opened in January and ended April 9. As part of the RA exhibit, Wollheim’s film is an intimate portrait of one of Britain’s greatest living artists as he returns at the age of 68 to his native Yorkshire to paint its landscape. Filmed over the course of three years, A Bigger Picture, now available on DVD from First Run Pictures, is an unprecedented record of a major artist at work, providing background and context for the exhibit’s giant landscape paintings and multi-screen installations.

Wollheim first came to know Hockney in 1989, while working on the BBC series Artists Journeys. “When I first came to Los Angeles to see David, he was working on a series of car drives,” Wollheim describes. “He would create soundtracks for various 90-minute drives, and take friends, one at a time, in his car to experience these landscapes set to music. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could sell, it was just this extraordinary theatrical experience that he organized, and took a lot of trouble over.”

Wollheim filmed Hockney again for his 2003 film, Double Portrait, creating a psychological portrait of the artist based on his portrait sessions with various couples he knew. “He quite liked the film, much to my surprise, because I thought it painted rather a bleak portrait of him,” Wollheim says.

Based on the success with Double Portrait, Hockney invited Wollheim to Los Angeles again to begin filming a biography project that would eventually become A Bigger Picture. In 2005, able to travel for the first time in years, Hockney made plans to return to the U.K., and asked Wollheim to accompany him and film him as he performed his plein air landscape experiments. This would be the first time the filmmaker would be allowed to film the artist while he worked, and Wollheim jumped at the chance.

“Initially I used the Sony DSR-PD150, because that’s what I had been using in Los Angeles when we still thought we were filming a biography,” Wollheim details. “In early ’05 I switched to the Sony HVR-Z1‎, which was a much easier camera to use with significant improvements in color. The Z1 has a better chip, and the focus is easier to deal with. With the PD150, it was difficult to know if you were in focus, so you couldn’t zoom into a detail of a painting and zoom back out and know you had your subject in focus.” (Read full story…)