ARTHUR CANTRILL

LIGHT STREAM, a retrospective season to mark Arthur and Corinne Cantrills' forty years' filmmaking, and their association with La Mama Theatre in Melbourne since 1977, was presented at La Mama, August 8-12, 2001. The poster image is a frame enlargement from Bouddi (1970).

Research Activities, and Lectures by Arthur Cantrill

• Production of experimental film, with Corinne Cantrill (see Filmography,, and Bibliography on Cantrills)
• History and theory of experimental film and video art, and associated areas of performance and installation art - early and contemporary. 'Cantrills Filmnotes', review of film and video art, was co-edited and published with Corinne Cantrill from 1971 to 2000.
  An essay on 'Australian Experimental Film', co-written with Corinne Cantrill, is included in the 'Oxford Companion to Australian Cinema', 1999.
• Pre-cinema exhibition in 18th/19th century. An illustrated 2 hour lecture by Arthur Cantrill is available: 'The First Mass Media: Large Scale Display of Still and Moving Images in the 1800s', covering proto-cinema (the 360 degree panorama, the moving panorama, Daguerre's double-effect diorama, the eidophusikon, the magic lantern, etc.) in Europe, USA and Australia. This lecture has been given many times in North America, Europe, New Zealand and Australia.
  
• Early cinema. For example, a paper on the 1901 Anthropological Cinematography of Walter Baldwin Spencer is published by University of Melbourne: 'Australian and French Connections - A Century of Cinema', edited Jane Warren, Dept of French & Italian Studies, 1996, and also by Editions Nota bene, Québec: 'Le cinéma au tourant du siècle / Cinema at the Turn of the Century', edited Clair Dupré La Tour, 1998. An earlier version is in 'Cantrills Filmnotes' issue no. 37/38, 1982. An illustrated lecture by Arthur Cantrill which develops themes in the paper is available: 'The 1901 Cinematography of the Arrernte People by Walter Baldwin Spencer'.
  Other lectures by Arthur Cantrill:
  'Colour and Cinema', on the philosophy and techniques of early colour in photography and cinema, from hand-tinting to the first integral tri-pak stocks;
  'The Knife of Light', on violence to the eye in surrealist cinema (see article in 'Cantrills Filmnotes' no. #93-100);
  'The Surrealist Cinema of Dusan Marek', the films of the Czech-Australian surrealist painter, from his first animation, 1952, (restored by Arthur Cantrill) to his live-action films, in relationship to his painting (given at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2003);
  'The Machine and the Image', on mechanically derived moving two- and three-dimensional images from pre-Christian times to the dawn of cinema, as precursors of digital image-making;
  'Man Ray as Filmmaker', on the avant-garde films of Man Ray, and the films on which he collaborated, discussing their relationship to his painting and photography (given at National Gallery of Victoria - International, 2004);
  . 'The Absolute Truth of the Happiness Acid': the cinema, writing, painting, and kinetic sculpture of Len Lye. (Given at Monash University Museum of Art and Queensland Art Gallery in 2002.) An article by Arthur Cantrill based on the lecture: 'The Absolute Truth of the Happiness Acid' is in issue #19 of Senses of Cinema, the online journal, at
  http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/19/lye.html
  The online journal Screening the Past, issue 15, has an article by Arthur Cantrill on Stan Brakhage at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0703/acfr15.html
  
  

Short Biographical Note

During the 42 years Arthur and Corinne Cantrill have been working in collaboration they have made more than 150 films including 7 feature-length films. They have been active in several directions of film research, such as multi-screen projection, film-performance; single-frame structuring of film; landscape filmmaking through their interest in relating filmform to landform; and work touching on the history of film, such as the 1901 cinematography of Baldwin Spencer, their mixed media performance 'Projected Light' and the history of film technologies through their research into the three-colour separation process. Examples of their three-colour work were introduced by Arthur Cantrill in a Colour in Film congress held at the Louvre, Paris, 1995

