Arthur Cantrill

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Room of Chromatic Mystery' is (...) another three-colour separation film, shot in the living room of the Cantrills’ old house in Brunswick. An ordinary domestic scene, with flowers and carved artifacts on a table by the window; but the borderlines of these objects quiver, and everything is bathed in a spectral or perhaps extraterrestrial glow. The mysterious soundtrack blends voices from earlier films – including the whispering of the singers in 'Two Women' – with discussions in a foreign language on a shortwave radio, drowned in static like the hiss of time escaping. An image of a place. An echo of a voice. (Jake Wilson)

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.

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.

short experimental film by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill

Brightly coloured animated drawings rotoscoped from high contrast black and white negative film of Ivor Cantrill aged 14, are integrated with the original negative and positive images on an optical printer to create patterns of black, white and colour. The film-maker reminisces about being 14 and describes the rotoscoping process. Ivor Cantrill is autistic, and his attention to detail and his preoccupation with repetition are positive aspects of his condition.

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

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

Sequences from the filmmakers' 16mm, Super 8 and Stand 8 mm work, dating from 1960 onwards, are contact-printed onto 35mm film, then reduced to 16mm for projection. The relationship of the frame sizes of the smaller gauges to that of the 35mm causes a fluttering on the screen which relates to the ephemerality of the memory and the effect on it of the passing of times. Floterian is an old English word meaning fluttering.

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.

A documentary involving the work done by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill since 1975 in 3-colour separation. Also discussed are the classic theories and principles in 3-colour separation in film and photography.

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.

3-colour separation film.

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.'

16mm, colour reversal print

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.

"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."

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.

Masses, crowds in the streets, traffic, large gatherings of people for political, religious, cultural events; TV newscasts – the tide of humanity being the matrix from which the alternative movement arose. From these masses emerge individuals: friends and family, co-workers, filmmakers, poets. A play between the quotidian and the particular.

"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."

A videographic film exploiting the phosphor textures on the cathode screen. Video images are filmed, filter-coloured and supered in the camera.

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.

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.

An experimental film to see how much information the eye can take in from continuous single frame images and from single frames of widely different type.

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

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.

"On several occasions we were impressed by the apparent vitality of some spools with arbitrary discards, compared to the laboriously assembled sequences of what is waste. Based on this idea, the cinema is a reel of clips from the Red Stone Dancer scene in Gaudier-Brezska's main film. It was done in an iconoclastic way very quickly, celebrating that we were abandoning the limitations of the documentary form. It was the first of many films in which we recycled previously filmed material and used it for new purposes."

This is a film about the work of the young French Vorticist sculptor who died in World War I and his ties to London and to Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. Much of the commentary comes from Gaudier's letters, his manifestos, and other writings by him. As with the Klippel films, the challenge was to bring the works in 3 dimensions to the film in 2 dimensions. If viewed in the context of a time when we were starting to specialize in art movies (we were trying to make a movie about the Vorticist movement), we noticed that we got bored with the documentary form, realizing that we didn't want to continue making movies this way. It was also around this time that we discovered the large amount of avant-garde cinema being made in America and Europe, at the 1967-68 edition of the Knokke Festival in Belgium, which confirmed our true interest.

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

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

“In Robert Klippel – Junk Sculpture No. 3, 1963 (1965), a spiky Klippel creation resonates almost visibly with the high, piercing tones of Larry Sitsky’s music. (Here the “voice” belongs to a harpsichord; another film in the same series creates a similar effect by electronically altering recordings of human song.)” —Jake Wilson, Senses of Cinema

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.

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.

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.

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."

In the Brisbane Creative Leisure Centre, conducted by the Cantrills, children are shown reproductions of stained glass windows and then make large transparent pictures with black paper, coloured cellophane, and other materials such as discarded x-ray pictures and textured fabric, with a minimum of instruction. These are taken indoors and fastened to window panes.

In the Brisbane Creative Leisure Centre, conducted by the Cantrills, children are shown reproductions of stained glass windows and then make large transparent pictures with black paper, coloured cellophane, and other materials such as discarded x-ray pictures and textured fabric, with a minimum of instruction. These are taken indoors and fastened to window panes.

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.