Arthur Cantrill

In the Brisbane Creative Leisure Centre, conducted by the Cantrills, children, with a minimum of instruction, build up pictures from a large variety of hardware materials such as chain, wire, nails, screws, case fasteners, steel wool, copper sheet, etc., nailed or glued to sheets of plywood.

Will Spoor is a Dutch performer, working in the abstract side of movement and mime. He has considerable knowledge of the potential of film and his intention was to extend his work into realms that were impossible for live theatre. We used a combination of animation and in-camera superimpositions to create structures of body movement. Our work on sound composition came to a head in this film with organically and electronically complex sounds. It was the most valuable collaboration we had done with another artist since Larry Sitsky; an intense concentration of our energies and skills and of his energies and skills. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

Ayers Rock is examined in the light of its ancient human and animal associations. It is seen under various light effects which create different colour and texture impressions. The timelessness of the monolith is suggested by negative colour, the result of using fine-grain Eastmancolour print stock in the camera, a slow speed material which required the intense Central Australian light for adequate exposure. A half-speed recording of the local bird call and insects contributes to the sense of cross eras. Human perception of time, colour and sound is questioned. As Einstein said: 'The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.'

Synopsis Part of a series of four studies the Cantrills made of the native flora of the Stradford Island, this one focusing on the Pandanus Pedunculatus.

TWO WOMEN records our passage through the tribal lands of the Central Australian region – a personal charting of this mythical landscape. The film is shaped by an unedited recording made of a Pitjantjatjara women’s song cycle: "Two Women", which describes the travels of ancestral women through this region. The film is not a literal interpretation of the song story, and there is no translation of the song. We are outsiders to this culture, and must therefore learn what we can from the ‚surface’ of the song cycle – from the voices singing, talking, whispering, coughing, laughing, reprimanding children.

Located 18 miles west, Katatjuta (The Olgas) is a recurring presence in the background of Uluru. Believed by Aboriginal people to have been inhabited by mythological ancestors, it is a place to be approached with caution. There is a sense of mystery and apprehension at Katatjuta, with the complex domed structures with their own rows of "windows" suggesting an abandoned temple city where, due to its mysterious symmetry, space circulates. The uneasy feeling of having intruded and being watched influenced the filming. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

In the Brisbane Creative Leisure Centre, conducted by the Cantrills, children, with a minimum of instruction, build up pictures from a large variety of hardware materials such as chain, wire, nails, screws, case fasteners, steel wool, copper sheet, etc., nailed or glued to sheets of plywood.

Will Spoor is a Dutch performer, working in the abstract side of movement and mime. He has considerable knowledge of the potential of film and his intention was to extend his work into realms that were impossible for live theatre. We used a combination of animation and in-camera superimpositions to create structures of body movement. Our work on sound composition came to a head in this film with organically and electronically complex sounds. It was the most valuable collaboration we had done with another artist since Larry Sitsky; an intense concentration of our energies and skills and of his energies and skills. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

Ayers Rock is examined in the light of its ancient human and animal associations. It is seen under various light effects which create different colour and texture impressions. The timelessness of the monolith is suggested by negative colour, the result of using fine-grain Eastmancolour print stock in the camera, a slow speed material which required the intense Central Australian light for adequate exposure. A half-speed recording of the local bird call and insects contributes to the sense of cross eras. Human perception of time, colour and sound is questioned. As Einstein said: 'The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.'

Synopsis Part of a series of four studies the Cantrills made of the native flora of the Stradford Island, this one focusing on the Pandanus Pedunculatus.

TWO WOMEN records our passage through the tribal lands of the Central Australian region – a personal charting of this mythical landscape. The film is shaped by an unedited recording made of a Pitjantjatjara women’s song cycle: "Two Women", which describes the travels of ancestral women through this region. The film is not a literal interpretation of the song story, and there is no translation of the song. We are outsiders to this culture, and must therefore learn what we can from the ‚surface’ of the song cycle – from the voices singing, talking, whispering, coughing, laughing, reprimanding children.

Located 18 miles west, Katatjuta (The Olgas) is a recurring presence in the background of Uluru. Believed by Aboriginal people to have been inhabited by mythological ancestors, it is a place to be approached with caution. There is a sense of mystery and apprehension at Katatjuta, with the complex domed structures with their own rows of "windows" suggesting an abandoned temple city where, due to its mysterious symmetry, space circulates. The uneasy feeling of having intruded and being watched influenced the filming. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

Evening performances of traditional Balinese dance-drama in Ubud, shot single frame with open shutter exposures.

