‘A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things’ Review: A Great British Artist’s Legacy Is Unthawed and Reexamined

Not for the first time in his filmmaking career, Northern Irish documentarian Mark Cousins begins his latest work by presenting the audience with a banal image, and persuasively talking us into a reconsideration. The picture is an unremarkable vacation snapshot of British artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in her seventies or eighties, dressed for a day’s sightseeing in a sensible raincoat, not projecting any particular halo of artistic genius. Cousins’ quizzical narration ponders her pose, her clothes, her comfortably ordinary aura, and wonders how easy these details make her — in a realm geared against even palpably extraordinary women — to overlook. A winningly discursive, often lyrical valentine to Barns-Graham and her oeuvre, “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things” aims to draw eyes toward her angular modernist interpretations of nature at its most serene and severe, and train them to see the subversive soul expressed therein.

Premiering in the main competition at the Karlovy Vary festival,…