Series of films May 18th-20th and June 1st 2025 at iMAL (Brussels), Art Cinema OffOff (Gent) and Cinematek (Brussels).
CINEMA PARENTHÈSE #45 and iMAL present MOVING STATICS: THE FILMS OF ARTHUR AND CORINNE CANTRILL.
Over a period of fifty years, Arthur (1938-) and Corinne Cantrill (1928-2025) started their extraordinary filmmaking careers in 1960, and has been two of the most significant and productive figures in the history of experimental cinema. They have collaborated on more than 150 films and their work is an intimate, highly formal, and breathtakingly cinematic exploration of the Australian landscape, their immediate domestic and working environments, the material qualities of the cinema, and key artistic influences on their work and life. The Cantrills´ have been active in several directions of film research, such as documentary, experimental film, expanded cinema, film-performance, sound art (field recording, musique concrète, electroacoustic, electronic music, and so on), and landscape filmmaking (through their interest in relating filmform to landform). But the Cantrills are probably most well-known for their research into the three-color separation process in which they deal with the primary colors in light: red, green and blue (and their complementaries, cyan, magenta and yellow). The three-color separation process consists of that they are shooting the same scene three times on black and white negative: first with a red filter, second with a green, and finally with a blue filter. Afterwords they print these three strips onto one strip of color film stock using the equivalent printer light color for each superimposition.
During a period of 30 years (1971-2000), they published the important film magazine Cantrills Filmnotes that they produced independently.
Curated by Keegan O’Connor, Audrey Lam and Daniel A. Swarthnas
In collaboration with Art Cinema OffOff and Courtisane.
Cinema Parenthèse is a collective of writers, programmers and filmmakers that organizes experimental film screenings and dialogues in Brussels. Current members are Wendy Evan, Els van Riel, Nicky Hamlyn, Daniel A. Swarthnas, Arindam Sen and Erwin van't Hart.
Moving Statics: The Films of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill (I)
Sunday May 18th, 2025, 19:00, iMAL (Brussels)
Part I
- Introduction by Audrey Lam and Keegan O’Connor
- Making Window Pictures (1960, 16mm, b&w, sound, 12'00)
In the Brisbane Creative Leisure Centre, conducted by the Cantrills, children are shown reproductions of stained glass windows and then make large transparent pictures with black paper, colored cellophane, and other materials such as discarded x-ray pictures and textured fabric, with a minimum of instruction. These are taken indoors and fastened to window panes. Smaller children make faces out of the same materials, and add bodies cut out of paper, before attaching them to the limbs of a tree, where they flutter in the wind.
- Adventure Playground, London (1966, 16mm, b&w, sound, 6'40)
A 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, where activities are built around tall forest trees, provides a space in which children can shape and reimagine the environment according to their own sense of play. A non-narrative film blending music and playground noises in its soundtrack.
- Home Movie A Day In The Bush (1969, 16mm, color/b&w, sound, 4'00)
This film is made up of repetitions of movements - within the frame, moving away from the frame, or facing the camera - punctuated by a 360° panoramic shot. Home Movie explores a given space, even as it makes reference to diary film in its use of repetition. By continually crossing the field of vision, the two characters reinforce the sense of its depth. At the beginning, they are simply two points within a wide shot, while at the end one of their faces occupies the entire frame.
- At Eltham A Metaphor On Death (197374, 16mm, color, sound, 24'00)
This film was shot at Eltham, Victoria, and it is a study of two classic Australian bush views: the river seen through gum trees and the hills covered uniformly in Eucalypts. It is a film of stillness: it evokes the sense that one has in the bush of responding to a slower more natural life rhythm.
On a formal level the film is an investigation of the possibilities of manually playing the mechanical functions of the Bolex camera: the fade mechanism, the focus and the lens aperture in order to change the light, color and definition of the landscape. Through a broken, irregular series of glimpses of a heavily timbered landscape, seen through varying degrees of light intensity as the camera shutter is opened and closed, the film presents a lyrical assembly of light and dark, of brilliant sunshine and heavy shadows. The natural rhythms of time, in the divisions between day and night, are broken, condensed and rearranged by the camera. Throughout this process, our perception of the landscape alters radically as the volume of light received by our eyes is manipulated.
Part II
- Earth Message (1970, 16mm, color, sound, 23'00)
Earth Message reflect on the Australian bush filmed in the winter around the inland mountains and hills near Canberra. With the accumulation of carefully layered images and choreographed camera movement, the film is the Cantrill's personal response upon returning to the Australian landscape after four year in London. The soundtrack consists of Aboriginal music from the Northern Territory.
- Ocean At Point Lookout (197677, 16mm, color, sound, 46'00)
During our final visit to Stradbroke Island, Queensland where we had filmed in the early sixties, we were appalled at the impact of laissez-faire tourism on the landscape (terrorism against nature) and the sand mining in the dunes. We directed the camera it to sea and kept it there.
