A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

 

A rogue preposition in the title betrays this film’s distinctive, dartingly eccentric idiom: not “of deeper things” but “to deeper things”. It is about neglected abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, born in Scotland in 1912 and a resident of St Ives, whose landscapes she represented with endless curiosity and passion; she died in 2004. Film-maker Mark Cousins makes an idiosyncratic but compellingly persuasive case for this artist to be restored (or in fact introduced for the first time) to the pantheon of accepted greatness, with Tilda Swinton giving us Barns-Graham in voiceover.