Corinne Cantrill

Will Spoor is a Dutch performer, working in the abstract side of movement and mime. He has considerable knowledge of the potential of film and his intention was to extend his work into realms that were impossible for live theatre. We used a combination of animation and in-camera superimpositions to create structures of body movement. Our work on sound composition came to a head in this film with organically and electronically complex sounds. It was the most valuable collaboration we had done with another artist since Larry Sitsky; an intense concentration of our energies and skills and of his energies and skills. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

TWO WOMEN records our passage through the tribal lands of the Central Australian region – a personal charting of this mythical landscape. The film is shaped by an unedited recording made of a Pitjantjatjara women’s song cycle: "Two Women", which describes the travels of ancestral women through this region. The film is not a literal interpretation of the song story, and there is no translation of the song. We are outsiders to this culture, and must therefore learn what we can from the ‚surface’ of the song cycle – from the voices singing, talking, whispering, coughing, laughing, reprimanding children.

Ayers Rock is examined in the light of its ancient human and animal associations. It is seen under various light effects which create different colour and texture impressions. The timelessness of the monolith is suggested by negative colour, the result of using fine-grain Eastmancolour print stock in the camera, a slow speed material which required the intense Central Australian light for adequate exposure. A half-speed recording of the local bird call and insects contributes to the sense of cross eras. Human perception of time, colour and sound is questioned. As Einstein said: 'The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.'

Experimental Super 8 film from 2001 by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill

Hand-drawn directly onto 16mm film, this animation is a 'diary' of daily drawing-on-film practice by Ivor Cantrill over a period of 18 months. Drawing style ranges from bold geometric patterns, to a delicate calligraphy.

The beauty of the Australian bush is depicted in a carefully composed camera choreography of different aspects of flora and fauna. Close-up and panorama shots and Aboriginal music meld into a meditative view of the energy and harmony that shape the place.

An experimental work about the Australian forests by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill.

"Island Fuse consists entirely of the monochromatic reprocessing of black and white footage that we filmed in the 1960s on the Isle of Stradbroke. Using an analysis projector, Island Fuse is a film that focuses on the interaction of the elements that produced the film: the analysis projector, the camera and its various mechanisms; filters, the projector and its mechanisms; the ribbon and the photograms; the operators."

Evening performances of traditional Balinese dance-drama in Ubud, shot single frame with open shutter exposures.

Timeless elements in a roll of film: stillness, movement, woman, girl, road, wind, sun, leaves. A triptych of a girl who reminds us of the face and figures in old icons.

short experimental film by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill

Three-color separation imagery expands the experimental documentation of landscape. Alternating nuances of color conjure up; a formal beauty, which are echoed in birdsong and the buzzing of insects.

At Black Range (1984) was shot near the Grampians in Western Victoria, and features monumental monochrome rocks with rainbow shadows and “fringing” in the moving eucalypts, which create coloured vibrations like the filmic analogue of Impressionism. The skin of the film and the rock itself are both living surfaces of mobile textures: lichen becomes electric, pointilist, as the camera fades in and out of focus. The shadows of skinny tree trunks dart like electric blue lightning, veins or eels. Shivering leaves morph into undersea anemones, caressing the rocks in a teasing, sexual way. Somehow, the loosening of Taussig’s “straightjacket of the spectrum” allows for a loosening of the straightjacket of taxonomy as well; classes, phyla, and even kingdoms drop away, revealing an undifferentiated field of vibrant matter in which entities shapeshift. (Tessa Laird)

Part of a series of four studies the Cantrills made of the native flora of the Stradford Island, this one focusing on the Casuarina Equisetifolia.

A short animation of Charles Lloyd’s dry points. Sound composition by Arthur Cantrill.

Synopsis Part of a series of four studies the Cantrills made of the native flora of the Stradford Island, this one focusing on the Pandanus Pedunculatus.

Part of a series of four studies the Cantrills made of the native flora of the Stradford Island, this one focusing on the Banksia Integrifolia.

3-colour separation film.

It's a three-colour separation study of MacKenzie Falls in the Grampians, Victoria.

A camera calligraphy of the coastal bush -- celebrating growth, summer light, rock and plant textures.

Part of a series of four studies the Cantrills made of the native flora of the Stradford Island, this one focusing on the Banksia Serrata.

The film Harry Hooton is conceived as a huge energy field combining the energy of light and colour, movement, editing and sound — a dense, vibrating, pulsating work, unrelenting in its thrust; a celebration of Hooton’s definition of art as the communication of emotion to matter.

Brightly coloured animated drawings rotoscoped from high contrast black and white negative film of Ivor Cantrill aged 14, are integrated with the original negative and positive images on an optical printer to create patterns of black, white and colour. The film-maker reminisces about being 14 and describes the rotoscoping process. Ivor Cantrill is autistic, and his attention to detail and his preoccupation with repetition are positive aspects of his condition.

Images of gold in nature and art are repeated in a fugal structure from one screen to the next. The extra potential for image structuring provided by the multi-screen form interested us from the moment we saw a reconstruction of the final sequence of Abel Gance's Napoleon in London in 1968. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill).