AFW + NFSA #73: Tribute to Corinne Cantrill

Tribute to Corinne Cantrill

7:30pm Tuesday 28 October, The Brunswick Green, 313/315 Sydney Road, Brunswick. 
16mm projection
$10 on the door

Born on 6 November 1928, Corinne Cantrill passed away in February this year at the age of 96. Over many years spent living in Melbourne and, later, Castlemaine, she and her husband Arthur Cantrill held screenings at their home, presenting work from their vast filmography (some 150 films) and their personal film library. This program is in the spirit of those screenings. The selection of films provides a small glance across their collaborative filmmaking lives, which began after meeting through the Children’s Creative Leisure Centre in Brisbane in the late 1950s, where they were both working. (See: Metal Collage.) After moving to London with their two young sons in 1965, the Cantrills became increasingly interested and involved in 16mm avant-garde filmmaking. Returning to Australia in 1969, they brought a renewed sense of energy and experimentation to the Australian scene, making a series of vibrant films that both documented and interacted with the landscape (e.g. Bouddi and Near Coober Pedy).

Travel and contact with international filmmaking communities remained important to them throughout their working lives: the late Super-8 film, Ramayana, Legong, comes from a trip they took to Indonesia in the 1990s. Equally important, though, was a sense of family and home. This is a constant subject of their work, seen in the 1998 three-colour separation work, The Garden of Chromatic Disturbance. As Corinne said during one of the Sunday screenings, ‘everything is right here’, in the domestic space--landscape, colour, endless possibilities for imagining and experimenting.

Alongside this selection of Arthur and Corinne’s films, some rushes by AFW member Audrey Lam (who was the projectionist for the Cantrills’ screenings for a number of years) will be shown. These document the Sunday afternoon events–always accompanied by afternoon tea–held at the Cantrills’ home in Castlemaine.

FILMS

Metal Collage (1965) 11 min, sound, black and white

In the Brisbane Creative Leisure Centre, conducted by the Cantrills, children, with a minimum of instruction, build up pictures from a large variety of hardware materials such as chain, wire, nails, screws, case fasteners, steel wool, copper sheet, etc., nailed or glued to sheets of plywood.

Bouddi (1970) 8 min, sound, colour

Described by the filmmakers as 'a camera calligraphy of the coastal bush near Bouddi, NSW'. The single frame stream of imagery - bark, insects, flowers, rock forms - and accompanying Aboriginal dance music can be seen as a metaphor for growth, summer, and the intensity of light.

Near Coober Pedy (1977) 14 min, silent, colour

Three short ‘essays’ by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, based on landscapes near Coober Pedy. In each segment, the landscape is manipulated by one camera to explore the quality of light in Central Australia and to express the timelessness and minimality of the area.

Ramayana, Legong (1995) 6 min, sound, colour

Filmed on Super 8 at night, in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia in 1994. This film shows two dance dramas, the first is part of the Ramayana legend, the second is part of a Legong performance.

Garden of Chromatic Disturbance (1998) 11 min, sound, colour

Does colour exist where there is no light? The garden is a setting for colour research: random objects - fruits, flowers, stones, cups and saucers, bowls and a green oil can, Kodak colour cards - are laid out in changing combinations for repeated shooting and printing with varying exposure densities and colour balances. Images of Corinne Cantrill standing and sleeping in a chair - keeping as still as possible during the three exposures to avoid colour fringing - evoke traditional portraits in garden settings, but here the figure is subjected to severe colour and contrast changes, and is partly obliterated by moving windblown foliage shadows in primary colours. There is constant shifting between brief monochromes, duochromes and full colour, intercut with fragments of stark black and white negative from the original separations which contrast with the strong colours - the flipped-over negative images point up the change in emulsion geometry from negative to positive. In some of the sequences there is a solidity of blackness, as in the background to a hibiscus flower, which seems to have a depth like thick velvet - in reality this blackness is the garden background with insufficient light to register on the high-contrast black and white negative. The sound mix of high-frequency cicada and the unmusical shrieks of flying cockatoo flocks, with skewed equalisation, nudges the film even further from naturalism.

All film notes from NFSA NTLC.