Arindam Sen

Through a mix of cultural neglect and self-absorption, experimental cinema has often remained outside vital contemporary discourses, for better or worse. Take for example its most towering figure, Stan Brakhage. Between the late 1950s and early 2000s, in nearly twenty films dealing with animals, Brakhage, more radically than anyone else, rendered amorphous the distinctions between looking and being looked at, subject and perception, human and non-human. Yet his work is rarely addressed from this vantage point. Surveying the repertoire of experimental and artists’ films for animal presence inevitably brings up many other formidable names. The most atypical figure who might feature in such a hypothetical catalogue could be the Berlin based experimental filmmaker Karl Kels, whose fascination with the zoological inspires both awe and admiration.

The story of the Australian couple Corinne and Arthur Cantrill ought to have been a famed one in the history of experimental film. Working in the modernist tradition with a strong materialist conviction, the Cantrills, who started out making documentaries, systematically probed the indexical possibilities of film as a medium from their removed geolocation in Australia. Their names might be familiar to aficionados of experimental film, but chances are that unless one has travelled down under, they wouldn’t have encountered a large corpus of their artistic production.