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Moving Statics: The Films of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill (III)

20.05’25
Red Stone Dancer

Red Stone Dancer © Footage courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA)

Art Cinema OFFoff
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
€ 8 / € 5 (Student) / Accreditation
Three-day pass for the full Cantrills program: € 20 / € 10 (Student)

The Knokke Connection is the third 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.

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill did not show work at the famed EXPRMNTL 4 festival of 1967/68 at Knokke-le-Zoute – their film Skin of Your Eye would screen at the next iteration of the festival in 1974 (and will be screening at CINEMATEK in Brussels on June 1). However, the Cantrills did attend the 1967/68 edition and considered it to be ​“life-changing”: ​“at that time… the most important event in our filmmaking lives.” 

Both Robert Nelson and Gunvor Nelson featured films at EXPRMNTL 4 and they left a profound impact on the Cantrills – they would, many years later, still recall the importance of seeing these works. The festival represented such a decisive moment in the Cantrills’ careers as filmmakers as it provided the nudge that they needed to dedicate themselves more totally to an experimental film practice.

Like the Cantrills, the filmic beginnings of Robert and Gunvor Nelson can be traced to the home movies they made together as husband and wife in the early 1960s. They would go on to make work solo or within other partnerships, e.g. with another married couple, William and Dorothy Wiley.

→ Curated and introduced by Keegan O’Connor, Audrey Lam and Anthony Brynaert

→ In collaboration with Cinema Parenthèse & Courtisane

Gunvor Nelson & Dorothy Wiley

Fog Pumas

SE • 1967 • 25' • b&w • 16mm

Fog Pumas, a fantastical and hallucinatory film populated by strange figures, represents something of a departure in Gunvor’s work and its skewering of domestic life. It won her and Dorothy Wiley a Knokke festival prize. 

Gof pumas

Fog Pumas © Filmform

Robert Nelson & William T. Wiley

The Great Blondino

US • 1967 • 42' • colour • 16mm

Another festival winner was Robert Nelson’s short The Grateful Dead, but it was his The Great Blondino (made with William Wiley), which also screened there, that he thought better deserved that recognition. Blondino follows a young, wandering, daydreaming naif on risky adventures, ​“living at great risk for the beauty of it.”

R Nelson Great Blondino

The Great Blondino © Canyon Cinema

Arthur & Corinne Cantrill

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

AU • 1968 • 30' • b&w • 16mm

The two Cantrills films in this program were works that the couple made while still living in London, in between attending the festival in Belgium in late 1967/​early 1968 and returning to Australia in 1969. 

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska is an idiosyncratic documentary about the eponymous Vorticist artist, studying his key sculptures in the Tate Britain and their formal attributes according to changes in motion and light.

632033 0005 001 HENRI GAUDIER BRZESKA flyer

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska © Footage courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA)

Arthur & Corinne Cantrill

Red Stone Dancer

AU • 1968 • 5' • colour • 16mm

Red Stone Dancer studies one of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s most famous sculptures – with offbeat camera movements and an offbeat rhythm, enhanced by Arthur’s electronic soundtrack. 

In both films in this program, the Cantrills were finding new liberating possibilities for their cinema – ​“celebrating that we were abandoning the limitations of the documentary form.”

Red Stone Dancer

Red Stone Dancer © Footage courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA)

Img articles knokke01

EXPRMNTL 4. Poster by Pierre Alechinsky

Gunvor Nelson & Dorothy Wiley

Fog Pumas

SE • 1967 • 25' • b&w • 16mm

Robert Nelson & William T. Wiley

The Great Blondino

US • 1967 • 42' • colour • 16mm

Arthur & Corinne Cantrill

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

AU • 1968 • 30' • b&w • 16mm

Arthur & Corinne Cantrill

Red Stone Dancer

AU • 1968 • 5' • colour • 16mm
OFFoff Extra

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill

Portrait2b

Arthur & Corinne Cantrill © In This Life's Body (Corinne Cantrill, 1984)

Over a period of fifty years, Australian filmmaking couple Arthur (1938) and Corinne Cantrill (1928-2025) sought to discover new visual languages and new ways of accessing and rendering landscape through the medium of 16mm film. Their vast body of work – encompassing documentary and experimental film, multi-screen installation, performance, and sound art – repeatedly stages “journeys” into unfamiliar terrain, investigating the creative feedback between environment and art, landform and film-form, shape and light.

Having met while working in children’s education in Brisbane in the late 1950s, the Cantrills moved to London with their young sons in 1965, where Arthur worked as a film editor and a sound producer for the BBC. During the couple’s time in Europe, they made a number of formally inventive documentaries about children and artists, and (after attending the famed EXPRMNTL 4 festival of 1967/68 in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium) determinedly took up an experimental film practice. Upon returning to Australia, they commenced a period of vital collaborative output, making seminal works about the Australian scene and the native landscape. They also started publishing their legendary film magazine, Cantrills Filmnotes, which they produced independently for some thirty years (1971-2000).

The Cantrills’ work is held in major international archives and galleries, including the Royal Film Archive of Belgium (Brussels), Arsenal (Berlin), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne), the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (Canberra), and MoMA (New York). They were the first Australian subjects of MoMA’s Cineprobe series in 1975, with two further retrospectives in 1988 and 2000. This four-part film program in Ghent and Brussels tracks their travels and movements as filmmakers – the development of their innovative practice at the cross-section of cinema, photography, sound design, and performance.

The Death of Metaphor / The Metaphor of Death: On The Cantrills is a new text on the films of the Cantrills written by curator Keegan O’Connor to accompany the program at Open City Documentary Festival in London (6-11 May 2025), with whom we are collaborating for this Belgian part.

Curated by Audrey Lam and Keegan O’Connor.

With thanks to the Cantrill family, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Arsenal, Light Cone and the Australian High Commission in the United Kingdom.