A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

Despite once having claimed in an interview that he didn’t intend to make biographical work, documentary maker Mark Cousins has gone on to make several. After films on Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock among others, he now turns his attention to the forgotten artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.

This is by no means a typical biographical film however, as Cousins is more interested in the artist’s mind than the facts and chronology of her life. He explores the way she perceived and categorized the world and interpreted it in her art. This essay film, which won the top award at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, attempts to get under the skin of a woman who saw the world in colors, shapes and lines; who perceived nature as structures and grids.

Through the prism of Cousins’ characteristic musing, associative gaze, the film devotes exceptional attention to her work—her evocative glacier paintings and her notebooks with page upon page of elaborate, mathematically engineered compositions of color planes. Like all films by Cousins, this documentary is ultimately about seeing.