Documentarian and cinephile extraordinaire Mark Cousins’s new film tells the enthralling story of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, a post-war modernist artist who was born in Scotland in 1912 and worked in Cornwall. Cousins knows many of his viewers will come to his film with no knowledge of this relatively under-the-radar British artist, so he makes a film that reflects and displays her art – and is in itself a glowing tribute to her work.
A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is as alive as its subject’s work was to physical texture, geometric form, angles, lines and colour. Cousins lingers on Barns-Graham’s notebooks, filled with coloured grids structured according to her obsessive mathematical calculations. Narrated mostly by the filmmaker himself, his curiosity about her brain, which he refers to throughout, helps him investigate her work more closely, and bring it into his own filmmaking. At one point, for instance, he frames his computer screen from a side angle whose one-point perspective Barns-Graham would have been proud of.
The film spans her life chronologically (she died in 2004 at 91) – paying attention to her early work in St Ives, visiting and touchingly re-framing the very scenes she painted. Access to the artist’s archive allows Cousins to intercut, beautifully, between his own footage and old photographs. He creates a continuity between her work and his image, which brings her work into the present, to his audience.
The real hero of this film is the artist herself
But the fulcrum of the film – and of Barns-Graham’s life – was her ‘encounter’ (Cousins’s words) in 1949 with Switzerland’s Grindelwald Glacier. To her, this formidable mass of ice symbolised the meeting of solidity and transparency, allowing for ‘a sudden glimpse into much deeper things’. The epiphany galvanised Barns-Graham – she made more than a hundred paintings inspired by the glacier. Even 40 years on, she’d continue evoking it in her brushstrokes. Cousins spins the glacier into metaphor: a glass through which the artist was attempting to see the world more clearly. ‘Her brain-machine,’ he says in one of many succinct and insightful metaphors, ‘was ready for ignition’.
To add an extra note of grace, Tilda Swinton gives voice to Barns-Graham’s writings and thoughts. But the real hero of this film is the artist herself, and her meticulous, endlessly striving paintings and drawings. They’re elevated and given propulsion by Cousins’ meticulous, fascinating film.
In UK cinemas Fri Oct 18.