Familiar Unknowns: The Cantrills

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. Together they made over 150 films and realized several multi-screen expanded cinema projects, some combined with live performances. Add to that their Cantrills Filmnotes, a film magazine that for nearly three decades (1971-2000) mapped the evolution of independent film and video in Australia and abroad. Arthur is also a sound artist, who drew upon developments in the spheres of musique concrète, electroacoustic and electronic music to elaborately compose and mix the soundtracks for many of their films. By all means, the Cantrills, more than anyone else, geographically broadened the horizon of experimental film history from its mooring in North America and Western Europe. 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.

Beginnings, and then Knokke 
Early in the 1960s, the Cantrills were closely involved with children on several art education projects and made a number of related films for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in Brisbane. One such film, Making Window Pictures (1963), is a modest record of young children at a workshop in the Creative Leisure Centre in Brisbane, making stained glass windows from paper cuts. The Cantrills made other documentaries, among them, a series of films on the sculptures and drawings of the artist Robert Klippel. On Klippel’s encouragement, after moving to London in 1965, they made an eponymous biographical sketch of the French born avant-garde Vorticist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1968), and a dedicated portrait of one of his sculptures, Red Stone Dancer (1968). Up until now, these informational documentaries, often with voice-over, betrayed little evidence of the formal maturity that their work was soon to attain. In the middle of making these two films, they visited the fourth edition of the EXPRMNTL festival in Knokke-le-Zoute in December 1967, a formative experience for them as filmmakers. In Knokke, they would admiringly discover the rich terrain of American, European, and Japanese experimental cinema; films by Gregory Markopoulos, Michael Snow, Gunvor Nelson, and Robert Nelson among others will have a lasting impression on them. Their sojourn in London ended in 1969, and they returned to the Australian National University in Canberra where Arthur was awarded a fellowship.

On a New Adventure 
The Knokke experience put the Cantrills in productive contact with the international avant-garde film scene, propelling them to commit to experimental filmmaking fully, a case of a transmission of formal attitudes from the centre of such developments to the periphery, in this case, Australia. The Cantrills’ example is not unique, many of the Australian artists exhibited at the iconic Field exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968 were responding to typically American styles of Greenbergian abstraction and Minimalism. On return to Canberra, they also started working on the Cantrills Filmnotes, no doubt inspired by the New York based Film Culture magazine. It would be far too easy, somewhat lazy, and certainly counterproductive to characterize the Cantrills’ films from then on in purely formal terms emphasising material investigations with film stock, abstract imagery, experiments in colour, deconstruction of the cinematic dispositif, rephotography, hand printing, and so on – eschewing how they consciously encourage a dialectical exchange between formal knowledge and the Australian context in its complexity, its local artistic community, landscape, ecology, and colonial history rather than being alienated from it. Consider Harry Hooton (1970), the film about the influential poet, philosopher and anarcho-technocrat by the same name. For it, the Cantrills authored a visual and aural language that could match the anti-humanist and materialist polemics of Hooton. Employing superimpositions, masking, refilming, monochromatic frames, and optical printing while mixing abstract and illustrative images, the Cantrills disturbed the indexical stability of the film-image. For the soundtrack, Arthur deployed techniques of musique concrète to manipulate piano effects, adding reverberation and white noise, and then further mixing with bird calls, radio sound, and excerpted recordings of Hooton’s voice. The Cantrills had made artist documentaries before, but with Harry Hooton, they could devise a formal language that equalled the artistic and philosophical disposition of their protagonist.

During the 1970s, in Canberra, Melbourne, United States, and back in Melbourne, the Cantrills devoted themselves to landscape films, bringing together their formal interests in cinema with their primordial regard for Australian land, its representation in their own cultural history, and its geological, botanical and zoological specificity. They retrospectively reflected on this commitment in the late 1970s as follows:

“If there is a social intention in landscape films, it is to create an awareness of the environment, of the original Australian landscapes, and to contribute to a calm understanding of their significance. In this way, we hope our films will relate to the political struggles against uranium mining, deforestation, sand extraction, and, above all, the fight for Aboriginal land rights. We’re not going to make rhetorical, political films about these issues…”

Earth Message (1970) depicts the wilderness of a mountainous landscape, the richness of its flora and fauna in sunlit chromatic vitality. Using overlaid images where each layer is filmed with varying degrees of camera movement, a dynamic cubist space is actualised. The frenetic motion of the camera creates a hallucinatory experience that collapses the perspectival spatial organization of the landscape in contrast to Australian landscape painting informed by European styles that, since the end of the 19th century, is known to pictorially convey vastness via its use of endless recession. The soundtrack is composed of Aboriginal chants and singing, a subtle reminder that the Aboriginal people’s relationship to this land predates its colonial cultural experience by thousands of years.

The disorienting camera movements of Earth Message and its feral setting is left behind in At Eltham (1974) in favour of prolonged static frames and smooth tilts and pans depicting eucalyptus covered hills and the river (Yarra) – two archetypal features of the Australian landscape – that canvas changes in natural light as well as luminous variations achieved through exposure adjustments in the camera. At Eltham is a film about mourning, the death of young Melbourne poet Charles Buckmaster who committed suicide in 1972, through a deep contemplation of nature, its grand indifference. The feeling of grief is intensified by a periodic bell that resembles the sound of the Bonshō. It is one of the few films credited only to Corinne.

