CHARLES PURCELL

‘Their films try to generate not just respect for nature, but something else. This is a kind of going down on one knee before an ineffable force’ SEAN MAYNARD.

A board upon which the Cantrill’s projected their film Blast (1971).

Last year the work of phenomenal husband and wife team Arthur and Corinne Cantrill was celebrated through a 50 year retrospective, Grain of the Voice, held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Having made more than 150 films to date, it celebrated one of the most impressive bodies of contemporary avant-garde cinema in the world. Their road to becoming the most active and prolific avant-garde filmmakers in Australia began in the 1960s and since then Corinne Cantrill says that they have overcome the challenges of making nothing but financial disasters through ‘living very simply’.

Their contribution to the Australian cinematic landscape, however, doesn’t stop at their films. For 29 years from 1971 to 2000 the couple provided indispensable documentation through the publication of quarterly magazine Cantrill’s Filmnotes, aiming to document work at the fringes of film culture that had largely been ignored by the mainstream.

Arthur claims he was bitten by the filmmaking bug first in the late 50s at which time he was making films for the ABC under a policy that supported local filmmaking. As such, claims Arthur, ‘the ABC (headed by Charles Moses) bought everything we made in our first five years of filmmaking,’ something that allowed the couple to buy their own equipment and branch into more experimental work. This led to a huge number of short films made in the 1960s, interspersed with biographical works that challenged traditional documentary forms. These films, which include Robert Klippel Sculpture Studies (1964-1965), The Incised Image (1966), Moving Statics (1969) and their acclaimed tribute to friend, poet, and prominent Sydney ‘Push’ figure Harry Hooten (1970), often honoured fellow avant-garde artists, driven by the objective of preserving their legacy, because, in the words of Corinne Cantrill, ‘we are all so easily forgotten’.

The couple spent a lot of this early time in London and continued their experimentation at the Drury Lane Arts Laboratory. It was a period that exposed them to creative practices that would inform much of their future work, and they returned in 1969 ready to connect the movements of overseas experimental art and film with Australian practice. In 1969 they took up fellowship in the Creative Arts at the Australian National University in Canberra and in 1970 they set up The Maze, an artist-run space in which they were able to screen their own films and those of others. After 1970, they were, along with Paul Winkler, amongst the most prolific of the avant-garde artists who remained.

Still from Myself When Fourteen, 19 min. 1989 (with Ivor Cantrill) 

Much of the work they have created is distinguished by their interest in the materials, methods and processes of the cinema, a practice primarily driven by the desire to explore the possibilities of the act of filmmaking: how a camera registers and records an image, how celluloid is manipulated, how a film is projected. Mostly working with 16mm film, they experimented with colour, editing and the hand-printing of film in ways that reflected their response to a subject at the time of filming, and explored how the finished film can structure space, time, framing and perceptibility of image and sound. This interest in the material side of cinema led them to interrogate the properties of different film stocks, speeds, and especially the phenomenon of three-colour separation (filming in black and white with red, green and blue filters), as in the Three Colour Separation Studies (Landscapes and Still Lifes, 1976) and Waterfall (1984). This colour separation divided an image into each of its primary components, which could then be printed together to present new ways of ‘reading’ that image. At this time there was little experimentation in this area and Australia had not developed a philosophy about film-form. As such, the Cantrills became pioneers.

Screened around the world from the Centre Pompidou and The Louvre in Paris to the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Cantrills’ body of work has been invaluable to, and at the centre of, the formation Australia’s experimental film identity. Their life long commitment to their unique vision, and ability to produce such an immense body of work despite waves of criticism and financial hardship, is what makes them pivotal veterans.

They neither recognise nor seek a mass Australian audience, they repudiate analysis and criticism with equal vigour, and are reluctant to define their relationship with other avant-garde filmmakers. Their experimentation was intended to draw audiences to the endless possibilities that exist in film-form—something that needed to be rediscovered and spread within Australian culture—and they succeeded. And although their work hasn’t disproved the existence of it, it has certainly managed to consistently circumvent the importance placed on the suspension of Australian film between culture (and cultural debates) and industry (and the discourses of employment, profitability, the language money ‘speaks’). In doing so they send an interesting message to newcomers: that to forge a career path, one doesn’t necessarily need a producer. All that’s needed, according to Arthur Cantrill, is ‘obsession, and a vision.’

Bibliography

Adams, Brian & Shirley, Graham 1989, Australian Cinema, The First Eighty Years, Revised Edition, Currency Press, Hong Kong.

Corinne and Arthur Cantrill 2010, radio program, The Conversation Hour, ABC Radio, Melbourne, 20 October.

Martin, Adrian 1989, ‘Indefinite Objects: Independent Film and Video’, in Moran, Albert & O’Regan, Tom (eds), The Australian Screen, Penguin Books Australia, Ringwood.

Maynard, Sean 1989, ‘Black (and White) Images: Aborigines and Film’, in Moran, Albert & O’Regan, Tom (eds), The Australian Screen, Penguin Books Australia, Ringwood.