How Cinema Can Do Justice to Overlooked Women Artists

When making a biographical documentary film about the life and work of an artist, if you wish to cater to the cinephile audience of the festival circuit and not only the television/streaming viewers, you must avoid as much as possible the clichés of the genre, such as the talking head expert intervention and the voice-over delivering essential data on the person and the times. And, equally important, you must assume the first-person perspective. The Crystal Globe-winning A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is a cinematic biography of the painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004), one of the leading women in twentieth-century British art, as much as it is a film about Mark Cousins discovering and trying to understand Willie’s world (she would hide her gender under that nickname, presumably hoping for better prospects in a male-dominated field). If we are open to fully accepting the auteurist subjectivity, then, for instance, a subplot involving the director’s doubts regarding the authenticity of a Barns-Graham painting bought at auction and gifted to him by his partner is not a futile digression but a significant stage of his journey. And so is the episode of the Willie-themed immersive art installation opened by Cousins in Edinburgh in 2022.

The Northern Irish/Scottish filmmaker opens the first chapter (“From a Distance”) of his latest work by challenging us, once more, to look beneath the surface, so as to grasp what lies behind the appearance of an old lady posing for a vacation photo. Who was this woman, Cousins rhetorically asks, who could casually associate elephants, rocks, and socks, based on their colour, as Willie did in her diaries (fragments from which are voiced off-screen by Tilda Swinton)? As revealed by art historian Lynne Green, author of a major monograph on Barns-Graham, the painter had synaesthesia, which, combined with her very structured mind (for example, she developed her own system of connecting letters and colours), informed her unique vision.

The middle chapter (“The Climb”) provides the film’s pivotal moment, equivalent to the point of no return for the protagonist of a fictional work. One day in May 1949, Willie, an unlikely mountaineer (she suffered from weakness of the lungs throughout her life), hiked to the top of the Grindelwald glacier in the Swiss Alps (Cousins resorts to a reenactment scene designed to prompt us to contemplate the glacier—shot by the director with ultra-wide-angle lenses—through her eyes). It was, as the director argues, an epiphany that would drastically change Willie’s art. This third chapter suggestively ends with the appearance on the screen of the film’s title (also extracted from the painter’s diaries).

Cousins spares no effort to distance himself from standard documentary storytelling. When alluding to Willie’s rich and strict father, who disapproved of his daughter’s artistic career, Cousins inserts a short fragment from Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the psychological thriller made by Alfred Hitchcock (one of his all-time favourite directors, and the subject of his previous film), thus encouraging spectators to identify Willie with Teresa Wright. Animated sequences have become quite common in today’s documentaries, but passages from classic fiction films are rare. Towards the end, when recalling his aforementioned multi-screen installation, Cousins produces a noteworthy split-screen dialogue between a young Willie and an aged Barns-Graham, which would be repudiated by documentary purists. The film bursts with ingenious solutions, ensuring a compelling viewing experience. However, the director never loses sight of his initial goal—that is, to better understand Barns-Graham’s world. For instance, Cousins glances into the painter’s spiritual life influencing her art.

Along with the implied gender disparity, the director’s discourse tackles, without stressing or lecturing, several other topics that are relevant today, such as neurodiversity, ageing, and climate change. A stimulating portrait of a “genius by accumulation” (Cousins applies Walter Pater’s formula), A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is an essayistic documentary that fascinates and does justice to the artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.

Mihai Fulger
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2024