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The Alma Drawings
“My hand still goes like the wind.”
– Alma Rumball
– Alma Rumball
"Picturing the invisible"
VIEW TRAILER
Award-winning documentary explores the mysterious life and work of reclusive Huntsville, Ont. artist Alma Rumball
Release Date: February 6, 2006
Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper for his wealthy patron, Duke Lodovico Sforza. Pablo Picasso was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to create his famed depiction of the bombing of Guernica.
But why on earth did Alma Rumball, a quiet, reclusive woman from Huntsville, Ont., produce hundreds upon hundreds of vividly detailed, otherworldly drawings full of inexplicable mystical imagery?
Even she never understood. According to Alma, when she was almost 50 years old Christ appeared to her one day in a vision and commanded her to draw. She denied authorship of the pictures, insisting that her hand did all the drawing independently, without her conscious guidance. Whoever was driving, it wasn't her. “It was all so strange, and yet I kept on doing it,” she once said. “I had no idea what was coming next.”
Was Alma connected in some way to the spiritual world? Or caught in the grip of madness? That's the question filmmaker Jeremiah Munce, tries to unravel in his award-winning documentary The Alma Drawings.
The hour-long film, a haunting investigation into the abiding mystery of Alma's life and art, makes its Canadian television premiere on VisionTV, airing on Wednesday, March 1 at 10 p.m. ET. The broadcast repeats on Thursday, March 2 at 11 p.m. ET.
The Alma Drawings won the award for Best Direction of a Short-Mid Length Documentary at the 2005 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival.
Born in 1902, Alma Kate Rumball was raised a devout Christian. In adulthood, she grew increasingly reclusive, seldom venturing beyond her small lakeside cabin. Few photographs of her survive. Though Alma had always possessed a certain artistic talent, she had no formal training and never pursued a career in art. So no one was more surprised than she when her remarkable drawings began to pour forth.
Munce tells Alma's story through images of her artwork, conversations with those who knew her, recreations (featuring Claire Dorsey as Alma) and a single surviving tape-recorded interview in which Alma speaks matter-of-factly about her mysterious gift. “I feel there is a spiritual power up there directing it,” she can be heard to say.
French surrealist André Breton once coined the term “psychic automatism” to describe this kind of phenomenon. The more contemporary interpretation would be that Alma suffered from schizophrenia. But even if it's true, this doesn't explain where, exactly, the extraordinary images in her drawings came from.
Why do some pictures appear to contain symbols from Tibetan Buddhist tradition – something of which Alma knew nothing? Why did she fashion a strange work depicting the fall of Atlantis? And what were the dangerous spiritual secrets she sometimes claimed to have been told?
Alma Rumball died in 1980 – and the answers died with her.
The Alma Drawings was produced by Firewatch Films Inc. in association with VisionTV. The film was directed and edited by Jeremiah Munce. Jo Riding was the Executive Producer. Alberta Nokes was Executive Producer for VisionTV.
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