While in the US between 1973-1975, the Cantrills found the American landscape alienating, and the experimental film scene that had transfixed them in Knokke, orthodox and uninspiring. They yearned to return to Australia in order to undertake further projects on landscape but on a scale larger than in their previous films. This yearning was most fervently realized with At Uluru (1977), part of their Touching the Earth tetralogy. It is an anti-ethnographic film and a portrait of the ancient Ayers rock or Uluru – a sandstone monolith on Aṉangu aboriginal land. Corinne’s voice clarifies the film’s intention at its beginning, “this film will tell nothing of the facts, history, statistics, measurements of Uluru, nor of the aboriginal mythologies, legends, and rights associated with the rock; this can be read in books. This film is of the rock itself, Uluru observed through the camera lenses, aperture changes, film emulsions, in movement and stillness, the fall of light on the rock, and passage of cloud shadows.” Uluru is filmed from a distance and in close-up, in still frames and cyclic pans, in scorching daylight and sunset, at normal frame rate and in time-lapse, with its foreground and horizon. The film is both an objective study and a document of an encounter between the cultural construct of the rock and its visual symphony experienced in changing light. The Cantrills are all too aware that this encounter is mediated through the medium of film and they were intent on testing its full indexical scope. In avoiding to circumscribe (colonize?) the myriad mythological and historical currents associated with the rock (undoubtedly different for the Aboriginal owners from the European settlers) within the film, the Cantrills remain modest about their own intellectual position, while also acknowledging the limitation of their medium to express or resolve such complexity. The politics of the Cantrills is often more nuanced and layered than the politics of the political.

In concerning themselves with the inland landscapes in films such as Earth Message and At Uluru, the Cantrills remove themselves from the tranquil pastoral imagery iconized in the Australian landscape tradition, of the Heidelberg school painters and after, and inscribe themselves within the Australian modern, when outbacks were mapped and popularized. Australian conceptual artist and trade unionist Ian Burn noted the implication of the pastoral prominence in Australian culture as follows:

“The pastoral ideal had defined the landscape exclusively on white Australian terms: the harmony between nature and the signs of cultivation suppressed an Aboriginal presence. The imagery effectively created Aboriginal people as intruders in their own country and signified European possession of the land.”

One arresting feature of these landscape films is how motion and stillness are played against each other; in Earth Message it is achieved through different registers of camera’s agitation, while in the long still shots of At Eltham, movement features on small sections of the frame (rustling leaves, river gently flowing downstream) as the rest of it remained motionless. This interest in motion and stillness was further enhanced once the Cantrills started exploring “colour separation” in their landscape films. Colour separation will prove to be a lasting preoccupation for the Cantrills who continued to hone this technique late into their filmmaking career. It can be as readily associated with them as single frame editing with Rose Lowder or time lapse with Chris Welsby. In Waterfall (1984), we observe three superimposed layers of falling water, each filmed with a different filter – red, green, and blue – on negative monochromatic stock and then colour-printed using optical filters, for a reconstructed approximation of colour, a method that recalls early colour photography from the nineteenth century. The sequences with different filters are filmed in succession, so movement within the frame leaves a chromatic imprint – a spectral dance of separate colours – while stasis is naturalistically reproduced, “time is expressed in terms of colour”, as per Cantrills’ description. By slowing down shutter speed, the white of the water becomes volumetric and emits an auratic glow that signals its spiritual energy. In Australian aboriginal cultures, waterfalls are sacred sites that hold deep spiritual significance.

As one delves deep into the fascinating oeuvre of the Cantrills and comes to term with the breadth of their formal achievements, the humility of their politics, and their significance within experimental film history, it would seem absurd how unlikely it is to encounter the films in a local independent cinema, gallery, or museum. Most of their films are not in distribution through the usual channels, but that is the outcome of their triple marginality – as Australians, filmmakers, and experimental practitioners – rather than being the cause. One might think that the environmental address in the landscape films, their diffuse yet unmistakable summoning of aboriginal history, would align with decolonial impulses and (re)considerations of the Anthropocene in contemporary art, and by extension, the wider moving image ecosystem. Not quite.

The State of Things 
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.

Andrew Pike, a friend of the Cantrills, in 1979 writing about Earth Message stated, “Aboriginal music is used in the soundtrack, but the music serves to emphasize the idea of the film as dance or celebration, rather than assigning any specific historical value to the landscapes as former Aboriginal land. The music does not add an awareness of time past, as the film focuses on timelessness.” Such emptying out of a formal gesture of historical and social signification betrays a typical romantic trait of modernist discourse, a quest for referential inertness posing as opposition to the irredeemable mass culture imagery loaded with ideological meaning, but in disguise, as in this case, undercutting how the film possibly addresses the politics of deliberate erasure in the cultural making of white settler colonialism. The suggestion is not to revive the entire modernist project from its ashes through strained assertions of political narratives (such attempts are often made these days without yielding very interesting results). It really merits deliberation on a case-by-case basis; for the Cantrills though, the framework of the long history of landscape painting in Australia as well as the registration of landscapes as usurped aboriginal land seems necessary. Experimental films address politics differently from documentaries and the Cantrills’ absolute commitment to experimental over descriptive forms does not mean that their relationship to the world is closed off. Quite the opposite, they define this relationship on their own terms.