Prolific documentarian Mark Cousins has dedicated himself to foregrounding underseen films from around the globe, especially those directed by women sidelined from cinematic history. in some of his best-known work, including the fifteen-hour The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011), and fourteen-hour Women Make Film (2018). The Northern Irish filmmaker’s latest feature documentary A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, which had its world premiere in the Crystal Globe competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, celebrates the unique gifts and unconventional lifestyle of an abstract painter, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, who he argues was underappreciated in her time as a significant visionary figure of 20th century British modern art. Cousins offers a running voiceover commentary punctuated with personal anecdotes, musing with his typical sensitivity and infectious enthusiasm on ways of seeing in general, what we can discern about the manner of perceiving the world and creative processes of Barns-Graham, who had synaesthesia, and personal aspects of her biography. Tilda Swinton lends her indomitable presence, voicing excerpts from the artist’s diaries. The film is quietly captivating, bringing another lesser-known image-maker into the historical constellation Cousins has built up beyond the traditional canon. As with all his work, it is also, as its title suggests, a self-aware masterclass in how images can be read, and how they enrich our world.
A Sudden Glimpse is divided into loose chapters with titles such as “From a Distance” and “Willie’s Brain,” as it charts Barns-Graham’s life, with Cousins positioning the keen traveller’s excursion to climb the Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland in 1949 as a before-and-after moment of epiphany in her search for inspiration. The creak of the glacier’s ice is part of the beautifully evocative sound design. Few women at the time ventured up this extreme terrain. It changed Barns-Graham’s inner world, becoming the focus of her subsequent paintings, a number of which Cousins considers in lively stretches of poetic analysis. Abundant still photos of her life also provide occasion for reflection. Cousins hones in on details, pointing out then undercutting assumptions. An initial picture of the subject from her later years shows a woman in “old lady glasses” and a “sensible overcoat” — before a forceful, offbeat personality and singular talent is revealed. Cousins is always aware that images are as much sites for our projections as they are evidence for our learning; that prejudice and a failure to pay attention means the most valuable qualities are frequently overlooked. The young Barns-Graham was regarded as a dramatic beauty but described herself as a “lone wolf,” and had a cruelly domineering father who kept a whip at the dinner table and condemned her artistic ambitions. She soon became adept at escaping restrictions, and after studying art at Edinburgh moved away from Scotland and her family to St Ives in 1940, where she became part of its pioneering group of modernists.
In an industry prejudiced against taking women seriously, Barns-Graham used her nickname “Willie,” and often left uncorrected people’s assumption on paper she was a man to improve her work’s sales prospects. Later in life, she was unfairly considered an “also ran” of the modernist movement, according to her biographer Lynne Green, though the deep appreciation with which she and Cousins discuss the vitality of the artist’s vast body of painting convey its power. “A life of brain-building” is how Cousins sums up her time on the planet, with her one marriage to a younger architect over by 1960, and her conceptual quest for freedom and harmony of expression the centre of a documentary with both feminist credentials and charming originality. The shrinking of the glacier in an age of climate change is a motif, reminding us of the transient nature of time and more destructive human tendencies, against which Cousins seems determined to safeguard flashes of creative brilliance by refreshing our collective memory.
Director, Screenwriter, Cinematographer: Mark Cousins
Editing: Timo Langer
Music: Linda Buckley
Sound: Ali Murray
Producers: Adam Dawtrey, Mary Bell
Production company: BOFA Productions
Sales: Reservoir Docs
Festival: Karlovy Vary (Crystal Globe Competition)
In English
88 minutes
