Moving Statics: The Films of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill (I)

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.