A selection of shorts tracing the Cantrills’ early filmmaking practice and their travels.
Making Window Pictures
Arthur & Corinne Cantrill | 1960 | Australia | 12’ | 16mm | Sound
One of the Cantrills’ earliest filmmaking efforts, documenting child’s play and the activity-based workshops held by the Creative Leisure Centres in Brisbane (through which Corinne and Arthur first met).
Footage courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.
Adventure Playground, London
Arthur & Corinne Cantrill | 1966 | Australia, UK | 6’ | 16mm | English spoken
Another film about recreation and learning, made during the Cantrills’ four-year residence in London, similarly tinctured by Herbert Read’s notions about children’s education as self-directed, creative, and free. The adventure playground provides a space in which children can shape and reimagine the environment according to their own sense of play.
Footage courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.
Home Movie: A Day in the Bush
Arthur & Corinne Cantrill | 1969 | Australia | 4’ | 16mm | Sound
The first film the Cantrills made upon their return to Australia in 1969, galvanised by their experiences with experimental cinema in Europe and their sense that the Australian landscape could be creatively generative. It is both a landscape and a children’s film: it features their two young sons as they move through a vibrant Australian bush scene.
Bouddi
Arthur & Corinne Cantrill | 1970 | Australia | 8’ | 16mm | Sound
An energetic portrait of the coastal bush of Bouddi in the outer Gosford area of New South Wales. A work of “camera calligraphy” with a single frame sequencing of images, the film richly evokes the wet summer growth, light, natural textures, and abundance.
At Eltham
Arthur & Corinne Cantrill | 1974 | Australia | 24’ | 16mm | Sound
A sombre and despairing bush film, made after the untimely death of the poet Charles Buckmaster (1951-72), to whom the film is dedicated, and shortly before the Cantrills’ move to the USA in 1973. Slow and somnambulant where Bouddi had been piquant and energised, it observes a classic but despoiled bush scene (eucalypts, acacia, melaleuca shrubs) in Eltham, an outer suburb of Melbourne. The film is haunted by a sense that they “could no longer work as filmmakers in Australia” (Corinne Cantrill).
With an introduction by Audrey Lam and Keegan O’Connor.
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