Arthur Cantrill and Corinne Cantrill (born in Sydney, Australia, in 1938 and 1928 respectively) have made more than a hundred films since 1960. Their work covers different forms and genres: documentary, experimental cinema, expanded cinema, performance and sound art. They meet in the late fifties in Brisbane and since then they share a long and prolific personal and artistic relationship. His first films are educational documentaries for children about nature, literature and art: short films in 16 mm that lead them to experiment with image and sound and to be interested in the abstract potential of cinema. After spending a season in Europe and making a few documentary and experimental films, on their return to Australia they develop a set of works that investigate perception, the possibilities of color, refilmation and multiprojection. It is a period of great experimentation in which Arthur and Corinne Cantrill begin to question the traditional projection space, introducing performative aspects and different forms of screens. In those years also appear the Cantrills Filmnotes, an independent magazine dedicated to experimental cinema and contemporary arts, published by filmmakers between 1971 and 2000. Adopting from the beginning artisanal procedures, its filmic practice results from a research work on the history of art. cinema, of a rigorous interrogation on the photo-chemical nature of the film, and of the study of the forms of the Australian landscape made from the cinema, making correspond the forms of nature with the filmic forms. Also investigating the formal possibilities of the separation of colors, the Cantrills have managed to create with their images unusual visions of the world. Each of his films is based on a research on cinematographic technique.
“The Cantrills are artists concerned mainly with seeing, not with seeing from an ideology to perceive social and political realities, but with seeing through the eyes, in order to discover the wonders of vision. His films observe familiar objects and re-perceive them for us, recreate them in a way that reveals their textures, shapes, lights and movements”. Andrew Pike
“Corinne Cantrill described in a publication of the Cantrills Filmnotes her film practice as "a kind of family cottage industry" (...). Embracing a somewhat romantic commitment to avant-garde art, with its connotations of something solitary, unappreciated, misunderstood, marginal, besieged or prophetic, (...), the Cantrills have been truly independent. This independence is accompanied by a certain anti-academicism: a tendency to value sensory experience and manual work more than theoretical analysis and erudition. (...) As for their method of production: they work alone, in their way of distribution and exhibition: they accompany and personally introduce their work in intimate places that they select; and in terms of the type of films they make: they are reprocessed images of uninhabited landscapes”. Freda Freiberg
May 30th, 19h- The Second Journey (To Uluru) (1981), 16mm, colour, sound, 74 min
*Screening introduced by Celeste Araújo
May 31st, 18h- Harry Hooton (1969-70), 16mm, colour, optical sound, 83 min
*Screening introduced by Celeste Araújo and Oriol Sánchez
Screening format: HD (New digital transferby the Australian Centre for the Moving Image supervised by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill. Copy courtesy of Arsenal)
Special thanks to Arthur and Corinne Cantrill
Cineinfinito #88: Arthur & Corinne Cantrill (I)Cineinfinito #89: Arthur & Corinne Cantrill (II)