As the camera moves gently from afar into the very heart of the monolith, the magic of the holiest site of the Aborigines unfolds in shimmering nuances of light. Shot at different times of day, the close-up and panorama shots of this more than 500-million-year-old stone formation combine silence and acoustically altered birdsong to convey a feeling of timelessness into which a sense of loss is also inscribed. The somnambulistic moonrise in the great sky seems almost like an abstract painting and yet it is real. The areas of discolouration in the film material caused by problems in the developing process were deliberately left in the film as a metaphor for the looming threat to this natural environment through bushfires and tourism.

The beauty of the Australian bush is depicted in a carefully composed camera choreography of different aspects of flora and fauna. Close-up and panorama shots and Aboriginal music meld into a meditative view of the energy and harmony that shape the place.

Experimental Super 8 film from 2001 by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill

Made from image fragments from Will Spoor's footage, it was our first direct foray into the relationship between cinema and visual perception. It has two parts: Retina Imprints, an experiment on the persistence of vision, stretching and reorganizing movement in time, and Memory Imprints, fragments of strange images that remain impressed on the memory. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

Part of a series of four studies the Cantrills made of the native flora of the Stradford Island, this one focusing on the Casuarina Equisetifolia.

The footage for this film was shot in London during our research into the Vorticist movement. It is a montage of images from the Vorticist magazine Blast, including Vorticist drawings and texts from the manifestos. A screen made from a collage of photographic enlargements from the magazine was prepared for the screening of this film. The soundtrack evokes the sounds of World War I, which were, in a way, the climax of the Vorticist movement in England. During the Expanded Cinema presentations, excerpts from Blast were read during the film screening. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

The film Harry Hooton is conceived as a huge energy field combining the energy of light and colour, movement, editing and sound — a dense, vibrating, pulsating work, unrelenting in its thrust; a celebration of Hooton’s definition of art as the communication of emotion to matter.

3-colour separation film.

Hand-drawn directly onto 16mm film, this animation is a 'diary' of daily drawing-on-film practice by Ivor Cantrill over a period of 18 months. Drawing style ranges from bold geometric patterns, to a delicate calligraphy.

It was made quickly, in a student-style way, to be shown at a student drama festival. In the main sequence, we continue to explore the nature of perception in relation to cinema: six- or nine-frame shots of the 270 festival participants appearing like flashes on the screen as they announce their names. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

Each screen shows exposure variations in a room with a seated figure, the sunlit bush seen through large windows, its tonality altering with the exposure changes. A stereo track of birdcalls and voices was added in 2010.

Timeless elements in a roll of film: stillness, movement, woman, girl, road, wind, sun, leaves. A triptych of a girl who reminds us of the face and figures in old icons.

Corinne Cantrill’s film At Eltham from 1974 explores her fascination with Australian landscapes and introduces her interest in playing the 16mm camera functions as a musical instrument. In an essay, Corinne notes she subtitled the film ‘A Metaphor on Death’ referring to their despair, at the time, about their future as filmmakers in Australia and their decision to leave the country temporarily.

Experimental film using fireworks, often superimposed and in soft focus, printed in negative form with a black image on a white background. Plucked piano strings reversed xylophone and cymbal with an electronic vibrato effect form the background sound effects.

"Island Fuse consists entirely of the monochromatic reprocessing of black and white footage that we filmed in the 1960s on the Isle of Stradbroke. Using an analysis projector, Island Fuse is a film that focuses on the interaction of the elements that produced the film: the analysis projector, the camera and its various mechanisms; filters, the projector and its mechanisms; the ribbon and the photograms; the operators."

An experimental work about the Australian forests by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill.

A short animation of Charles Lloyd’s dry points. Sound composition by Arthur Cantrill.

short experimental film by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill

It's a three-colour separation study of MacKenzie Falls in the Grampians, Victoria.

Super8 bi-packed onto 16mm with recurring patterns and combinations of superimpositions. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

Part of a series of four studies the Cantrills made of the native flora of the Stradford Island, this one focusing on the Banksia Integrifolia.

Three-color separation imagery expands the experimental documentation of landscape. Alternating nuances of color conjure up; a formal beauty, which are echoed in birdsong and the buzzing of insects.

