Early Movements is the first program in a four-part screening series dedicated to the work of the Australian filmmaking couple Arthur (1938) and Corinne Cantrill (1928−2025). The screenings take place in Ghent (Art Cinema OFFoff) and Brussels (Cinema Parenthèse, CINEMATEK) between May 18 – 20 and on June 1. You can read more about the Cantrills’ work below.
This selection of works traces the Cantrills’ early filmmaking practice and their travels – from Brisbane (Making Window Pictures), to London (Adventure Playground, London), then back to Canberra (Home Movie; Earth Message) and Melbourne (At Eltham), before their relocation to the US in 1973.
There will be a break before the screening of the closing film, Ocean at Point Lookout (1977, 45′).
→ Curated and introduced by Keegan O’Connor, Audrey Lam, Anthony Brynaert and Daniel A. Swarthnas
→ In collaboration with Cinema Parenthèse & Art Cinema OFFoff
One of the Cantrills’ earliest filmmaking efforts, documenting child’s play and the activity-based workshops held by the Creative Leisure Centres in Brisbane (through which Corinne and Arthur first met).
Another film about recreation and learning, made during the Cantrills’ four-year residence in London, and 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.
The first film the Cantrills made upon their return to Australia in 1969, galvanised by their experiences with experimental cinema in Europe and their sense that the Australian landscape could be creatively generative. It is both a landscape and a children’s film: it features their two young sons as they move through a vibrant Australian bush scene.
An energetic, yet carefully choreographed and layered, study of the hills, plains, and gardens of Canberra. Great feeling and excitement for the landscape is expressed through a roving, dancing, ‘calligraphic’ camera.
A sombre and despairing bush film, made after the untimely death of the poet Charles Buckmaster (1951−72), to whom the film is dedicated, and shortly before the Cantrills’ move to the USA in 1973. Unlike Earth Message, At Eltham is slow and somnambulant, observing with wearied, blinking eyes a bush scene in Eltham (an outer suburb of Melbourne). The film is haunted by a sense that they ‘could no longer work as filmmakers in Australia’ (Corinne Cantrill).
The camera focuses deliberately on the sea, not on the beach and the visible environmental destruction caused by sand mines. The concentration on the mood and nature of the sea highlights the desire to respect nature and its power. Different materials are used to film the undulation of the sea, the reflection of light and the horizon, over and over. This is visual poetry whose musical structure rests on silence.
