The prolific Northern Irish writer and director Mark Cousins, known for the over 15-hour long 2011 sum “The Story of Film: An Odyssey”, as well as “The Eyes of Orson Welles” (2017) or Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema (2019) – to mention but a few of the many passionate and poetic works in which the prolific documentarian and narrator guides us through the cinema and art he loves in his own “magnetising” voice (to borrow KVIFF artistic director Karel Och’s words), and his very unique manner – follows up his 2022 Edinburgh-premiered immersive, multi-screen installation Like a Huge Scotland, with a documentary also dedicated to the fascinating British genius artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, titled “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things“.
In this film, vying for the Crystal Globe of the 58th
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival where it world premiered, also benefitting from the participation, through readings, of Cousins’ long-standing collaborator and friend
Tilda Swinton as well as from the knowledge of art historian
Lynne Green, Barns-Graham’s biographer, the director invites to sees things through different eyes, her eyes, Willie’s eyes.
In this interview, after discussing his strong relationship with the major Czech film event and the phrasing of the both fleeting and profound title “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things“, Mark Cousins goes on to explain how pivotal Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s 1949 experience of climbing to the top of the Grindelwald glacier was to her artistic vision. He also underlines how relentless she was in her creation, the place of maths and colours in the way her synaesthestic mind worked, the kinship he himself feels with the artist. Cousins also talks about ageing, layering, the structure of his films, and he tells us a little bit more about a mysterious painting he received for Christmas.
On the fact that Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s work wasn’t given the attention it deserved at the time
“When you look through our career, she kept changing styles, and that, I think, is one of the reasons why the other critics didn’t celebrate her. Art critics like one person who has one style and sticks to it, but this one was always searching, changing form, in an out of abstraction, in and out of realism. She continued to draw all her life, and as you know the modernist art critics didn’t really like people who drew. So for all those reasons, she kept shifting, including her relationship with the glacier experience.“
On emphasising the contribution of great female minds
“I’ve always been a passionate feminist, I read Simone de Beauvoir when I was still a teenager, and I think the reason I’m a passionate feminist is that the politics of equality and liberation doesn’t really free woman: it frees men. (…) I think feminism is a basic humanism, so it’s exciting for me to come across an artist like this, because not only can I see her poetics, as a filmmaker I can feel a certain rage and anger about her sequestration, the fact that the art world didn’t value her enough.”
On Wilhelmina Barns-Graham just being very cool and utterly relevant
“Isn’t it interesting that we talking about a woman who was considered uncool, and now we can see her through a feminist lens, which is very contemporary, a neurodiversity lens, which is very contemporary, and of course the fact that the glaciers have disappeared, we are seeing it through an environmental lens as well. This is three ways that this woman, twenty years after her death, is extremely relevant I think.”</
