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’
Bouddi (1970) 8’
Near Coober Pedy (1977) 14’
Ramayana, Legong (1995) 6’
Garden of Chromatic Disturbance (1998) 11’