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[This essay appeared in Cinematograph: A Journal of Film and Media Art, Volume 3. 1988]

Cinema of the Senses:

Selected Films of
Arthur and Corrine Cantrill

by Barry Kapke

        Throughout over a quarter of a century of work, the concerns and films of Australian filmmakers Arthur and Corrine Cantrill have remained consistent. Their approach to filmmaking is both trenchant and resolute. Their concerns converge around experience, both their own and that of the spectator, as they relentlessly explore the subjective experience of perception, process, and time. Their practice is firmly rooted in the body, the material. Theirs truly could be said to be a cinema of the senses, a cinema of the body. The color separation films, the image analysis films, the landscape films, the multi-screen and film/performance works, all reflect a lived body. Theirs is not a cinema of the "mind." It is a cinema to be experienced.

        Interior/Exterior (1978), subtitled "… to explore a difference between camera and human vision… ", is an example in point. It investigates the duality inherent in seeing, the choices that must inevitably be made in excluding some experiential possibility to benefit some other. A two-screen film, it records the same mise-en-scene, with minor variations. Foregrounded is a room interior in which, on one screen, a man is seated, and, on the other, a woman is seated; backgrounded is the exterior landscape, it is filmed in real time with no ostensible action. The "action" is in the physical material of the film itself and in its objectification of visual selectivity. One film is overexposed, allowing the interior to be seen while the exterior detail "burns out"; the other portal appears to be underexposed, pulling us through the interior darkness to the world outside. Lacking the adaptability of the human eye, the filmic medium emphasizes the constant process of selection/rejection. As the two films alternate their exposures, perception is manipulated from one screen to the other, from interior to exterior.

        Studies in Image De/Generation (1975), too, is concerned with how the eye chooses to look. As Corrine Cantrill explained:

I'm interested in the 2-screen work because it gives us a chance as viewers, as film spectators, to read a new form of editing in. The eye does select, or choose to look at, certain parts of the image and to follow the image from one screen to another in certain ways.[1]

Studies in Image De/Generation refilms three small sections of footage of the Central Australian Arunta  peoples, originally shot by anthropologist Baldwin Spencer. The ritual actions of the Arunta are repeated in endless loops and abstracted through successive optical printings onto extra high contrast film stock. Each generation increases the contrast and the level of degeneration/abstraction. Shown side by side on the two screens are the second and fourth generations. The eye tends to find the higher contrast "flicker" film the more comfortable to "see", but there is also constant eye movement to the other screen, seeking detail or a sense of reference to the "real". As the Cantrills point out, the result of this experiment is that the original action recorded is "progressively replaced by the action of the film material."[2]

Waterfall by Arthur and Corrine Cantrill (1984)

        Because the Cantrills are interested in allowing materials and processes to "speak," they have greatly minimalized, or eliminated entirely, the rationalizing organization of editing. In Two Women (1980), editing is dispensed with altogether. The soundtrack by Arthur Cantrill records a song cycle belonging to three women of the Pitjantjatjara tribe. The long pauses and discussion between the women as to the next verse are preserved in the recording. The song cycle describes a journey of two ancestral women across the landscape of Central Australia, which, coincidentally, is the same landscape filmed, but the Cantrills have made no attempt to subtitle or translate the song. It is the sound, or, to use Roland Barthes' phrase, the "grain of the voice," that we sense. The Cantrills query:

Can we understand something of the society through the pitch of the voice, the nature of the inflections, the softness or harshness of tone, the flowingness of the precision of speech, the selection of certain predominant sounds and patterns, and the lack of others?[3]

The visual footage of the Pitjantjatjara songwomen and the geographical veracity of the Cantrills' unedited sojourn across the Macdonnell Ranges are but gratuitous "extras," or textures. Two Women is a film about hearing, not hearing "meaning" but hearing "qualities" of sound. Film, it becomes clear, need not be delimited by the primacy of vision.

        Other films by the Cantrills, such as Imprints (1969), Fud 69 (1969), and 4000 Frames - An Eye‑Opener Film (1970), are concerned with retinal and memory imprints of short duration images. Whereas a high level of editing is necessarily present in the process of shooting such films, there is no attempt to organize the montage structure to impose a "meaning" upon the viewer. Such films, rather, attempt to explore what the individual viewer will perceive from a sensual overload of images. Operating within this same genre, but with additional concerns, is Floterian - Hand Printing from a Film History (1981).  Floterian represents a film history of the Cantrills' own work, while at the same time exploring new ways of reading and perceiving the old materials. Four-foot lengths of film - regular 8, super 8, and 16mm - were arbitrarily drawn from twenty years of work; these were then contact hand-printed onto 35mm color negative stock, usually with two different film "quotations" side by side within the 35mm frame. Viewing them we perceive a simultaneous experience of the individual frame and of the film as linear chain of frames. "Floterian," meaning "flutter", presents four-second bursts of dual chains of images. The varying formats utilized break down the illusion of apparent motion, calling attention to the materiality of the filmic images. Thus, Floterian is pointedly subversive in its multiple modes of address.

