Skin of Your Eye is a major cinematic essay about the flow of time, the filmic process, and the Melbourne counter-culture scene in the early 1970s.
EN
“Skin of Your Eye is a major cinematic essay about the flow of time, the filmic process, and the Melbourne counter-culture scene in the early 1970s. The film was projected in various formats over the years and presented at EXPRMNTL 5 in Knokke, Belgium (1974). We show the single-screen version on the print preserved at the Royal Belgian Film Archive. Arthur and Corinne Cantrill described how each sequence of Skin of Your Eye is concerned with a particular aspect of the process: ‘the relationship of projector, screen, camera, the film strip of the positive or negative, the coloured gelatin, the film frame, the projector gate, the projector lens, the projected image of the screen and the blackness around… colour and lack of colour, black-and-white, negative and positive, over and underexposure.’”
Courtisane programme notes
“The hegemonistic and historicist frameworks of experimental film and the infinite contestations about the acceptance or rejection of medium specificity means that uneven developments and cultural peculiarities away from the centres in North America and Western Europe are rarely accounted for. A typical example are the Cantrills, whose films do not feature in the canons of postwar experimental film unlike their transatlantic contemporaries, or within considerations of ‘other modernisms’ which is typically reserved for the so-called Global South. On top of that, these films veer closer to the formalist distinction of the two avant-gardes as defined by Peter Wollen (if for a moment, one were to ignore the shaky premise of Wollen’s formulation, as if either of the political or the formal can be self-contained), an uncomfortable category that always struggled to find its rightful place between art and cinema, that in the present moment, is out of favour with film and visual culture worldwide. If autonomy of art was the old bourgeois ideal, the neoliberal mantra is to claim art as a means to act upon the world [sic]. One romantic ideal displaced by another. As a result, the proliferation of moving images in gallery spaces today is dominated by documentary-adjacent films and in our post-medium condition, the materialist ethos of the 1960s generation is anathematized. You might still not be as hard pressed to walk into a Helen Frankenthaler or a Brice Marden exhibit; after all painting, especially American, can rise and prevail above trends, and is afforded a degree of heterogeneity that moving images inside and outside of art contexts are not. This blame is shared by a combination of factors: the anxiety of our present moment towards the question of form, deterministic notions of the ‘other’, and, the romantic allusions and spurious claims of autonomy that continues to plague the discourse around historical experimental films. The anxiety of form is the revenge of the present on late modernism for its anxiety of meaning.”
Arindam Sem1
“Over a period of more than 60 years now, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill have created a filmic cosmos that is unrivaled in its polymorphic experimental visual and tonal abundance. Their works range from documentaries to experimental films, from multi-screen installations to performances and sound art. Between 1971 and 2000, they also edited and published Cantrill Filmnotes, an international journal about experimental film, video and the applied arts. Their oeuvre explores artists, social movements and particularly Australia’s landscape. The partly structural approach of their films transcends itself by highlighting the sensory aspect of the cinematic experience and seeking ways of revealing this and making it palpable in their works. The Cantrills’ keen interest in the relationship between landscape and the form of film soon led to a more profound conception of the Australian landscape as a part of Indigenous heritage and environment. The political dimension of the films illuminates their determined appreciation. ‘We are interested in a continuing dialogue between content and form. We also see this synthesis of landscape and film form as bringing together our attitudes as citizens to the conservation of land, forests and, seashore, and to Indigenous land rights. We have no difficulty in sharing the Indigenous belief that the landscape is the repository of the spiritual life of this continent.’ (Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, 1982) Their artistic interest in technological approaches in film, film theory and reflections in film history led them to explore two and three-color separation extensively, resulting in some of the most beautiful works to use the medium of film to create a sensory realm of experience. Their oeuvre breathes a free spirit that is both beguiling and contemplative.”
Arsenal Institut für Film und Videokunst programme notes
- 1Arindam Sem, “Familiar Unknowns: The Cantrills,” Sabzian, 14 May 2025.
