LOVE’S PRESENTATION AKA FOURTEEN POEMS OF CP CAVAFY CHOSEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID HOCKNEY
UK | 1966 | black and white | 27 mins
Credits:
Production Company: Maya Film Productions Ltd
Sponsor: Allan Power
Cinematographer: Adam Barker-Mill
Editor: Barney Platts-Mills
Commentary: Jasia Reichardt, David Hockney
Etchings published by Editions Alecto
David Hockney had already built a significant reputation for himself when James Scott made this exploratory documentary. Leaving Bradford for London and the Royal College of Art in 1959, he quickly began exhibiting widely in fashionable, critical circles, and infiltrated other media. He danced an energetic frug in Ken Russell’s BBC TV documentary Pop Goes the Easel* (1962) in the Monitor strand, and later appeared as an ace face, offering thoughts and comments, in Peter Whitehead’s ode to the swinging capital, Let’s All Make Love in London (1967).
Scott’s film, by way of contrast, removes the artist from the hype of the time and implicitly complicates Hockney’s reputation as a Pop artist, a label he himself resisted anyway. The book of 14 poems by Cavafy that Hockney has selected for illustration here combines the processes of mass reproduction, by way of a printing press with the more traditional, artisanal processes of aquatinting, which Hockney discusses, and systematically demonstrates. Printing plates are prepared, lines are inscribed carefully, and then the images are fixed and washed by way of numerous baths.
In keeping with much of James Scott’s work, process and an openness to reflection are pushed to the forefront. Hockney, for example, speaks over the film, explaining the processes of etching and aquatinting, but he also comments anecdotally on the footage, highlighting that he is in fact looking at the film in much the same way we are. ‘I’m just wiping dust off the wax there,’ he says and he later makes light-hearted remarks about his trousers when they change suddenly; an unusual moment (or moments – it happens more than once) in a sequential, illustrative narrative that otherwise flows seamlessly. Also, film is reproducible, like an artist print, and Love’s Presentation implicitly highlights this, raising questions about its own status as an art object.
Love’s Presentation was bought by the British Council for international touring but certain things in the work were considered inappropriate for such a body to support, however, and an alternative cut was manufactured (this can be seen on the BFI DVD and Blu-ray release of A Bigger Splash (1974)). The point of contention was the film’s references to homosexuality which, prior to the 1967 Sexual Offences Act was of course still criminalised. Cavafy’s poems describe a gay relationship and Hockney is himself gay. The alternative cut saw the removal of a sequence where we see many of the finished illustrations accompanied by David’s voice reading the Cavafy poem. The censoring of these aspects was ironic given the name of Scott’s intended film – Love’s Presentation – and so the edited version circulated to British embassies all over the world was Fourteen Poems of CP Cavafy Chosen and Illustrated by David Hockney. It would seem that elements of Hockney’s personality and identity were not considered permissible, despite his visibility and fame.
Love’s Presentation is a tightly constructed, illustrative documentary that brilliantly complements the printing processes that it depicts. James Scott would go onto make many other imaginative documentaries, and shortly followed with the brilliant Richard Hamilton (1969).
– William Fowler
William Fowler is Curator of Artists’ Moving Image, BFI National Archive.
