for colours to appear, figures must be moved
— Goethe, Theory of Colours (1810)

…we moving it is quiet now the dusk is the same as dawn over india red soil i flew above the alps they were below me sharp peaks model mountains the train goes into a tunnel it is dark and dark i'm scared it was hot my feet got too big for my shoes…
—Ania Walwicz, travelling (1996)

This paper forms part of a broader project looking at the emergence of experimentalism and research at the nexus of Australian arts, media, and tertiary education industries during the twentieth century.¹ My aim here is quite narrow, however: by examining the term 'experimentalism' it should be possible to begin to understand and/or disentangle it from the correlative term 'avant-gardism', with which it is often used interchangeably. Experimentalism is defined by musicologist and historian Benjamin Piekut as a ‘historically specific network’ and further one that ‘does not express a radical political imagination’, he argues that experimentalism is usually understood as more closely engaged with ‘science-and-technology discourses’. It is posed in contrast, then, to politically progressive movements. Rather than as an avant-garde, it instead forms a “rearguard” practice—noted as early as 1964 by Italian theorist and television executive Angelo Guglielmi (1929-2022).² Here I consider the work of Australian artist-filmmakers working after the Second World War. How might mapping this historically specific network provide us with a vector for the history of the expanded arts after the Second World War, in Australia and elsewhere? Artist Helen Johnson has more recently questioned the ‘rationalisation’ of arts practice as research in the tertiary education sector, pointing to the potential distortions of these concepts.³ Given the context in which we are working, I find the end of experimentalism as a dominant discursive arrangement of the university. Nevertheless, my example and focus will be the work of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, whose practice emerges from the anarcho-technocratic poetics of Harry Hooton (1908–1961) in Sydney in the 1950s, tracking the artists’ moves from the margins to the university.⁴ Further, and given 1949 is the date of the first international “experimental” film festival at Knokke-le-Zoute—the related “film and fine arts world festival” was held in Brussels in 1947—the festival that would become ‘the most important international event in the world of the avant-garde cinema’, according to Artforum in 1975, suggests the initiative led by Jacques Ledoux (1921–1988) is also as good a place as any from which to begin (fig. 1).⁵

During an interview conducted in 2014, Corinne Cantrill recalled attending the fourth iteration of the festival (the second was held nearly a decade after the first, in 1958 during the Brussels World’s Fair/Expo 58, the third began on Christmas Day in 1963):

In 1967/68 {over the December to January period} we attended the Knokke Experimental Film Competition in Belgium, organized by the great, late Jacques Ledoux. People came from across the world to be there—there was a Gregory Markopoulos Retrospective, the premiere of Michael Snow's ‘Wavelength’, with separate sound on a powerful sound-generating device, lots of films from USA—Robert Nelson, Gunvor Nelson, Will Hindle, Paul Sharits; really powerful films from Germany and Austria, from Japan, and from England—Stephen Dwoskin, Malcolm Le Grice, Don Levy, Yoko Ono (whose events and performances we knew already from London)—so it was very full on, and a turning point in our filmmaking lives.

We had been wavering about making films, or animated films, but after Knokke we knew we wanted to work in this more experimental area.⁶

EXPRMNTL 4 began on Christmas Day 1967 and continued into the new year (from 25 December to 2 January) at a Casino in the Belgian municipality now named Knokke-Heist. It was officially known as Le festival international du cinéma experimental de Knokke-le-Zout. The festival ran for five editions over 25 years, ending in 1974.⁷

Corinne Cantrill AM was born in Sydney in 1928, so was 39 at the time. Arthur Cantrill AM was also born in Sydney, in 1938. Married in 1960, their careers were spent collaborating as artist filmmakers and facilitators. Recent international interest in the Cantrills' films, particularly through screenings in Berlin, Santander in Spain, and New York, demand that our local histories and its political and aesthetic economies also be attendant to the ways in which their work is being reconsidered by contemporary art and film institutions around the world. Given so much of their work is concerned with the settler-colonial presence in the Australian landscape, it also often comes into direct confrontation with First Nations iconography and locations sacred to Aboriginal Australia (the recently digitised film, Second Journey to Uluru, 1981, being only the most obvious example). Significant contemporary film festival programmers like the former artistic director of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), Michelle Carey, is also a current champion for their work in Europe and the US (for example a screening of Corinne Cantrill’s personal film-manifesto, In This Life’s Body (1984), was held at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2022).

