MOVIE REVIEW : Hockney’s ‘Grand’ Tour

“A Day on the Grand Canal With the Emperor of China”--beginning today for two days at the Nuart--is a film about painted waters, surfaces and perspectives. And, perhaps in ways director Philip Haas and writer-narrator David Hockney don’t always plan, it’s a demonstration of the adventure of painting, the humanity of art.

In the film, the screen frame encloses, at various times, Hockney himself, two Chinese silk scrolls (one dating from about 1698 and the other from 1770) and a Renaissance painting, Canaletto’s 1763 “Capriccio: Plaza San Marco Looking South and West.”

Hockney takes us on a journey along the earlier 72-foot-long silk scroll painting, “The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour,” painted by Wang Hui and his assistants.

As Wang’s flat surface--dominated by black lines, flattened perspective and simple colors--gradually unrolls from right to left, we duplicate the emperor’s itinerary. We pass through river-side towns that have put on all their festive finery and bunting. We drift through a bustle of life--from bonsai tree gardens to private mansions, to streets clogged with passers-by to “mom and pop” dumpling shops--under bridges, past fields and all along the wave-dimpled canal. Finally, we sight the emperor’s barge docking in a maze-streeted city, greeted by a beneficent throng of robed dignitaries. The emperor has a gentle smile on his face--as well he might, after such a tour.

Hockney regards Wang’s work as a neglected masterpiece. And it obviously is. But another item on his agenda may prove harder to swallow: a general theological and philosophical attack on the conventional notion of perspective, linking Renaissance painting to imperialism and militarism.

Now, possibly, devotees of Canaletto might snobbishly dismiss Wang Hui. And indeed, the later silk scroll--another southern inspection tour by another emperor, that was painted after Western missionaries influenced China--is markedly inferior, comparatively lifeless.

But does it follow that the vanishing-point in a painting is philosophically related to a cannoneer’s gun-sight, measuring some Chinese wall to blow a hole through? Sometimes, the more argumentative and exclusivistic theories are what tend to drain humanity out of art. Academicism can be more killing than Michelangelo or Raphael, whom Hockney seems to see symbolically stalking their preys--with Da Vinci engineering the weaponry--while Wang Hui and his friends, all unaware, drift blissfully along the river of peace, unbedeviled by missionaries and museums.

Hockney is a droll, perceptive, often fascinating lecturer, with a manner reminiscent of the late Christopher Isherwood’s mix of quiet precision and bluntness. But why pit one group of painters against another--and grant more destructive potential to the evil daubers of the Renaissance? Who knows, after all, what the emperor was really smiling at that day?

Showing with “A Day on the Grand Canal” is Hiroshi Teshigahara’s lovely--and nearly narrationless--documentary, “Antonio Gaudi,” about the eccentric and sportive Spanish architect.