While living in the USA from 1973-1975 their films were shown widely in North America, and they were the first Australian filmmakers to be invited to give a CINEPROBE of their work at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. (A second MoMA Cineprobe was given in 1988, and a third in March 2000.) They have exhibited very widely at film festivals, film museums and art galleries in Britain, Holland, Belgium, West Germany, New Zealand, Japan and France, where in 1983 they gave five programs of their work at the Festival d'automne à Paris. In January, 1985 they had a Retrospective series of screenings at the Musée national d'art moderne (Centre Georges Pompidou), Paris. In February, 1985 they took up a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (D.A.A.D) Cultural Award to work in West Berlin for 6 months as artists-in-residence, and while in Germany they gave screenings of their films in Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich and Osnabrück.

In 1986 and 1995 they showed The Berlin Apartment, a 2-hour double-screen film based on the material they shot in Berlin on the D.A.A.D. award at La Mama Theatre, Melbourne. It was also shown in Sydney in 1992.

In 1988 they first showed their film/performance work 'Projected Light - The Beginning and End of Cinema' at La Mama Theatre, Carlton. In 1989 this was shown at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, and in 1990 at the Vancouver Art Gallery and at the MIMA `EXPERIMENTA' exhibition in Melbourne. In 1994 they presented it in Leuven (Belgium), Berlin, Auckland, San Francisco, New York, Toronto, and at the Brisbane Film Festival.

In recent years they have worked extensively in Super 8mm, in particular making a series of Super 8 films shot in Indonesia between 1990 and 1994. This material was used in two film-performances given at La Mama Theatre, Melbourne: The Bemused Tourist, in 1997, and The Becak Driver, 1998. In 1994 the Cantrills showed their films in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Bangkok, San Francisco, New York, Toronto and Auckland. In 1995 they participated in a series of screenings at the Louvre, Paris, on colour in experimental film, showing two of their 3-colour separation films. To mark 25 years of Cantrills Filmnotes, a review of international avant-garde film and video they have edited and published since 1971, two programs of Cantrill films were given at the Sydney Film Festival, and the Melbourne Cinémathèque 1996.

During a screening/lecture tour of North America, Frankfurt and Paris in March 2000, ten shows entitled 'Chromatic Articulation' of recently completed three-colour separation films and 16mm enlargements from Super 8 of single-frame 'articulations', were given at public venues and colleges, and a lecture on Proto-cinema at five venues, including the Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt. The 'Chromatic Articulation' program was shown at La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, in May 2000. In November/December 2001 they gave 13 screenings of films they made in the last decade in 12 cities in France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, and the Czech Republic, and gave two Proto-cinema lectures. The venues included The Royal Belgian Film Archive, Nederlands Filmmuseum, Deutsches Filmmuseum, Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek's Kino-Arsenal, and Kommunales Kinos in various German cities. D.A.A.D. funded the airfares for this tour.
A program of ten of their films from 1969 to 2001 was shown at the Lisbon Biennale, Portugal, in October 2003.
Two programs were given at the OtherFilm Festival in Brisbane, 2006: a retrospective and a reconstruction of the Cantrills' 1971 Expanded Cinema show including films interacting with patterned and three-dimensional screens, and Calligraphy Contest for the New Year, a film screen transformation performance piece.
See review by Jim Knox:
http://www.realtimearts.net/rt73/knox_off.html
A recent film, The Room of Chromatic Mystery, was shown at the Media City Festival 14 in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in March, 2008, and was awarded an honourable mention by the festival jury.
http://houseoftoast.ca/mediacity/festival.html

The Cantrills' work is included in several film collections including those of The Royal Film Archive of Belgium, Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek (Berlin), Deutsches Filmmuseum (Frankfurt), PRÉA (Avignon), The British Council, and the National Library of Australia. Six films are in Musée national d'art moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (a screening of recently acquired Cantrill films was held there 23 March, 2000), and two films in the New York Museum of Modern Art.

• Filmography, Arthur Cantrill and Corinne Cantrill
• "Cantrills Filmnotes"
• Bibliography on Cantrills

Last modified 17.3.08