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On the 6th of October 1995 two landscape films by the Cantrills were shown in Paris at the Louvre.⁸ While both films were deeply involved in the abstract quality of the film medium—a treatise on three-colour separation written in the 1970s was their specific contribution to the catalogue for the exhibition—the Australian landscape, captured by the settler-colonial gaze and projected for a European audience, provided the contents for the Cantrills’ experiments: Heat Shimmer (1978) and Waterfall (1984). For three decades, their commitment to experimentation through filmmaking had followed their experiences in Belgium.

While the question of how to capture the landscape has been a constant concern for the vast majority of the Cantrills' films, another question was what these films, set in Australia, could show to an audience of mostly European modernists, avant-garde artists and film experimentalists. In 2019, nearly three decades after the screening at the Louvre, the Cantrills' films would again be presented to contemporary European audiences, this time at the Arsenal in Berlin, where their films, including The Second Journey to Uluru (1981) was remastered and digitised, and shown—coincidentally—in the wake of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the Makarrata or treaty process agreed to and set out by First Nations delegates in 2017, whereby it was derailed and ultimately sidelined by the (soon to be ousted) Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull and the subsequent, accidental Morrison Government (2018–2022). The subsequent failure of the Australian Indigenous Voice referendum in 2023, brought by the Albanese Government, provides a further context for the screenings and restoration of these works. In Berlin for the screenings in June 2019, artist Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha and Nukunu) was compelled to leave the room when the remastered and digitised images of Uluru’s interior cave systems and peripheries were projected into the large underground space, a former crematorium, now known as the Silent Green Kulturquartier.

As the Australian landscape is a necessary focus for any settler colonial aesthetics, so landscape becomes a key consideration for any history of Australian filmmaking. Yet to critically engage with these films, which are still to receive close examination and analysis for their experimentalism in artist filmmaking in Australia in the mid-twentieth century, the obvious entry-point into this vast and diverse project is the Cantrills Filmnotes, a long-running journal of film and experimental media edited by Arthur and Corinne themselves, between 1971 and 2000. As Dirk de Bruyn has noted more recently, the Filmnotes is notable because it also became a mouthpiece for the filmmakers, operating at least in part ‘as a machine for the transformation of dissent into cultural capital’.⁹

Another reason an Australian national focus is needed here, to be held in contrast with a transnational or formal histories of filmmaking in the period, is the unique funding “environment” that was supported not by the national film body, Film Australia, but through the recently established Australia Council for the Arts’ Experimental Film Fund in 1970 (later the Experimental Film and Television Fund 1971–77), as the Filmnotes initially were.¹⁰ Furthermore, the palpable anxiety of the settler colonial gaze over the Australian landscape, and during a period of intense debate over the sovereignty of British settlement, that followed in the wake of Indigenous Australian suffrage in 1962 and then nationally: ‘in 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard’ says the Statement from the Heart—as well as the beginnings of native title recognition over the lands and waters of this vast continent (the Milirrpum, or Gove land rights case, in which the judgement ruled against Yolngu claimants in favour of British colonial law, was heard in 1971).

This settler history has been captured in the writing of Gerald Murnane, which locates this anxiety in the landscape itself: 

I looked around me for some detail of a painted landscape on the wall or some gesture made by a porcelain figure in the crystal-cabinet or some pattern in the threads of an anti-macassar that seemed the nearest sign of the other world. (Gerald Murnane, Landscape with Landscape, 1985)

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Since the arrival of the so-called First Fleet of British settlers to Australia, images of the Australian landscape have operated by representing an oscillation between its documentation, and what Chiara Bottici calls the “European imaginary,” in the sense of its mythmaking and aesthetic identitarianism.¹¹ My question is whether it is now possible to see in the moment of late 1960s a different kind of imaginary emerging, the imaginary of an “Australian” vision for the South Pacific: not a vision of reality subjected to the service of science, but an experimental aesthetics subjected to the politics of avant-gardism.¹²

