The cinema of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill is spoken about more frequently than it is seen. When spoken about, discussion tends to alight upon the work’s difficulty of access and what makes it so little seen: a hardline commitment from the filmmakers to the medium of 16mm film, to film as film. This commitment has meant that, outside of the print storeroom in their home in country Victoria, Australia, the work survives only in a handful of international archives. Exhibitions of the prints remain relatively rare.

As stories do, the film-only story about the Cantrills gets a little caught up in its own mythos. Digital editions have, in fact, existed of some of the works for a number of years now—some of these to the Cantrills’ chagrin, some with their sanction. In This Life’s Body (1984) is now included in university courses about the seminal works of Australian cinema, owing to lecturer-filmmaker Margot Nash’s championing of the film and her use of university funds to have it digitised in 2018 (a process Nash supervised with the Cantrills’ approval). Arsenal Berlin have also overseen the digitisation of several Cantrills prints—most notably, a restoration of the Second Journey (to Uluru) (1981) which premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2019. One who has come to know the Cantrills only by hearsay may also be surprised to read Cantrills Filmnotes, the magazine Arthur and Corinne edited and published independently for nearly thirty years, and to find how persistently receptive it is to various new developments in experimental moving image culture beyond the small-gauge film. This includes the video work of Nam June Paik (a decisive influence), Steina and Woody Valsulka, and Peter Campus, intermedial works and performances by Jud Yalkut and Bo McCarver, or new digital media compositions by Steven Ball.

However, there is ultimately truth in the grapevine: it was to the material image of 16mm and (later) Super 8 that the Cantrills dedicated their filmmaking lives. What they opposed in cinematic developments of the later twentieth century was not so much video or digital media in themselves, as is sometimes recounted, but a ‘confusing’ of the different audiovisual forms. ‘It is inevitable,’ Arthur said, ‘that there is some overlapping of technique and even creative work in film and video, but it is the expediency of showing on video programmes that have originated on film, that are photochemical and not electronic images, which we are quietly fighting against.’ (The dissonances between the film and the video image are explored in the Cantrills’ 1971 short, Video Self-Portrait.) As such, their dedication to exploring the unique and yet to be realised potentials of analogue film did have the aura of an oppositional project: in their view, the potentials of the photochemical image were being slighted by the widespread misreading of the electronic image as its successor.

In their ‘Cinema Manifesto’, the piece which opened the very first edition of the Filmnotes in 1971, the Cantrills stated that all that matters in their films is the ‘matter of film’. For them, working with a tactile image was crucial to their goal of producing cinema that simply was—that was not notional or a representation of something, but was a sensuous, impervious thing in itself:

“Our films have no story because all the stories have been told and retold, on the grey pages of literature until they are meaningless, like a word repeated again and again. They have been dissected, analyzed in the morgues of the Universities. We want to make films which defy analysis, which present a surface so clean, so hard, that it defies the dissector’s blade.”

Beyond just spurning the narrative conventions of mainstream cinema, the Cantrills’ manifesto bears similarity to structural-materialist polemics of their British contemporaries like Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Gidal. After all, it is not just the script-driven projects of Hollywood but the very concept of literary mediation (allegory, symbol, metaphor, analogy, concept) that the Cantrills are apparently jettisoning as filmmakers here. In his piece ‘Against Metaphor’ (more dialectical experiment than manifesto), Gidal wrote about metaphor as a way of creating that is principally invested in conserving what has been previously said and previously known and in estranging us from the ‘real’ and ‘true’ with its incessant ‘illusion of more’: it is a constant ‘removal … in relation to things, objects of the world’. He envisioned a living cinema that can ‘relinquish those unnecessary fictions’ and escape the totalising grips of metaphor. In truth, says Gidal, there is ‘no likeness’; there is ‘no recovery’.

