Mark Cousins on A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things
Every time we blink it seems Mark Cousins has made a new film. The prolific Edinburgh-based director is back with a documentary celebrating the undersung talent of Scottish abstract artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
It’s not every day that a filmmaker invites you to “see my two Willies”, but that’s the proposition I received from Mark Cousins ahead of this interview. The “Willies” in question, you’ll be relieved to hear, are two pictures by the Scottish abstract artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, the subject of his ecstatic new documentary A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things. It’s a typically passionate piece of work from Cousins, who appears to have suddenly got in the habit of making striking films about creative people, even if that’s not been his intention. “Yes, I said I would do no biographical films,” says Cousins, “and somehow now I've done five of them.”
Those five are The Eyes of Orson Welles (2017), The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021), My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock (2022), this Willie Barns-Graham film and an upcoming documentary on producer and former EIFF director Lynda Myles. They’re far from your standard biographical docs though. “In each case, I tried to look at their imagination rather than their life,” Cousins says of his approach. “Obviously you drop a bit of life in there, but for me, it’s the imagination – particularly the visual imagination – that’s the most interesting thing.”
This is one of Cousins’ talents: getting inside his subjects' heads. Elsewhere on his CV is a more personal cine-essay called The Story of Looking, but that title could aptly apply to these documentaries; in one way or the other, they’re about how their subjects see the world. “I have always been fascinated by that,” says Cousins. “How can lots of people look at the same thing and see something entirely different? That's close to the question of what creativity is, I think.”
Barns-Graham certainly seems to have seen the world differently than most. For one, she had synesthesia, a neurological quirk that causes sensory crossovers in the brain. In her case, this manifested as an extreme sensitivity to colour, and even as a child, she described seeing the world through colour, shapes and lines. Cousins first encountered Barns-Graham’s work when he was a student in the late 1980s. “I saw her retrospective at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre and I was totally wowed,” he recalls. “Her work had the combination of the rigour and the structure and all that mathematics stuff that I talk about in the film, but also a kind of lyricism and total abandon.”
This collision of order and disorder clearly appeals to Cousins. It characterises the work of his movie faves – “if I think of my own taste in cinema, Orson Welles, [Yasujirō] Ozu, these are people that are massively interested in structure” – and it’s there in his own films too, which are often rigorously delineated into distinct chapters, but within these constraints there’s a free-wheeling quality, filled with poetic flourishes and imaginative leaps between ideas.
When Cousins attended that Barns-Graham show he hadn’t begun making films yet, but even back then he reckons he recognised an artistic kindred spirit. “Weirdos notice each other. It's as simple as that. You notice other similar brains, and I could see her brain. There are certain artists that I've massively identified with, like Paul Cezanne and Leonardo di Vinci and Willie Barns-Graham and a few others, and they're all the engineering people; they're the people for whom beneath the surface of the picture, there's a structure.”
As well as biography, A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is a work of advocacy. Throughout the film, Cousins makes a compelling case that Barns-Graham’s considerable genius has been overlooked by the art establishment. “I've made films about famous people,” says Cousins, “but a lot of what I've tried to do is say, look at all these other people that we haven't heard of, and they're equally great, and maybe even better in some ways.”
Cousins slyly invites audiences to be as dismissive of Barns-Graham as the sexist, ageist art establishment was. The film opens with a series of photos of Barns-Graham in her dotage, wearing unglamorous, practical clothing: anorak and comfy shoes; green Mac and muddy wellies. “I wanted to start with prejudice, in a way,” he explains. “Like, ‘look at this wee auld woman, she looks like a Morningside lady you might see on the bus who's just been into the Cats Protection.’ You want to start with an outsider perspective to sort of express the prejudice of, 'How can she be interesting?' And then of course, once the film gets going, you want people to think, 'Oh my God! Oh my, God! This woman is amazing!' Once you get beyond the wellies and the old lady glasses and everything.”
Cousins wears his ardour for Barns-Graham on his sleeve – quite literally. When Cousins says he owns two “Willies” – one a print, the other an original he was given as a birthday present – that isn’t quite true. There’s a third on his left shoulder in the form of a tattoo based on Geoff and Scruffy, the series of paintings Barns-Graham did of her friend and his dog, with the man depicted and a wonky pentangle and the canine a squashed half-circle. He got inked part way through making the film. “I felt that she was really getting to me,” he says. “Fuck the film, it was more than that. I just couldn't stop thinking about her and her obsessions.”
Of his growing list of tattoos of artists, Cousins has said: “They, in a way, live in me. They colonized me.” Barns-Graham joins fellow painters like Paul Cézanne and Albrecht Dürer, as well as the likes of Sergei Eisenstein, Virginia Woolf and Le Corbusier to name a few. Watching A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things will go a long way to convincing you that she belongs on this illustrious list.
A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things has its UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival, Cameo, 21 Aug, 1pm, and is released later in the year by CONI
Filmography (selected): Cinema Has Been My True Love: The Work And Times Of Lynda Myles (2024), A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things (2024), The March On Rome (2022), My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock (2022), The Story of Film: A New Generation (2021), The Story of Looking (2021), The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021), Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema (2019), The Eyes of Orson Welles (2017), Stockholm, My Love (2016), Atomic, Living in Dread and Promise (2015), I am Belfast (2015), A Story of Children and Film (2013), Here be Dragons (2013), What is this Film Called Love? (2012), The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011), The First Movie (2009), The New Ten Commandments (2008)