Email address: acantrill@netspace.net.au
Postal address: GPO Box 1295, Melbourne, Vic. 3001, Australia
For a recent photograph of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill see ‘The Age’: http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/the-houses-that-earth-built/2007/12/16/1197740086852.html
Since 1960 Arthur and Corinne Cantrill have collaborated on more than 150 films including seven feature-length films. They have been active in several directions of film research, such as multi-screen projection; film-performance; landscape filmmaking (through their interest in relating filmform to landform); the ‘still’ moving image, concerns with duration, single-frame 24-images-per-second which challenge retinal retention and superimposition, and analysis of colour, using a similar 3-colour synthesis employed by the human retina and brain, and work touching on the history of film, such as the 1901 cinematography of Baldwin Spencer, their mixed media performance ‘Projected Light’ and the history of film technologies including their research into the three-colour separation process. Examples of their three-colour work were introduced by Arthur Cantrill at a film congress, Colour in Film, held at the Louvre Auditorium, Paris, 1995, where two of the colour separation films were shown, as well as a three-projector demonstration showing three black and white colour records projected through red, green and blue filters, first side by side, then superimposed to recreate natural colour on the screen.
From 1973-1975 when Arthur Cantrill was teaching film production and film history and criticism at the University of Oklahoma and at Penn State University their films were shown widely in North America, includng at Charlotte Moorman’s 10th and 11th New York Avant-garde Festivals, and they were the first Australian filmmakers to be invited to give a ‘Cineprobe’ of their work at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. (A second MoMA Cineprobe was given in 1988, and a third in March 2000.) They returned to Australia in 1975 where Arthur Cantrill taught at Melbourne State College/University of Melbourne until he retired as Associate Professor in 1996.
The Cantrills have exhibited very widely at film festivals, film museums and art galleries in Britain, Holland, Belgium, West Germany, New Zealand, Japan and also France, where in 1983 they gave five programs of their work at the Festival d’automne à Paris. In January, 1985 they had a five-day retrospective series of screenings at the Musée national d'art moderne (Centre Georges Pompidou), Paris, for which Kris Hemensley wrote a CATALOGUE ESSAY. In February, 1985 they took up a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Cultural Award to work in West Berlin for 6 months as artists-in-residence, and while in Germany they gave screenings of their films in Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich and Osnabrück.
Arthur and Corinne Cantrill at the Kino Arsenal in Berlin, 1985.
(Photograph by Stijepo Pavlina)
In 1986 and 1995 they showed The Berlin Apartment, a 2-hour double-screen film based on the material they shot in Berlin on the DAAD award at La Mama Theatre, Melbourne. It was also shown in Sydney in 1992.
In 1988 they first showed their film/performance work Projected Light - The Beginning and End of Cinema at La Mama Theatre, Carlton. In 1989 this was also shown at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, and in 1990 at the Vancouver Art Gallery and at the MIMA ‘Experimenta’ exhibition at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne. In 1994 they presented it in Leuven (Belgium), Berlin, Auckland, San Francisco, New York, Toronto, and at the Brisbane Film Festival.
As well as 16mm film production, they have also worked in Super 8mm, in particular making a series of Super 8 films shot in Indonesia between 1990 and 1994. (The opening title to this web page is taken from the credits of these films.) This material was used in two film-performances given at La Mama Theatre, Melbourne: The Bemused Tourist, in 1997, and The Becak Driver, 1998. Several of the Super 8mm films have been enlarged to 16mm. In 1994 the Cantrills toured with their films to Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Bangkok, San Francisco, New York, Toronto and Auckland. To mark 25 years of Cantrills Filmnotes, a review of international avant-garde film and video they have edited and published since 1971, two programs of Cantrill films were given at the Sydney Film Festival, and the Melbourne Cinémathèque, 1996.
During a screening/lecture tour of North America, Frankfurt and Paris in March 2000, ten shows entitled ‘Chromatic Articulation’ of recently completed three-colour separation films and films of single-frame 'articulations' (Super 8 enlarged to 16mm), were given at public venues and colleges, and a lecture on Proto-cinema at five venues, including the Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt. The ‘Chromatic Articulation’ program was shown at La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, in May 2000.
LIGHT STREAM, a retrospective season to mark Arthur and Corinne Cantrills’ forty years’ filmmaking, and their association with La Mama Theatre in Melbourne since 1977, was presented at La Mama, August 8-12, 2001. The poster image is a frame enlargement from Bouddi (1970).
In November/December 2001 they gave 13 screenings of films they made in the last decade in 12 cities in France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, and the Czech Republic, and gave two Proto-cinema lectures. The venues included The Royal Belgian Film Archive, Nederlands Filmmuseum, Deutsches Filmmuseum, Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek's Kino-Arsenal, and Kommunales Kinos in various German cities. DAAD funded the airfares for this tour.
A program of ten of their films from 1969 to 2001 was shown at the Lisbon Biennale, Portugal, in October 2003.
Two programs were given at the OtherFilm Festival in Brisbane, 2006: a retrospective and a reconstruction of part of the Cantrills’ 1971 Expanded Cinema show including films interacting with patterned and three-dimensional screens, and Calligraphy Contest for the New Year, a film screen transformation performance piece.
A review by Jim Knox, which includes a photograph of the Calligraphy Contest performance, is at:
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue73/8122
Above: the cone screen from Expanded Cinema
A 2006 film, The Room of Chromatic Mystery, was shown at the Media City Festival 14 in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in March, 2008, and was awarded an Honourable Mention by the Festival jury.