From one point of view, the Cantrills are exemplary practitioners of the ‘literal’ and thingy cinema that Gidal champions, creating images that are startling in their vibrant immediacy. One can think, for example, of the profusions of Bouddi (1970), where a roving, bodily camera creates (as in the films of Marie Menken) a rush of experience that keeps us within its instant moment, thwarting retrospection and association. This sense of rush is equally pivotal to Waterfall (1984) with its static camera fusing into the flow. And then there is the quasi-documentary Second Journey (to Uluru), in which the imaginative ‘capture’ or figuration of Uluru (which was then more commonly referred to under its white-settler misnomer, Ayers Rock) breaks down in the face of the structure’s looming magnificence, a form which is so alive in its unlikeness to anything that it seems to bar even documentary representation. Compellingly, this brings into view the inadequacy of the metaphors—straggling, corrupted, exploitative metaphors—that underpin Australia’s colonial history and the European capture of the land.

Yet to watch the Cantrills’ work is not simply to be within the world of sediments and acids, but within inter-stitched seams of fiction and reality and the ‘difficulty of what it is to be’, to borrow Wallace Stevens’s phrase. Their films often ingrain themselves within metaphors and analogies, exploring what access they permit and what they obstruct. This, too, is key to the Second Journey, where associations proliferate even as they are found desperately wanting. For example, the Cantrills find in the material degradation of their film stock (discussed in Corinne’s voiceover narration) an analogy of compromise, a compromised analogy: a way to ‘frame’ their experience of Uluru and their film about it. More than this, observing the changing light on the monolith throughout the course of the day provides them with productive metaphors for their own practice of projected light and sculpted image. That is, content and form interact, and the near-unimaginable rock is felt to be informing the shapes of the film in a way that is at once palpable and entirely mysterious. (The alternative title of the film was The Practice of Filmmaking.) Maybe, then, it is best to think about metaphor in the Cantrills’ work not just as a ‘removal’ from the material world but as a living thing, related in some way to the worldly processes of metamorphosis and transference that their creative work engages. ‘Movement,’ said Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, another of their influences, ‘is the translation of life.’

An interesting instance of metaphor-making is found in At Eltham (1974), a remarkable film that engages with a bush scene in an outer suburb of Melbourne. The film’s subtitle is A Metaphor on Death, which might point to the emblematic, dream-like nature of the scene that our melancholic filmmaker (Corinne, the camerawoman and the principal agent behind this film) observes. There, the dream-machine of the camera becomes an extension of the filmmaker’s wearied body, catching the slow rise and fall of her breath and seeing through her blinking eyes as she seems to waver in and out of consciousness. (The original title of the work was On Closing One’s Eyes on the Native Land. Corinne made the blinking eye effect by, in her words, ‘perform[ing]’ on the Bolex and its shutter and aperture controls.) Through this languid gaze, the trees, the river, and the human figures recorded become somewhat distant and illusive. Yet by looking at the scene so sombrely, through the lens and the metaphor of death, something else comes through—the piercing sounds of the bellbirds, the warmth of the afternoon light, the unseen bodies of the camera and camerawoman, all seem to take on a new tenor of solidity and presence. Illusion and reality intertwine.

At Eltham elegiacally closes out the series of Australian bush films the Cantrills made between their return from Europe in 1969 and their temporary relocation to the USA in 1973. But it also anticipates Corinne’s In This Life’s Body, made some ten years later. The assertions of the body, and the hardiness and intensity of the spirit, that mark that later autobiographical work (made in her mid-fifties) are also there in the earlier film (made in her mid-forties) with its otherwise world-weary sense of devastation. Both are distinguished by a determination to confront mortality and to make creative analogies out of it—to find new life-sustaining possibilities and metaphors to work by, at the edge of ruin.

As Arthur Cantrill said back in 1981, there is something fundamentally altered and lost when translating the photochemical image into another format, a vanishing of context and origin in the electronic reproduction. But, as film conservationists (and digitisation technicians) know all too well, there is a continuous losing and forfeiture also in making and exhibiting something so prone to rupture and deterioration as is analogue film. In creating a living, physical ‘body’ of work, the Cantrills face up to this reality over and over again, with films which repeatedly insinuate themselves within the fragility that energises the material world.

Audrey Lam and I are therefore very pleased to have the opportunity to present this programme of ‘moving statics’ in their fragile 16mm celluloid formats, the first exhibition of the Cantrills’ films in Britain since the 1980s. In screening these prints, new audiences are invited to be within the volatility of life that the Cantrills made a part of their work—to share space and time, while we can, with the worlds and the films that we are losing.

Dedicated to Corinne Cantrill (1928-2025).

Keegan O’Connor