Writer and Director: Mark Cousins
In approaching the reputation and legacy of modernist painter, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, film-maker Mark Cousins makes it clear that conventional story-telling will not do. A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is a textural, emotive exploration of an artist who he calls – and with good reason – a “forgotten visionary”. Barns-Graham exhibited; she lived and worked in St. Ives at the same time as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, but her name threatened to disappear entirely in the later 20th century.
Cousins not only details the development of Barns-Graham’s career, but lets us observe her progress for ourselves. In the most successful part of his documentary, Cousins’ narration falls silent and we are presented with a montage of her work including an extraordinary, energetic last phase. The paintings come alive with bands of colour. The art world’s dismissal of her as an “also-ran” becomes all the more astonishing.
The structure of the film continually adjusts our perceptions of the elderly artist. She is born into minor Scottish gentry, but fits in well with the working-class community in St. Ives. Barns-Graham travels and explores the world around her: a pivotal experience occurs when she climbs the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland. The colours and textures of the glacial environment – brilliantly captured by Cousins – stay with Barns-Graham for the rest of her life. Her work becomes an obsessive chasing of abstract shapes and silhouettes. She returns to these themes again and again. It is a moment of artistic reckoning.
Cousins’ film-making takes on a unique rhythm in A Sudden Glimpse: we have snapshots (Barns-Graham’s youthful beauty is irresistible) along with longer, considered passages of film. The combination works: A Sudden Glimpse delivers a great deal of biographical detail but it never feels heavy. Cousins’ close camera work on the same environments that Barns-Graham saw, offers a suggestion of the colours and shapes that inspired her. The wealth of textures echo Barns-Graham’s work. She never went with the obvious: during her travels in Italy, it wasn’t the frescoes that she came to see, but the landscape.
Mark Cousins really understands his subject: in discussing her neurodiversity (she experienced synaesthesia), the importance and significance of colour for her is illuminated through an exploration of previously-unseen notebooks. The film also makes use of Barns-Graham’s diaries – voiced by Tilda Swinton – and we have a parallel narration in the artist’s own words. Describing herself as “looking for different answers”, it is disappointing (but predictable) that her reputation begins to recede in the 1970’s.
Cousins’ suggests that Barns-Graham is a “genius by accumulation”, in the vein of Raphael and Rilke, and it’s hard to argue with that. Barns-Graham’s style is indicative of an artist who never switched off: always observing, always taking note. Sudden Glimpses to Deeper Things not only examines Barns-Graham’s creative process, but makes wider points about the importance of having that space to think and build. Cousins’ film isn’t just a portrait of the artist, but full of political persuasion. Barns-Graham met with resistance at every level, but the work still stands.
A Sudden Glimpse of Deeper Things is in UK and Ireland cinemas 18 October 2024.
