Filmmaker and academic Arthur Cantrill, and his wife Corinne, have made more than eighty avant-garde films, many of them quite provocative. They began their professional union in 1963 with a series of independent films on child arts and crafts for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC-TV). In 1969, the couple travelled to London on a two-year fellowship from the Australian National University and, while in England, acquired a body of avant-garde films for the National Library. After returning to Australia, the Cantrills undertook a series of lecture and screening tours to promote an appreciation of avant-garde film. For these exhibitions, they showed their multi-projection and film-performance work.
Much of the Cantrills's enormous output of work (more than 140 films and film-performance works) explores the process of filming and the audience perception of visuals, with a particular fixation upon the use of landscape to create a national identity. The films vary in length from two minutes for Zap (1971) to 148 minutes for In This Life's Body (1984).
Their film work and publishing is well known internationally. They are represented in several film collections, including those of The Royal Film Archive of Belgium, Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek (Berlin), Deutsches Filmmuseum (Frankfurt), Musée National d'Art Moderne (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), New York Museum of Modern Art, PRÉA (Avignon), The British Council, and the National Library of Australia. Their films have been shown at the Centre Pompidou and The Louvre (Paris) and the Museum of Modern Art (New York), as well as other art museums and film festivals. Between 1971 and 2000, the Cantrills also edited and published Cantrills' Filmnotes, a journal on film and video art.
Arthur Cantrill has given lectures at Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, The National Library of Australia, ScreenSound Australia, and other places. His papers have discussed such topics as nineteenth-century proto-cinema, Len Lye, and colour in cinema. In 1996, he retired as Associate Professor in the School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne, and subsequently accepted an emeritus position of Senior Associate at the university.