           Resituating vision in the body, Corporeal (1983) speaks to sensation, rather than to the filtered subjectivity of point of view. The camera normally seeks to represent an interpreted vision, an "ideal" vision without the distraction of other perceptual experience which reflects back upon the subjectivity of the "viewer." To these ends, the cameraperson axiomatically strives for the fluid  panning track or the rock-steady point of view shot; the aim is to keep the identification of the spectator "out there", apart from the body that perceives. Corporeal strategically disrupts that seamless perception. This film, according to Corrine Cantrill, is "not film from the eye or the brain but more from the body and the movement of the breath."[4] There is, again, no editing here; it is 12 rolls of Kodachrome paired into two sets of six, which are spliced together, and projected on two screens. The camera "breathes" with the body of Corrine Cantrill, drifting upward and downward with the rise and fall of her breath. Different focal length lenses were used to modify the extent and the rhythm of the movements. The camera meditates languidly upon reflections in a rock pool or along the sensuous trunk and limbs of an overhanging Angophora tree. The film could easily have become a meditation, with the spectator identifying with and synchronizing his or her own breath to the respirated rhythms of the visual drift; the two screens, however, "breathing" in different paces prevent this automatic identification, or suture, from taking place. The stereo soundtrack by Arthur Cantrill, of bush insects at daybreak, also "breathes," rising and falling in contrapuntal dialogue with the visual tracks.

           Color separation films represent another genre in which the Cantrills have pursued their relentless questioning of perception and of the medium. Waterfall (1984) is their fourteenth, and most recent, color separation film. In this process, three rolls of black and white negative film, shot through red, green, and blue filters, are printed in superimposition, with color filtration, onto Eastmancolor print stock; the result is an amazingly faithful color reconstruction of the scene. What is unique about the process is its ability to objectify time, to render it observable. This additive process of color printing produces accurate color where the three separations are in register; when, however, there is a displacement among the three "layers", then one of the primary colors (red/green/blue) is evidenced at this "ripple". Each roll of film represents approximately five minutes; when recording a scene three times, quite a bit can happen in fifteen minutes - wind blows against the trees, people walk into the scene, the volume the waterfall occupies at any given moment changes. Each disalignment in time leaves its telltale mark. The audio track was composed in one take during the filming, mixing three different waterfall "effects" through a graphic equalizer and slowly altering the frequency spectrum to anticipate changes in the visual images. Waterfall is a fascinating film to watch, the already magnificent grandeur of the landscape supplemented by these rainbow "traces" of time.

          Arthur and Corrine Cantrill make films that deconstruct both the materiality of the filmic medium and the "nature" of perception itself. While the Cantrills would probably resist such a label, their work clearly is about the "speaking" of the body, that is, both the sensing, perceiving human body and the filmic medium as speaking corpus (rather than as inscribed text). It is a subversive film practice, working to undermine the habitual modes of perception in favor of a reflexive sensuality.

           The orthodoxy of "realism" as a perception‑structuring apparatus in cinema, and other terrains of textual production, has been problematized.[5] It is this structuring apparatus itself, it can be argued, that the Cantrills examine, rather than the content of this structuring. The process of speaking/ reading, of entering into and making "sensible", a text is what is denaturalized by their work. They make problematic our unquestioned habits of perceiving, calling into question our assumptions of what is "natural", and thus of what is "real". In this problematization of the naturalizing of perceptual constructs, the films of the Cantrills open up the practice of text production. Certainly, these films do not constitute a practice capable of replacing the artifactual discourse of realism, but they do engage the opening up of the production of meaning. Through their denaturalization of the body that reads, Arthur and Corrine Cantrill point to a position from which to articulate new cinematic practices.

FOOTNOTES

1.    Corrine Cantrill, speaking at screening of selected works at the San Francisco Art Institute, on February 7, 1988.

2.    Arthur and Corrine Cantrill. "An Annotated Auto-Filmography". June 1979.

3.    Arthur and Corrine Cantrill. "Program Notes" January/February 1988.

4.    San Francisco Art Institute, on February 7, 1988.

5.   For a clear and cogent discussion, see Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980).