Director – Mark Cousins – 2024 – UK – Cert. PG – 88m
*****
A look at Scots artist and painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, who had synaesthesia – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 18th
I am someone who frequents art galleries, yet I have to confess that before seeing this film, I had never heard of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Cousins starts his film off assuming we know nothing about her.
He starts with images. Who is this old woman on a verandah with palm trees in the background? Or peering down at rocky ground wearing an all-weather coat?
In later years, she frequently wore a necklace she had made resembling, in Cousins’ words, Concorde with droplets.
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, a woman to whom all men were attracted (“she’d have flirted with you”, a woman who knew her tells Marc) was fascinated by order and disorder. Her arresting 1967 abstract painting Pilgrimage consists of Vermillion squares on brown, jostling as if in a procession across the picture surface.
Her father (and here Cousins cuts in the moving image of Joseph Cotten giving his “if you rip the sides off houses you’ll find swine” speech from Shadow of a Doubt, Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) never wanted her to be an artist.
Willie, as she was known, had synaesthesia, a condition which causes someone to perceive things around them in terms of colour. At one point, she produced a key designating each of the 26 letters of the alphabet – E for “light Prussian blue, fairly transparent”, F for “Rust, vulnerable”.
In 1940, some time after studying at Edinburgh College of Art, she moved from her Scottish birthplace of St. Andrews to St. Ives, where she became part of the circle of modernist artists that included Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. She would often drive off with the latter in his car, recalling (in the voice of Tilda Swinton, who narrates extracts from Willie’s writings throughout the film) that he “drove his car like his pencil over his canvasses”.
She was excited by biologist Darcy Wentworth Thompson’s book Growth and Form. As Cousins puts it, “nature had a structure and a grid.” Willie believed a painting should work just as well if you hung it upside-down, or flipped the image left to right, and would often check her work in a mirror, to make sure the reflection worked just as well as the real thing. For years, she was searching for something, without knowing exactly what.
She found it in 1949, on a climb up the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland. Her art was never quite the same again. She became fascinated by ice, translucence. A friend recalled, in Willie’s later years, her tapping a frozen puddle with her walking stick to cause it to crack.
The film features a few all too brief animated sequences in which the artist’s pictures build up piece by piece, or simply move.
Cousins has now made a number of films about filmmakers. This one is about a painter, yet it sits well alongside his film about Orson Welles (which focused on his drawings and paintings). I came to this film knowing very little about the artist in question, and left wanting to know more. Cousins really knows how to get inside the head of an artist through his films, and this is one of his strongest efforts.
A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 18th.
Trailer:
UK Q&A Tour
12 October – London Phoenix East Finchley (+ Q&A with Mark Cousins)
13 October – London The Garden Cinema (+Q&A with Mark Cousins)
16 October – Glasgow GFT (+ Q&A with Mark Cousins)
19 October – Bath Film Festival (+ Q&A with Mark Cousins)
21 October – Plymouth Plymouth Arts Centre (+ Q&A with Mark Cousins)
22 October – Falmouth The Poly (+ Q&A with Mark Cousins)
23 October – St. Ives The Royal Cinema (+ Q&A with Mark Cousins)
24 October – Bristol Watershed (+ Q&A with Mark Cousins)
25 October – Belfast Queen’s Film Theatre (+ Q&A with Mark Cousins)
29 October – Edinburgh The Cameo (+ Q&A with Mark Cousins)
1 November – Stirling Central Documentary Festival (+Q&A with Mark Cousins)
2 November – Dundee DCA (+ Q&A with Mark Cousins) – 2 November
3 November – Newcastle Tyneside Cinema (+ Q&A with Mark Cousins)
7 November – Woodbridge The Riverside (+ video Q&A with Mark Cousins)