A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things; Film Review by Izzy Sieveking

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things- film review With a recent cohort of female painters and printmakers exhibiting their work at the Barns, it's fitting that our May film should be A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things (2024). From the passionate documentarian Mark Cousins- with 14–15-hour long homages to filmmakers on his CV- this more cinema-friendly piece brings to life the story of Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, a pivotal yet underappreciated figure in British modernist art. Again, this screening is of especial interest to the Barns community as Matilda Heydon (curator of the current Mary Webb exhibition) is archivist for the WBG Trust in Edinburgh. Proving what documentary can do, and giving Barns-Graham the exposure she deserves, this is a film to be interpreted as both fact and art.

A powerful yet charmingly intimate narration by Cousins himself sets the ground for his investigation into Barns-Graham's obscurity. He uses the poetic documentary form, where abstract images and cinematography take place over 'the truth' or a filmmaker's argument, to situate us within Barns-Graham's life. A series of still photographs of an elderly, bespectacled woman clambering over rock pools and smiling good-heartedly for a presumed holiday shot invite assumptions about what kind of person this is. So at odds with the youthful Barns-Graham looking straight at the camera, the film's recurring image, that it feels like a confronting exercise in ageism and sexism, those obstacles that female creatives (in any field) know well. Not letting this unfortunate fact overshadow his project, Cousins instead creates an archive of Barns-Graham, drawing surprising comparisons to photography, film and even our relationships. A dire memory of her father welding a whip at the dining table (created through a period film clip) suggests that gender was one battle and art her resilience. To recreate her move from Scotland to Cornwall as an art student, Cousins shoots from within a moving train. He even learns to see the world as she did, joining shots of unrelated objects in the way that Barns-Graham found unity, reminding me of the Soviet innovation of film montage (creating meaning through editing). With editor Timo Langer, raw, unedited footage of the public making their way around the St Ives coast transform into the pastel beach scenes of Barns-Graham's paintings.

​Image courtesy of the BFI. 

​Key to Barns-Graham's work was her synesthesia, whereby one sensory experience triggers another. In film studies, we learnt about this through colour- the universal association of danger with red, blue with sadness for instance. Barns-Graham's interpretation of the natural world found order in chaos, symmetry in nature and associations in pattern. For the mathematics averse (yours truly), animation is a welcome feature of the documentary. The rust squares of 1964's 'Cinders' shuffle across the screen, whereas granite lines recreate works like 1978's 'Glacier Fields' in front of our eyes. Through the rubble, as you might say, of orderly patterns of brick and square shapes emerged her defining fascination with glacial landscapes. The name of the film itself is her reflection upon seeing Grindelwald's Alps in the 40's (if there's one thing missing from this gender-informed film, it's more about her travels across Italy in the following years), marking the point Wilhelmina's art shifted into a focus on glacial rock formations, the subject of which she is associated today. 

Recall the blues and greens of many Suffolk-made greetings cards (rather than the house pink)? Or, how those colors are universally applied to the sky and land? That's a possible influence from the St Ives School of Art, of which Barns-Graham was a member from the 1950s. Although they didn't formally recognize themselves as such, this still makes Barns-Graham's omission from modern art history more questionable. As the film rightly points out, the 70's women's liberation movement should have done more to raise the profile of her work. Among famed actress Tilda Swinton reading from Barns-Graham's notes, we hear personal testimonies on her refusal to conform to the standards of the art world, like friend and historian Lynne Greene remembering her as " a bit combative...she didn't know how to work the system". What system was it, exactly, that Barns-Graham didn't know how to work? Was it her beauty, acknowledged by these accounts, that overshadowed her artistic potential? Competition from male artists who envied her perspective? Yet Barns-Graham never did conform, continuing to see beauty and symmetry where she stood. The glimmer of water over pebbles, the contrasting mountain ranges of Orkney and Scotland, even the half-moon shape found in her St Ives paintings- all of this led to a vast body of work that the film allows to roll, almost endlessly, one after the other.

​This is a deeply sensory film, with operatic music, animated brushstrokes and striking portraiture staying true to the feel of a contemporary essay film. Cousins invites the audience- art critics or not- for more than a mere 'glimpse' into another forgotten artist. A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things raises new questions about the relevancy of female art, but it also leaves the hopeful impression that, like the lines of rock formations, Barns-Graham's legacy will endure.