Over a period of fifty years, Australian filmmaking couple Arthur (1938-) and Corinne Cantrill (1928-2025) sought to discover new visual languages and new ways of accessing and rendering landscape through the medium of 16mm film. Their vast body of work – encompassing documentary and experimental film, multi-screen installation, performance, and sound art – repeatedly stages “journeys” into unfamiliar terrain, investigating the creative feedback between environment and art, landform and film-form, shape and light.  

Having met while working in children’s education in Brisbane in the late 1950s, the Cantrills moved to London with their young sons in 1965, where Arthur worked as a film editor and a sound producer for the BBC. During the couple’s time in Europe, they made a number of formally inventive documentaries about children and artists, and (after attending the famed EXPRMNTL 4 festival of 1967/68 in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium) determinedly took up an experimental film practice. Upon returning to Australia, they commenced a period of vital collaborative output, making seminal works about the Australian scene and the native landscape. They also started publishing their legendary film magazine, Cantrills Filmnotes, which they produced independently for some thirty years (1971-2000). 

The Cantrills’ work is held in major international archives and galleries, including the Royal Film Archive of Belgium (Brussels), Arsenal (Berlin), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne), the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (Canberra), and MoMA (New York). They were the first Australian subjects of MoMA’s Cineprobe series in 1975, with two further retrospectives in 1988 and 2000. This retrospective at Open City tracks their travels and movements as filmmakers – the development of their innovative practice at the cross-section of cinema, photography, sound design, and performance. 

The Death of Metaphor / The Metaphor of Death: On The Cantrills, a new text on the films of the Cantrills by Keegan O’Connor written to accompany this programme is available to read on our site here.

Curated by Audrey Lam and Keegan O’Connor. 

With thanks to the Cantrill family, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Arsenal, Light Cone and the Australian High Commission in the United Kingdom.