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‘A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things’ Review: A Great British Artist’s Legacy Is Unthawed and Reexamined
The life and work of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham gets its due in Mark Cousins' stirring, singular documentary 'A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things.'
Premiering in the main competition at the Karlovy Vary festival, where it won the top prize from Christine Vachon’s jury, this is among the more broadly appealing feature docs to date from the prolific Cousins — bringing the same energized enthusiasm and artist-to-artist empathy that characterizes his cinema-focused work (notably his “Story of Film” series) to a fine-arts subject who isn’t exactly a household name. Even that relative obscurity works in Cousins’ favor, however: “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things” joins a recent wave of documentary and dramatic films centered on female artists formerly neglected in popular culture (among them “Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint,” “Kusama: Infinity” and “Maudie”) in a collective effort to amend and expand a patriarchal canon. Such patterns and throughlines in her drawings and paintings are made plain through the simplest of techniques: unfussy, mostly chronological slideshow montages, free from narration, accentuated only by Linda Buckley’s lovely, pensive string score, permitting viewers to digest and silently respond to Barns-Graham’s art as they would in a gallery.
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