Everyone loves the painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, as well as Tilda Swinton.
“I texted her a while back and said I was making this movie. She said, ‘I’m in love with Willie,’” says Mark Cousins, director of the biographical documentary “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Issues.” Selection.
“Willie didn’t have a dramatic life, she didn’t go to fancy events. So there was the art world sexism and the agism. She changed her type too, and the art world doesn’t like that. The film world doesn’t like that either. They want a Hitchcock movie to be like a Hitchcock movie.”
“Abbas Kiarostami informed me that he wanted his films to be pure on the skin and rich on the inside. Willie’s life seemed drama-free, but inside, there was a raging fire.”
In his Karlovy Differ Movie Pageant-winning “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Issues,” Cousins peeks into the thoughts of the forgotten artist, who passed away in 2004. Partly narrated by Swinton, it also features her own voice.
“I kind of distrust that omnipresent male narrator who is all-knowing. I find it annoying and presumptuous. I had to ask myself, ‘Why am I really into this girl?’” he reveals.
“Scorsese and Jake LaMotta in ‘Raging Bull’ are ostensibly very different people. Yet he needed to find an angle and a degree of connection before he could make that film. I glimpsed pieces of myself in her, I believe, in that particular person without any change.”
“I also live in Scotland. I’m a mathematician, and then there’s this proven fact that she was just an unstoppable life force. It tells viewers, ‘This is where I come from. This is my link.’ It’s like Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam’: you look for the touch of those fingers and that spark.”
Cousins is not afraid to get close to his subjects, to form friendships with the deceased icons and even to call them by their nicknames.
“She preferred to be called Willie,” he says with a smile.
Mark Cousins
Courtesy of KVIFF
“It’s about intimacy, you know? This film isn’t really about her life – it’s more about her mind. In ‘The Eyes of Orson Welles,’ I was trying to get into his creativity as well. Cinema is a very intimate medium. When you’re watching a film, it’s 1:1. That’s why my voice is so soft here. It’s like we’re sitting there alone.”
As depicted in the document, he received a tattoo of her work.
“I used to be raised Catholic. I’m not spiritual at all, but my tattoos are like stigmas, you could say. People who are overly revealing about things like that are usually boring. None of this detachment and coolness is useful in the creative field,” he says, warding off potential haters.
“When I first went to England, I used to be at dinner parties where people would just analyze things all night. That’s fine, but when are we going to put on Shania Twain and start dancing?! When we got the award last night, one of the first things we did was dance to Sister Sledge. Joseph Brodski said, ‘Try to keep the passion. Leave your cool to the constellations.’ I’m a Celt. Willie’s a Celt, and Tilda. Celts don’t do ‘heat’ remarkably well.”
As a substitute, he relies on tenderness, which also came in handy when he discovered his unusual diaries. Barns-Graham, who had synesthesia, left behind pages full of letters transformed into colors.
“Absolutely. ‘Tender’ is the phrase I use so much. I used to be brought up during the conflict in Northern Ireland and I often say I was ‘tenderised’ by it, the way you tenderise meat when you pound it,” he says.
“People assume that ‘cinematic’ means ‘Furiosa’ or ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. But cinematic can imply small issues and moments that can be magnified. You’re sitting in the theater, this diary and it’s 50,000 times bigger. Cinema can do that brilliantly. It can take a tear running down Elizabeth Taylor’s cheek and turn it into something epic. If we can take these small works of art and make them big, it’s special.”
In her profession, Cousins has spoken about the known and the unknown, about Hitchcock, Welles and obscure female filmmakers in the much-celebrated “Women Make Movies.”
“When you’re dealing with someone who’s been forgotten, you’re not making the film out of love for your subject. You’re making it out of anger, and anger is like rocket fuel. Love and anger are a great combination,” he says.
He will work on “The Story of Documentary Movie” later.
“In real life, I’m not a very confident person. When it comes to my creative life, I am. When I did ‘The Story of Movie: An Odyssey,’ a lot of journalists said, ‘It’s so subjective.’ I’ll tell you what’s really subjective: writing about film and leaving out most of the girls or not mentioning African films. There’s a rigor to what I do that you don’t usually see,” he says.
“Now I’m taking the same format as ‘The Story of Movie’. It’s about the same length and I’ve been shooting all over the world. The concept is to really passionately challenge what we expect a documentary to be.”
In “A Sudden Glimpse of Deeper Questions,” he challenges viewers with an extended sequence highlighting Willie’s work.
“Some people will find this boring, of course, but I wanted to give it a way to continue and continue this obsession. Not for months, not for years, but for many years. I was talking to Geoffrey Rush, one of the jury members, and he referred to this sequence as being crucial in the film,” says Cousins.
“There’s a right formulation, and I can do it in my sleep. It sounds presumptuous, but I can: You interview a lot of people, you minimize it really quickly, you add a bunch of graphs, and you document the rise and fall of a profession. But Willie looked at so many familiar issues with fresh eyes.”
Its triumph in the Czech Republic marks yet another victory for documentaries at top-tier events, from the Berlinale (“On the Adamant”) to Venice (“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”).
“I used to be shocked. I met a filmmaker before and said, ‘I’m definitely NOT going to win an award.’ I was sitting there[at the ceremony]thinking, ‘Should we be eating pizza or Chinese soon?’” he laughs.
“Documentaries were this slapdash style. Then in the late ’90s, they became commercially viable on the big screen with the Madonna movie (‘Truth or Dare’) and ‘Buena Vista Social Membership.’ Any time reality gets really bizarre, documentaries start to feel necessary. And our reality is pretty bizarre right now.”