Film pioneer set fire to screens and didn’t care if you hated her work

Now, you’re not going to like this,” Corinne Cantrill would sometimes warn viewers before screening the films she and her husband, Arthur, made together. The experimental filmmaker, who died last month at the age of 96, took defiant pride in the fact their work wasn’t for everyone.

The Cantrills’ body of work, which includes more than 150 films, is as original as any in Australian cinema; they jointly received the Order of Australia (AM) in 2011. The first of their seven features was 1969’s Harry Hooton, but they worked primarily in experimental film, the branch of cinema that defies not just the conventions of commercial filmmaking, but viewer expectations of any kind. Not to be confused with arthouse cinema or video art, it tests the boundaries of what a film can be; one of the Cantrills’ “expanded cinema” events involved setting fire to the screen.

For the Cantrills, as for other experimental filmmakers of their generation, “film” was analogue, not digital. While digitised versions of some of their films have screened in cinemas with their approval, none are officially available for home viewing – one obvious reason their work is not more widely known.

Yet their films have travelled widely. As well as festival screenings, they have shown at the Centre Pompidou and the Louvre in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Australia. Within the next couple of months, screenings are scheduled in the UK, Europe and South Korea (all planned while Corinne, who is survived by Arthur, was alive), reflecting the fact that experimental film remains the most truly global form of cinema, communicating far more through image and sound than through words.

And the films are not the forbidding intellectual exercises Corinne’s warnings might have suggested. Some are literal home movies (especially those made while the couple lived at “Prestonia”, a 19th-century brick house with tower in Brunswick). Others concern the Australian landscape, their travels abroad, and the works of other artists, often friends.

The Cantrills’ filmmaking career started in Brisbane in the early 1960s, where they made children’s programs for the ABC, including the educational nature series Kip and David, shot on Stradbroke Island, and a shadow-puppet version of The Odyssey.

In the mid-1960s, they headed for London, where they made short art documentaries for TV while crossing paths with such avant-garde figures as Yoko Ono and the British “structural” filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice. By the end of this crucial four-year period, they were determined to put conventional filmmaking behind them.

Their later lives were spent primarily in Melbourne, where Arthur taught for many years at Melbourne State College while Corinne worked tirelessly to ensure their films were screened as widely as possible. From 1971 to 2000 they jointly edited and published the journal Cantrills Filmnotes, which published writing by experimental filmmakers from around the world along with fiery editorials denouncing funding bodies and the mainstream generally.

Corinne became a familiar presence at experimental film screenings in Melbourne, selling copies of the Filmnotes in the foyer, which is how I first encountered her as a student in the 1990s.

Not long after, I was galvanised by their “three-colour separation” films, made by filming the same location through red, green and blue filters and overlaying the resulting images, so that colour becomes a means of perceiving several moments at once.

These were like nothing I’d seen before – or since. While other experimental filmmakers have used versions of the technique, I know of none who have realised its artistic potential as the Cantrills did. The films inspired me to write what became one of my first published pieces of film criticism, which was the start of coming to know the couple as friends.

After they moved to Castlemaine in the mid-2010s, I would travel regularly from Melbourne for Sunday afternoon screenings held in the basement of their hillside home; the last was held in 2023. Even if the Cantrills’ films eschewed conventional human interest, Corinne once wrote that a film screening should have “a sense of human and social occasion”.

For her, film and life were totally intertwined – it was hard to see any distinction between her personal life with Arthur and their artistic collaboration. Nor was it easy to distinguish their respective contributions to the films. Sound was said to be Arthur’s department, but when I helped them plan a retrospective of their work at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in 2010, it was Corinne who insisted the starting point should be the theme of the voice, including the “voices” of birds and other natural sounds.

Corinne was proud of her own voice, and of her clear, emphatic way of speaking. She once she told me triumphantly how she and actor and critic John Flaus had travelled from Castlemaine on the train together and how their conversation had held the whole carriage spellbound.

In public she tended to hold the floor, with the quieter Arthur providing the occasional addition or correction. But even when they disagreed, as long-married couples will, they spoke of their films in the same spirit, with the same emphasis on the specifics of technique.

While they mostly worked together, Corinne’s 2½-hour 1984 feature In This Life’s Body – one of the great autobiographical films made anywhere – belongs to her. Most of the images are photos of her at different ages, as she tells her life story in voiceover.

It starts with the meeting of her oddly matched parents, her father a Jewish communist and her mother active in the Theosophy movement. We hear about her childhood in Sydney in the Depression, her precocious botanical studies, her travels in Europe soon after the Second World War, her love affairs, her first marriage, her meeting with Arthur and their joint discovery of a vocation. The film also covers the birth of her sons Aaron and Ivor, the latter profoundly autistic (now an artist and filmmaker in his own right).

All this is set forth with Corinne’s typical candour. Through the distance provided by film, she was able to study herself in the same close yet detached spirit that she might examine a natural phenomenon like a waterfall or a rock formation.

Who is she, the film asks, this ordinary yet singular person. What are the forces that have shaped her? How has she changed over the years? How is all of this visible in her face and body, as recorded at particular moments? Where is she headed?

Though the least typical of the Cantrills’ films, In This Life’s Body would become the most celebrated, a development Corinne viewed with ambivalence. Often she maintained her narration was less frank than it seemed, bypassing traumatic experiences and periods of despair. In person, she had no qualms about expressing her pessimism with great frankness. But even her prophecies of her imminent death, a constant over the time I knew her, were made with a relish that conveyed her extraordinary appetite for life.

In This Life’s Body aside, the Cantrills’ shared artistic goal was to escape personality in any usual sense. But if their work endures, as it undoubtedly will, it will be due in large part to Corinne’s defiant insistence on always being taken on her own terms.

In This Life’s Body screens at ACMI on March 30 at 2pm. Jake Wilson will participate in a commemorative event following the screening.