'Hockney' is among the movies that matter

In the Movies That Matter series at the Panida. “Hockney” probes what makes the artist David Hockney tick.

Randall Wright’s docu-portrait of David Hockney, arguably one of Britain’s greatest living artists, the films explores how he also become the modern painter most associated with Los Angeles? He is a likable, engaging and undemanding.

“Hockney” is an attractive introduction to the man and to his work. He had a great experimental curiosity, and Hockney has used fax machines, color photocopiers, iPhones and iPads to create art. It is fascinating. Made with considerable cooperation from the artist, who will turn 79 in July, including access to his personal archive of photographs and film, “Hockney” lets us hear from the man’s friends, listens to theories about what drives him, and most of all shows us his art in all its fecund diversity.

The film was a reminder of the thrilling boldness and scale of Hockney’s work, from his pop-art classic like “A Bigger Splash” from 1967 to his colossal landscape “Bigger Trees Near Warter” in 2007. The picture of his mother emerges from this film as one of his most striking portraits, with the great china-blue eyes and bony, gnarled hands that are abstractions, more like tree branches.

There are hints at a loneliness in Hockney himself. But this film does not reflect deeply on any pain in Hockney’s heart; it only acknowledges it in the sense that the pain has now subsided and been safely absorbed into what we understand to be the value of his work.

Perspective is tyranny. That is why he was attracted to the collages, and to the bendy “panorama” photos you can take on your iPhone with a steady, sweeping movement. It’s an engaging and talkative film, and Hockney is now a cheerful, grandfatherly figure, and an object lesson in taking the boy out of Bradford, and not the other way around.

The film is showing in the Panida Little Theater on Friday, June 3, and Saturday, June 4, at 7 p.m.