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'One of the most original and neglected figures in Australian cinema, Leo Berkeley has continued working across a range of formats and genres for over three decades. Yet most reference works credit him with just a single feature - 1991's Holidays on the River Yarra, one of two Australian features invited to that year's Cannes Film Festival.' (Introduction)
'Looking back at the vast body of work produced by Arthur and Corinne
Cantrill over the past 50 years, the immediately striking thing is its
range, in subject matter as well as technique. The Cantrills' earliest
films include a number of relatively straightforward documentaries made
for television - and through all their subsequent formal experiments,
they have never abandoned the goal of bearing witness to their
surroundings, at home and abroad. Simply put, the Cantrills film is what
interests them: people, landscapes, works of art.' (Introduction)
'Artists, experimental filmmakers, poets and their associates have a
covert history of exploration beyond the standard arrangement of
audience, beam and screen. In expanded cinema, as the late Paul Arthur
noted, the commitment "is to an ethos of spontaneity" that contradicts
not just the classical cinema's normal exhibition mode, but also
critically "ruptures the privatized and quietist dynamics of avant-garde
presentation linking static spectators to a static screen" .' (Introduction)