Corinne Cantrill’s sole-authored, autobiographical feature, in which she traces her life story through a series of photographs and probes the relationships between body and image, cinema and photography, the moving and the static. While the film’s visual palette is largely made up of black-and-white images from the late 1920s onwards, In This Life’s Body also opens with newly filmed shots of the filmmaker’s naked body lying near a lake. There, her voiceover recounts the occasion for making this film: a health crisis she had recently suffered, for which doctors had recommended immediate surgery. Cantrill describes how she had rebuffed the medical advice, “sens[ing] in their attitudes undertones to do with male power and revenge on women’s erotic bodies”: “This disturbed her greatly. The integrity of the body was vital.” The film thus offers itself as a study of the body that leaves its integrity intact. Instead of surgical intervention or anatomisation, it is the scanned image, replete with veiled secrecy, which is harnessed as a means of self-revelation.

Footage courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.