Not for the very first time in his filmmaking profession, Northern Irish documentarian Mark Cousins starts his most current work by providing the audience with a banal image, and persuasively talking us into a reconsideration. The photo is an average trip photo of British artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in her seventies or eighties, dressed for a day's sightseeing in a practical raincoat, not forecasting any specific halo of creative genius. Cousins' quizzical narrative contemplates her present, her clothing, her conveniently normal aura, and questions how simple these information make her– in a world tailored versus even palpably remarkable ladies– to neglect. A winningly discursive, frequently lyrical valentine to Barns-Graham and her oeuvre, “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things” intends to draw eyes towards her angular modernist analyses of nature at its most tranquil and extreme, and train them to see the subversive soul revealed therein.
Premiering in the primary competitors at the Karlovy Vary celebration, where it won the leading reward from Christine Vachon's jury, this is amongst the more broadly attractive function docs to date from the respected Cousins– bringing the very same stimulated interest and artist-to-artist compassion that identifies his cinema-focused work (especially his “Story of Film” series) to a fine-arts topic who isn't precisely a home name. Even that relative obscurity operates in Cousins' favor, nevertheless: “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things” signs up with a current wave of documentary and significant movies fixated woman artists previously ignored in pop culture (amongst them “Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint,” “Kusama: Infinity” and “Maudie”) in a cumulative effort to change and broaden a patriarchal canon. The movie's Karlovy Vary victory ought to yield lots of more celebration reservations and expert multi-platform circulation.
Popular on Variety
Anybody acquainted with Cousins' distinctive movies will understand not to anticipate a standard-issue biodoc of talking heads and archival montage. With a singing help from routine Cousins partner Tilda Swinton, mellifluously checking out numerous first-person passages from Barns-Graham's letters and journals, the movie details the artist's life story without plentiful biographical information. We discover that she was born in St. Andrews, Scotland, to landed gentry; that she studied at the Edinburgh College of Art; that she later on settled in Cornwall, where she discovered both picturesque motivation and a modernist creative neighborhood; that she wed as soon as, unsuccessfully.
Cousins is less interested in this kind of story than in more abstract, sometimes speculative reflection on her visual and spiritual fixations– rotating on a developmental 1949 walking to the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland. There, she was enthralled by natural geometries of rock and ice, types and concepts that would then circle through her work over the next half-century. Such patterns and throughlines in her illustrations and paintings are made plain through the most basic of methods: unfussy, primarily sequential slideshow montages, devoid of narrative, emphasized just by Linda Buckley's charming, pensive string rating, allowing audiences to absorb and calmly react to Barns-Graham's art as they would in a gallery. Cousins does take the liberty, nevertheless, of talking us through her early note pads: page upon page of elaborately color-coded, mathematically developed structures that expose something of Barns-Graham's synesthesia, an important consider her art that was both loosened up and made complex by her increasing fascination with the natural world.
As typical, Cousins is a vital figure in his own work, with the movie developed around his growing private associate with, and affinity for, Barns-Graham's story. This develops to his own leading of a multi-screen setup dedicated to her operate in Edinburgh's Fruitmarket exhibit area, which once again highlights Cousins' sense of the permeable bond in between visual art and movie theater. (“I question what David Lynch would make from this?” he states, looking upon among her most darkly deconstructed glacier paintings.) Some art historians might discuss Cousins' claims of how sidelined Barns-Graham has actually remained in the popular view of 20th-century British art– she is displayed in the Tate, however was neglected of a hit Royal Academy exhibit committed to her contemporaries– however his movie totals up to an engaging rehanging of her oeuvre in any case.
A degree of debauchery is foregone conclusion– as in an interlude where the filmmaker gets a tattoo of a Barns-Graham painting, musing aloud regarding just how much more detailed this does or does not bring him to her– however not precisely improper. “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things” affectingly articulates how we can form extremely individual relationships with art work by individuals we've never ever understood, commemorated or otherwise. This offers the movie license for any variety of unanticipated angles– consisting of one thoughtful tangent, that might even have stood higher growth, on environment modification, and the physical disappearance of landscapes that when influenced such abstract charm. At one point, Cousins asks a biographer of Barns-Graham (who passed away, aged 91, in 2004) if she would have invited a movie about herself, just to be informed the artist would most likely have actually desired more of a say in its contents. No artist can manage their tradition, therefore Cousins in turn welcomes us to read his moving, infectiously compulsive movie as we will.
