The Room of Chromatic Mystery

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

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.'

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.

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill are two of Australia's most prominent experimental filmmakers. The Cantrills are well known for their 'colour separation' films. To create these works they shoot a scene three separate times on black and white film stock, using a different colour filter each time. In the lab, they combine these three films onto a single Eastmancolour print. This process creates dramatic transitions in colour that the Cantrills liken to the vibrancy of Technicolor. Though the footage here was shot in the mid-’80s, it was only last year that they edited it into this fifteen-minute movie. Structurally it’s simple enough: just a series of views of various parts of inner Melbourne, from panoramic wide shots to close-ups of the sides of buildings. The soundtrack blends and warps familiar urban noises – cars, buskers, the ringing bells of trams – into a kind of musique concréte.

A film about recreation and learning, made during the Cantrills’ four-year residence in London, similarly tinctured by Herbert Read’s notions about children’s education as self-directed, creative, and free. The adventure playground provides a space in which children can shape and reimagine the environment according to their own sense of play.

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

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

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.

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.

"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."

Masses, crowds in the streets, traffic, large gatherings of people for political, religious, cultural events; TV newscasts – the tide of humanity being the matrix from which the alternative movement arose. From these masses emerge individuals: friends and family, co-workers, filmmakers, poets. A play between the quotidian and the particular.

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.

An experimental work about the Australian forests 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.