A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things
The documentarian Mark Cousins is at his finest with this study of the undervalued abstract artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.
Image courtesy of Conic.
There have in recent times been a number of very able documentaries about women artists among them Kusama: Infinity (2018) and Beyond the Visible: Helma af Klint (2019). In the same category and quite possibly the best of them is this new work from Mark Cousins, a celebration of the talent of the Scottish painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham who liked to be known as Willie. Just as his films about cinema are born of a personal passion, so too this endeavour to give wider prominence to an artist who deserves more limelight than she has received came about because of the strong response that Willie's art has brought out in Cousins. The result is a film that counts among the best that he has yet given us.
I came to this documentary with no knowledge of Willie who lived from 1912 to 2004 and who, having moved down from Scotland (she was born in St. Andrews), would become a noted member of the artistic community that thrived in Cornwall at St. Ives most notably in the mid-20th century. This film touches on the main details of her life but is first and foremost a work about her art which is approached through the appreciation of it by Mark Cousins himself. As so often in his own work, Cousins is a key presence in it in that his voice-over comments are a major feature. Indeed, it could be said that here his gifts as a critic are being utilised in a very special way for he is reporting on the interaction between her art and his own sensitivities just as a critic does when reporting on a film. But in this case the response - admiring, analysing, explaining – is one that is totally positive since he sees no downsides.
In its earlier stages Willie’s art included pictures of St. Ives which, however individual and stylised, were relatively representational. However, her work soon turned more abstract as is illustrated by what is to be seen in her notebooks. Cousins shows them to us as he explains Willie’s remarkable interest in the use of colour proportionality. This part of the film comes in a section entitled Willie’s Brain which refers to her synesthesia. If full understanding of this is far from easy, what is immediately apparent is the degree of satisfaction that one can get from Willie’s handling of colour. The next development in her art came out of a visit that she made in 1949 to the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland where her eyes were opened not by looking up but by looking down and responding to what she could sense as existing meaningfully within the ice. Cousins calls this her Alpine Epiphany and, having illustrated the climb itself, he goes on in a section entitled Infected to show what was ignited in her there and led on to so many subsequent works both drawings and paintings. They are featured in a montage taken from what she produced between 1970 and 1994 and here it is Linda Buckley’s sensitive music score which takes over from Cousins’s spoken words and plays its expressive part in aiding us to find our way into images that are firmly in the category of modern art.
Three voices are featured in this film since we have Tilda Swinton contributing by speaking Willie’s words while her biographer Lynne Green adds her own comments. Yet the fact remains that the viewpoint is always essentially that of Mark Cousins since even the choice of Buckley as composer reflects his taste while the fine photography is largely by Cousins himself and adds to our sense of what he wants to communicate about Willie. In total there are five distinct sections in the film and both the first and the last are entitled From a Distance. The first is a gentle introduction which, incorporating photographs of Willie herself, leads Cousins to speculate on what we can deduce about her from these images and what we may in reality be imposing on them. But, if the interpretations stem from Cousins, these are personal insights that can be used by the viewer as an invitation to further their own understanding of Willie’s art. We are led into this by the familiar mellifluous tones of the filmmaker’s voice and his great gift for words yields here something more poetic than ever before.
The final section sketches in Willie’s later years but also incorporates material linked to an exhibition at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket which included a multi-screen installation. Indeed, Cousins builds on that with a climactic sequence in which he imagines the older Willie conversing with her younger self. It involves the use of four split screen images and proves to be the film’s one real misstep. It comes across as too tricksy by far and while pondering afresh on what truly happened on the glacier in 1949 it fails to find any clearer answers then have been suggested earlier. But for the rest this is a great example of how one artist (for Cousins is artist as well as critic) can throw light on another. Even so I will end with a quibble and that concerns the film’s title. It appears to derive from actual words of Willie’s but for no clear reason Cousins has very slightly modified those words although the original phrase as spoken here by Swinton had a more natural flow: this film should be called A Sudden Glimpse into Deeper Things.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring the voices of Mark Cousins, Tilda Swinton and Lynne Green.
Dir Mark Cousins, Pro Mary Bell and Adam Dawtrey, Screenplay Mark Cousins, Ph Mark Cousins, Gemma Thorpe and Andy Phillipson, Ed Timo Ranger, Music Linda Buckley.
BofA Productions-Conic.
88 mins. UK. 2024. UK Rel: 18 October 2024. Cert. PG.
