Unpublished writing on Cantrill films from two letters, Jochen Brunow review, and a review from Libération
A letter from Mike Hoolboom, following his screening tour of Australia, ca 2003 . . .
Dear Arthur and Corinne,
It was nice to see you at home after all this time corresponding – incredible house you live in – and just wanted to write to thank you for sharing your work. It was very inspiring, coherent and strong – your Waterlall film ranks with the very best landscape films made anywhere anytime, a very beautiful, poetic evocation of these watery onrush, its prismatic outbreaks never appearing garish or superfluous, but emerging instead as integral moments of wonder, as if the light contained or reflected in this water exceeded its simply natural presentation, leaking out into rainbows both seductive and deadly. Its rigorous framing re-viewing this spectacle and managed to draw out both its allure and its danger somehow, converting the falls by film's end to shrieks of light, these veils become a curtain of luminous descent that was so Other, so beyond human cope, that is joined wonder and terror. There is an honesty in this encounter that is very moving and to be able to share this openness is a real gift. The same holds true for Warrah which looks as if it were shot on a tropical moon, its opening passages especially strong, its landscape subject somehow turning beneath this just-right view into something resembling metaphor, the whole trembling with a hidden life these new colours only hint at, there is an animism here, a granting of life or unveiling of it in these ancient stalks which hover above their watery reflection, their double, as if in anticipation of the moment when these two will merge, unholy union of shadow and living double, and together spawn a new race of nightmares.
Floterian seemed for me to be a film concerned with mortality, with the fragility of events, and of a fleeting memory, here the film strip tries to contain itself, to arrest memory which is cascading past, streaming over the eyes in a gesture evoking touch, of all those memories by the body which will not be held at one remove by the eyes, but which enters fully formed into the body's perimeter, these eruptions miming the alleged flashback which occurs in the moment before dying, a synoptic review which prompts a thousand others in the mind, and so races in parallel against The End. It is an incomplete film, firstly because it requires and is waiting for death to finish it, finish with us all, and secondly because it requires its viewer to race alongside, adding their own understandings to those already raised to light. The most troubling and in some ways the most interesting film you showed me was Negative/Positive on Three Images by Baldwin Spencer. Troubling because it so obviously replays the colonialist tendencies in the original footage, but does so as an image of an image, calling attention to its own processes of re-play and containment The light here is beautiful, the earth stammering and shimmering beneath an aboriginal walk as if called to witness, the whole frame seizing with the attempt to contain these rites. The same animism (am I using the right word?) that's at work in Warrah seems practised again here, only this time on the level of the emulsion, which breathes silver into these old ghosts, the shudder of a continent being given over to its own image for the first time. A fascinating meta-ethnography, it recalled for me Minh-ha's Reassemblage film – I don't know whether you've seen it – which is infinitely more Brakhage-Iike than your film – but shares with it a keen identification with the image (as opposed to what's in it), and a gentle irony about its mode of presentation. And then of course there was In This Life's Body, a very brave and moving account of your life Corinne. The motion picture frame was wonderful, your lying prone on that unearthly beach, a body waiting to be re-storied, to name itself on these banks, and then irresistible flow of photos. The first reel was the bluntest, most open and honest for me, it seemed the nub of the film, that these parental origins should be revisited with the clarity and unsparing acuity of hindsight, one fairly feels the weight of the present being returned to these times, and this double time, the time of the viewing and the times depicted in the photos is a dynamic the film plays with wonderfully, it is a divide between eye and mouth, between naming and showing which the film seals in its viewer who is conjured to reconstruct these fragments. A powerfully personal film – and had of course already spoken to many who spoke of it in that tone of voice reserved for moments that cut straight to the nerve ends, that it has already meant much for folks, and it's obvious why.
So that's the end of my little film review. I realize I saw just a fraction of what you've managed to produce these many years, . . . I guess I wished that I'd found you happier, that all of these strands of vision might have allowed you some kind of I don't know serenity amongst the noise and haste. Experimental film in australia, like X film just about everywhere, seems a small and specialized concern, and sure it attracts its share of hangers-on, show boaters , one-timers like everything else –ultimately though all the infighting means that the big roads stay clear for the foreign moguls – maybe it's the way it'll always be but me, i'm too tired to fight everybody now -have already witnessed the toll its taken on people like AI (Razutis) and many others – and mostly they just get tired and quit -and then everybody loses. Anyways, hope you're able to soldier on somehow. Best of luck with all,
Mike
A note by Australian filmmaker Ken Shepherd, from a letter, April 2000:
It was good to see you both (in Paris at the Centre Pompidou in March 2000) and the two programs. I was amazed by the diversity and the invention. The parametric beauty of Heat Shimmer, and all the works shown, in fact, fuses aesthetically and structurally the medium with the image content in a unique reflective and poetic manner.