Ocean at Point Lookout begins with single frame frozen moments of the ocean surface building up to full ocean movement, a suggestion of the evolution of the ocean from 'atoms' of light. Several strategies are then used which are explored in the following films including the use of long expanses of image and soundtrack durations, the manipulation of the relationship between a particular image and sound, or silence, 'testing' the sounds against an image and playing with the expectations that a viewer brings to a film, in this regard. Moods of the sea, storms, calm days, sunsets, night, are related to the changing image quality, achieved by shooting on a variety of film stocks. Given scenes are viewed through three standard camera lenses to observe the different information contributed by each lens. The camera repeatedly returns to the horizon as a constant element in the changing conditions of weather and light.
Moving Statics: The Films of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill (II)
Monday May 19th, 2025, 20:00, Art Cinema OffOff (Gent)
Introduction by Audrey Lam, Keegan O’Connor and Anthony Brynaert
- Waterfall (1984, 16mm, color, sound, 17'00)
Like a lucid dream, the movements of the water in Waterfall meld into a metaphorical space of constant transformation, which transcends the real and makes palpable the unbridled force of nature. It is one of the Cantrills’ most famous films and offers a unique viewing experience thanks to its brilliant interlacing of form, subject and apparatus. (Angelika Ramlow)
- At Uluru (1977, 16mm, color, sound, 80'00)
Ayers Rock is examined in the light of its ancient human and animal associations. It is seen under various light effects which create different color and texture impressions. The timelessness of the monolith is suggested by negative color, the result of using fine-grain Eastmancolor print stock in the camera, a slow speed material which required the intense Central Australian light for adequate exposure. A half-speed recording of the local bird call and insects contributes to the sense of cross eras. Human perception of time, color and sound is questioned. As Einstein said: 'The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.'
Curated by Keegan O’Connor, Audrey Lam and Anthony Brynaert
Moving Statics: The Films of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill (III)
Thuesday May 20th, 2025, 20:00, Art Cinema OffOff (Gent)
Arthur and Corinne Cantrill didn't show their own work at the famed EXPRMNTL 4 festival of 1967/68 at KnokkeleZoute, but they attended this edition and considered it to be “life-changing”: “at that time… the most important event in our filmmaking lives.”
Both Robert Nelson and Gunvor Nelson featured films were shown at EXPRMNTL 4 and they left a profound impact on the Cantrills – they would, many years later, still recall the importance of seeing these works. The festival represented such a decisive moment in the Cantrills’ careers as filmmakers as it provided the nudge that they needed to dedicate themselves more totally to an experimental film practice.
Like the Cantrills, the filmic beginnings of Robert and Gunvor Nelson can be traced to the home movies they made together as husband and wife in the early 1960s. They would go on to make work solo or within other partnerships, e.g. with another married couple, William and Dorothy Wiley.
Introduction by Audrey Lam, Keegan O’Connor and Anthony Brynaert
- Fog Pumas (Gunvor Nelson & Dorothy Wiley, 1967, 16mm, color/b&w, sound, 25'00)
Fog Pumas, a fantastical and hallucinatory film populated by strange figures, represents something of a departure in Gunvor’s work and its skewering of domestic life. It won her and Dorothy Wiley a Knokke festival prize.
- The Great Blondino (Robert Nelson, 1967, 16mm, color/b&w, sound, 42'00)
Another festival winner was Robert Nelson’s short The Grateful Dead, but it was his The Great Blondino (made with William Wiley), which also screened there, that he thought better deserved that recognition. Blondino follows a young, wandering, daydreaming naif on risky adventures, “living at great risk for the beauty of it.”
- Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, 1968, 16mm, b&w, sound, 30'00)
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska is an idiosyncratic documentary about the eponymous Vorticist artist, studying his key sculptures in the Tate Britain and their formal attributes according to changes in motion and light.
- Red Stone Dancer (Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, 1968, 16mm to digital file, b&w, sound, 5'00)
Red Stone Dancer studies one of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s most famous sculptures – with offbeat camera movements and an offbeat rhythm, enhanced by Arthur’s electronic soundtrack.
In both films in this program, the Cantrills were finding new liberating possibilities for their cinema – “celebrating that we were abandoning the limitations of the documentary form.”
Curated by Keegan O’Connor, Audrey Lam and Anthony Brynaert
Skin Of Your Eye
Sunday June 1, 2025, Cinematek (Brussels)
- Skin Of Your Eye (1973, 16mm, color, sound, 116'00)
A series of fifteen film essays on Melbourne and its counter culture from October 1971 until mid 1973: masses, crowds in the streets, traffic, large gatherings of people for political, religious, cultural events; TV newscasts – the tide of humanity being the matrix from which the alternative movement arose. From these masses emerge individuals: friends and family, coworkers, filmmakers, poets. A play between the quotidian and the particular.