A public screening to celebrate Corinne Cantrill’s 80th birthday was held at La Mama theatre, Melbourne, in 2008. The poster shows a still from The Room of Chromatic Mystery (2006):
And in his later article on August 10, summing up the Film Festival, he wrote: ‘A highlight was the dazzling Expanded Cinema performance by Australian experimental legends Corinne and Arthur Cantrill, which concluded with one half of the duo painting a black movie screen white then slicing it up with a pair of scissors.’ (Actually a stanley knife was used!)
An article by Jon Dale on the 2009 Expanded Cinema show is in ‘un.’ magazine #3.2, pages 62, 63:
http://www.unmagazine.org/?page_id=346
A screening of Cantrill 3-colour separation films was presented at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne, on Saturday, 26 September, 2009 (see http://www.acmi.net.au/oz_cantrill_3_colour.aspx) in connection with the opening of the ACMI ‘Screen Worlds’ history of film exhibition, in which a Cantrill 3-colour film is continuosly on display.
Two screenings of Cantrill films were shown at Kino Arsenal in Berlin on May 21 and 25, 2010, to celebrate the Cantrills’ 50 years of filmmaking.
http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/de/arsenal/programmtext-anzeige/article/1921/194.html?cHash=36e6120792
The Cantrills’ work is included in several film collections including those of The Royal Film Archive of Belgium, Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek (Berlin), Deutsches Filmmuseum (Frankfurt), PRÉA (Avignon), The British Council, and the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (National Film Lending Collection). Six films are in Musée national d'art moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (a screening of recently acquired Cantrill films was held at the Pompidou Musée national d'art moderne on 23 March, 2000).
Three films are in the New York Museum of Modern Art, including The Room of Chromatic Mystery (2006), acquired 2009.
In all cases, 16mm prints are held by the above. DVD copies of Cantrill films are not available.
“CHROMATIC MYSTERIES”, a CD of a selection of Arthur Cantrill’s film sound compositions, compiled by Clinton Green of Shame File Music, was launched at the ACMI Studio 1 on June 6, 2010. Cantrill films featured on the CD were shown, and also some of their silent films with sound improvisations by Robin Fox, Undecisive God, Jack Quigley and Jeremiah Rose.
A review of the event by Alice Body is in
Inpress, issue #1128, June 23, 2010, pp. 62-63.
The CD, Chromatic Mysteries, is available from record stores or from ShameFile Music:
http://ShameFileMusic.com
More details, including excerpts from the CD are posted on:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Arthur-and-Corinne-Cantrill/270612517406
and
http://www.acmi.net.au/media_chromatic_mysteries.htm
Reviews of the CD are on http://www.vitalweekly.net/736.html and in Inpress No. 1132, 21 June 2010, p. 29
An interview about the CD with Arthur Cantrill and Clinton Green from Greg Wadley’s 3CR program ‘Two to the Valley’ is on http://spill-label.org/tttv/tttv.php
And Clinton Green discusses the CD on 2MBS, Sydney: http://anonradio.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/background-noise-experimental-film-soundtracks-of-arthur-cantrill-with-clinton-green/
The Cantrills participated in duetto at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, on June 19 with a screening of seventeen of their films at the Mercury Theatre.
http://aeaf.org.au/exhibitions/10_duetto.html
UPCOMING CANTRILL EVENTS
A four-screening retrospective of 31 Cantrill films (including 2-screen works) to celebrate 50 years of filmmaking by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, curated by Jake Wilson on the theme ‘Grain of the Voice', is planned for ACMI in October, 2010. October 1: 'The Voices of Others'; October 17: 'Terra Australis'; October 24: 'Voices of Artists'; October 31: 'Harry Hooton: the Outsider Poet', with supporting short films. Further details will appear here nearer the event.
A travelling exhibition of Cantrill posters, stills, other ephemera and short films, curated by Fiona Trigg, will open at ACMI in 2011.
For a detailed chronology of past Cantrill exhibitions, screenings, lectures etc. go to EXHIBITIONS.
Other lectures and writing by Arthur Cantrill:
Colour and Cinema, a lecture on the philosophy and techniques of early colour in photography and cinema, from hand-tinting to the first integral tri-pak stocks (given at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, 2001);
The Knife of Light, on violence to the eye in surrealist cinema (see article in Cantrills Filmnotes no. #93-100);
The Machine and the Image, on mechanically derived moving two- and three-dimensional images from pre-Christian times to the dawn of cinema, as precursors of digital image-making;
Man Ray as Filmmaker, on the avant-garde films of Man Ray, and the films on which he collaborated, discussing their relationship to his painting and photography (given at National Gallery of Victoria - International, 2004);
The Absolute Truth of the Happiness Acid: the cinema, writing, painting, and kinetic sculpture of Len Lye. (Given at Monash University Museum of Art and Queensland Art Gallery in 2002.) An article by Arthur Cantrill based on the lecture: The Absolute Truth of the Happiness Acid is in issue #19 of Senses of Cinema, the online journal, at
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/19/lye.html
The Surrealist Cinema of Dusan Marek, the films of the Czech-Australian surrealist painter, from his first animation, 1952, (restored by Arthur Cantrill) to his live-action films, in relationship to his painting (given at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2003).
An article by Arthur Cantrill: A Surrealist Film Practice -- the Animated Films of Dusan Marek is in ASIFA Magazine, The International Animation Journal, Volume 21 No. 2, Winter Issue 2008.
The online journal Screening the Past, issue 15, has an article by Arthur Cantrill on Stan Brakhage at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0703/acfr15.html
Thinking About Grain of the Voice, an article by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill on their three films in the Grain of the Voice series, is in Soundscape, The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, vol. 9, no. 1, Fall/Winter 2009
http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/WFAE/journal/index.html