I was truck by the strange marriage your work has with the spirit, the living experience of being in Australia. ‘Place’ is the truly distinctive feature of Art. Your lives, your house, etc., have become a Proustian saga, it seems to me, pertinent to us all. It is what I had forgotten, let slide out of my consciousness. For me, on watching your work, I felt revitalized, as well as being aware of ‘film’ and its illusive beauty – its dream-like ‘nature’, shadows
(See Cantrills Filmnotes #69/70 for more on Ken Shepherd, and most issues between #67/68 and 93/100 for more on Mike Hoolboom.)
BERLINALE 1982
by Jochen Brunow, from Filme, No. 13, 1982
translated from the German by Cynthia Beatt.
Without showing more than rocks, stones, dust, plants, trees, flowers, the film The Second Journey (to Uluru) by Corinne and Arthur Cantrill, succeeds in creating a continent on which one has never set foot. It takes you into the innermost, the heart of a landscape.
Uluru, as the Aborigines named this monolith in the middle of the Central Australian desert, was one of their places of worship before they fled deeper into the bush in the face of tourism. ‘Where we intrude, they withdraw; where we are, they are not’, is one of the few short off-screen commentaries – more than simply a description of a physical state of being there or not being there. The eye of the camera is directed solely on the formation of rocks, minerals, on the sparse vegetation. Formally it remains on the surface. The purely physical attributes of this place are registered with a natural scientific precision and precisely through this reduction a film arises whose subject is philosophy. Sounds and images compare a musical-visual discourse about the powers of the landscape, the state of matter.
The innermost, the heart of a landscape. This metaphorical image arises from the idea of a middle, an organising centre. The film itself goes still further; it not only pushes man away from the centre, but also allows objects their differentiation. Space is not presented as being geometric, or as being temporal (a chronological time element), but rather as a network, woven. The film shows things and is amongst them. It takes the way of multiplicity ‘which realises itself and does not think itself’*, and shows us another world.
*John Cage
Article from Libération, Paris, October 22, 1983, by Chantal Aubry:
CINEMA
Bush à oreille
Deux cinéastes marginaux et australiens sont alles filmer les Aborigènes. Ils sont revenus avec des effets optiques et sonores en tous genres. L'affaire est dans la poche!
Arthur et Corinne Cantrill son australiens et un peu fadas. Deux choses les intéressent dans la vie, les Aborigènes et le cinéma expérimental. Depuis bientôt quinze ans, ils associent l'un aux autres avec une belle constance, parcourant les terres du desert d’Australie centrale et celles du Nord, la caméra à la main, ce qui dans leur cas est rien moins qu’un-effet de style, Leur mérite est à la mesure de l’immensité des territoires sillonnés, d’autant plus qu’il leur à fallu d'abord vaincre la méfiance des Abos eux-mêmes et, plus encore, se passer de toute aide de la part des autorités qui ignorent souvelainement leur travail.
Huit de leurs films ont été reunis par le Festival d’Automne. On peut les voir actuellement à Beaubourg. Longueurs diverses, de 8 (Bouddi) à 117 minutes (Grain of the voice), pour une même recherche. L’idée est de parvenir à rendre par une forme filmique appropriée la fascination qu’exercent les étranges paysages du ‘bush’ australien, lieux infinis et comme immémoriaux, où tout peut devenir signifiant, arbres, rocs, sables, terre rouge, passages montagneux, grottes, ouvertures, eau. Et traduire si possible le rapport entre le lieu et l’homme.
Point de départ: le son. Chants d’oiseaux (assez extraordinaires, comme dans Katatjuta) et chants de diverses tribus (les Pitjantjatjara d’Australie centrale—comme on vous le dit—ou les habitants d’Arnhem Land, au Nord), enregistrés en continuité et en son généralement non synchrone.
Toute l’affaire est dès lors dans le travail sur l’image, très humble par rapport au son et, à la fois, complètement folle: sélection et manipulation des différentes couches de la pellicule séparation des trois couleurs (dans Warrah, Bouddi, Grain of the voice, etc), travail sur le son optique, utilisation d’un copieur optique et de l’altération d’images anciennes (dans Reflections on three images by Baldwin Spencer, le fameux anthropologue du début du siècle), etc. Dans Katatjuta, le résultat est étonnant, l’image rejoignant parfois l’art japonais de l’estampe. Autre effet majeur: la répétitivité, un minimalisme absolu en liaison directe avec les chants eux-mêmes. Les Cantrill suivent la leçon des Abos: avancer en se répétant sans cesse et sans cesse en différant. C’est une déambulation somnambulique à la Werner Herzog, mais sans le tape-à-l’oeil.
Chantal AUBRY
Films d'Arthur et Corinne Cantrill, Beaubourg, petite salle, deux programmes, l’un samedi, l’autre dimanche. De 12 à 14H. 277 12 33.
LIBERATION • SAMEDI 22 ET DIMANCHE 23 OCTOBRE 1983 page 31