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill are two of Australia's most prominent experimental filmmakers. The Cantrills are well known for their 'colour separation' films. To create these works they shoot a scene three separate times on black and white film stock, using a different colour filter each time. In the lab, they combine these three films onto a single Eastmancolour print. This process creates dramatic transitions in colour that the Cantrills liken to the vibrancy of Technicolor. Though the footage here was shot in the mid-’80s, it was only last year that they edited it into this fifteen-minute movie. Structurally it’s simple enough: just a series of views of various parts of inner Melbourne, from panoramic wide shots to close-ups of the sides of buildings. The soundtrack blends and warps familiar urban noises – cars, buskers, the ringing bells of trams – into a kind of musique concréte.

Part of a series of four studies the Cantrills made of the native flora of the Stradford Island, this one focusing on the Banksia Serrata.

At Black Range (1984) was shot near the Grampians in Western Victoria, and features monumental monochrome rocks with rainbow shadows and “fringing” in the moving eucalypts, which create coloured vibrations like the filmic analogue of Impressionism. The skin of the film and the rock itself are both living surfaces of mobile textures: lichen becomes electric, pointilist, as the camera fades in and out of focus. The shadows of skinny tree trunks dart like electric blue lightning, veins or eels. Shivering leaves morph into undersea anemones, caressing the rocks in a teasing, sexual way. Somehow, the loosening of Taussig’s “straightjacket of the spectrum” allows for a loosening of the straightjacket of taxonomy as well; classes, phyla, and even kingdoms drop away, revealing an undifferentiated field of vibrant matter in which entities shapeshift. (Tessa Laird)

A three colour separation study filmed at Pearl Beach, which examines the same scene of Amethyst Avenue during the progression of a winter, then a summer day. With the sea in the background, the moving objects such as the pedestrians, cyclists, traffic are transparent and ephemeral while the stationary objects are opaque and retain a permanent quality. A strange, almost surreal quality illustrating the transitional nature of life.

A camera calligraphy of the coastal bush -- celebrating growth, summer light, rock and plant textures.

16mm, colour reversal print

The Native Trees of Stradbroke Island (1964), consisting of four films: Banksia Integrifolia, Casuarina Equisetifolia, Pandanus Pedunculatus and Banksia Serrata (each 6 min, b & w). Music: Nancy Tow. "Born out of our interest in the environment, based on Corinne's training in botany, these were our first essays on landscape. When we refilmed some of this material at Island Fuse in 1971, we were struck by our emphasis on close-ups in this early work, compared to our subsequent landscape films."

A film about recreation and learning, made during the Cantrills’ four-year residence in London, similarly tinctured by Herbert Read’s notions about children’s education as self-directed, creative, and free. The adventure playground provides a space in which children can shape and reimagine the environment according to their own sense of play.

Does colour exist where there is no light? The garden is a setting for colour research: random objects are laid out in changing combinations for repeated shooting and printing with varying exposure densities and colour balances. Images of Corinne standing and sleeping in a chair evoke traditional portraits in garden settings, but here the figure’s subjected to severe colour and contrast changes, and is partly obliterated by moving windblown foliage shadows in primary colours. There’s constant shifting between brief monochromes, duochromes and full colour, intercut with fragments of stark black and white negative from the original separations which contrast with the strong colours. In some of the sequences there’s a solidity of blackness, as in the background to a hibiscus flower, which seems to have a depth like thick velvet -in reality this blackness is the garden background with insufficient light to register on the high-contrast black and white negative.

It was filmed from photographs of a rehearsal by Will Spoor of a Tardieu work at the Arts Laboratory, Drury Lane. The photos were taken before starting Moving Statics and were a way to familiarize ourselves with Will Spoor's work. The soundtrack consists of a recording made at the time of the photo shoot. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

"These three films are derived from "Negative / Positive on Three Images" by Baldwin Spencer, which was copied in high-contrast material to make Study No. 1. This, in turn, was copied into the same material to make Study No. 2 serially. . Then Study No 2 was used as the material to copy Study No 3, copied again in high contrast material. Each copy had more and more contrast, until in the third there was nothing gray left in the image. As a result, the original action is progressively replaced by the action of the cinematographic material. These three films together, in addition to the first two Baldwin Spencer films, were used in our film / performance piece that we did in 1977 Edges of Meaning, in which we examined some of the implications of the material."