I’ll explain briefly what I mean. If we begin with Guglielmi’s “rearguard” thesis for experimentalism, the question of political intent is bracketed out. But what we have seen is that these works are often understood as both experimental and avant-garde. This gives the work a double-meaning that is difficult to track. This is especially so when there is no agreed target for the avant-garde, something which the turn to abstraction begins to represent: the end of progressive art. To explain this, let’s jump again from the experimental into the political, ahead in time, to the first ConFest—then known as Down To Earth festival, which was held on the banks of the Cotter River in the ACT over a few days from the 10-14th of December 1976. The invitation to the event came from Jim Cairns, formerly a minister in the Whitlam Government and the recently deposed Treasurer of Australia (who had before this time been a leader of the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign in Melbourne in 1970). Might this document suggest the course upon which the EXPRMTL festival intervenes in the development of Australia’s festival and arts cultures in the post-war era? Like, for example, how films such as Philip Noyce’s two-screen work documenting the Aquarius Arts Festival in Canberra, Good Afternoon (1971), or Michael Lee’s Turnaround (1983), which documents Down To Earth (placing it contrast to, among other things, the urban parades of Moomba in Melbourne).¹³ Lee was a close collaborator and acolyte of the Cantrills—he had been the driver for the Cantrills' Second Journey to Uluru in the late 1970s (the film had debuted at the Melbourne International Film Festival in June, 1981). Here’s Cairns:

The purpose of the festival is to show the urgent need to SHAPE ALTERNATIVES NOW.

Ways must be found because of the violent, acquisitive, alienated, industrial society which now poses a threat to survival. People have for centuries searched for equality and the right and ability to determine their own development. Individuals must accept responsibility for themselves. Personal happiness and equality, as much as a good society, depend upon self realisation. The most vital factor today is a sense of true identity. This is lost because our identities are created by others - not by ourselves. The all-powerful externally created hegemony in this assumed-to-be-free society, and its internalised personal alienation, must be understood if self realisation can be achieved.

The starting point must be the "will to be the self which one truly is".

There must be equality and effective individual participation in government and in every other group activity if self realisation is to be achieved.

The festival will be concerned with the search for the true nature of man and woman.

While this paper continues research I have been undertaking on experimental and avant-garde filmmaking, artist-films or so-called “independent” films by filmmaker-employees of the ABC, to the filmmakers’ cooperatives and artist communities in Australia and across the Pacific, there is still an origin or starting point that remains to be established. One such starting point might be the Cantrills' first film, Mud (1964). Shot in the thermal pools of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s north island, Mud represents—in its cataclysmic soundtrack and shots of a bubbling and violent natural spring—something like the creation of a new world. Continuing onwards I am seeking here to establish the role the Cantrills played as pivotal figures for the expanded arts of Melbourne and Australia from the 1970s and on to their recognition for the Queen’s 85th birthday honors in 2011, separately bestowing both of the Cantrills as Members of the Order of Australia (AM):

For service to the visual arts as a documentary and experimental film maker, and to education in the creative arts fields, particularly surrealism and avant-garde cinema.

In many senses this recognition is both incongruous and somewhat (necessarily) reductive, considering the staggering amount of work the Cantrills have produced (they continued to “work” right up until 2020, hosting regular screenings and didactic events in their Castlemaine home, when Corinne was well into her 90s). The entanglement of their work with the state cultural and funding bodies deserves closer inspection and criticism than it has garnered so-far. Since the publication of the Cantrills Filmnotes in 1971 the presence of Arthur and Corinne, along with their sons Ivor and Aaron, in the media arts “environment” has been immense and perhaps because of this somewhat invisible.

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The question of what this invisibility might be defined as, was tentatively formulated in 1965 by Fluxus artist and publisher of the Something Else Press, Dick Higgins. For Higgins it was the concept of intermedia—‘a location in the field between the general area of art media and those of life media’—that could provide a model for the arts after WWII, to coalesce around an idea or a mood that was, by the end of a decade marked by seismic technological and cultural shifts, aiming to demystify and popularise the concept of the avant-garde.¹⁴ Higgins went so far as to call it an ‘uncharted land’.¹⁵ “Expanded Arts” was another term that came to be used to describe the promiscuity of practices, between media (the simplest way to understand the concept), helping to produce new horizons and directed away from medium-specificity discourse in the arts of the 1960s and 70s. It is this term—intermedia—which pops up again in Chris Hemensley’s discussion with Corinne Cantrill on 3RRR radio in 1983. Significantly, Hemensley’s suggestion of a ‘New Australian Poetry’ in 1970 had sought to internationalise the potential of what he saw as the “little mags”, even as he left for England.¹⁶ His parting shot: ‘In Australia there is a battle ^with anti-Anti-Intellectualism before one even arrives at the stage of anti-intellectualism i.e. the Academy.’¹⁷ The answer to this impasse, he believed, was in the ‘open communications’ that contemporary technologies were only just beginning to make possible at the time.¹⁸ While searching for the essential characteristics of film as a medium, it is also clear that the performance of the work permitted its interaction across the arts—something that is evident in the way EXPMTL 4 took place in 1967/8.

The radicalism the Cantrills had encountered in Belgium was led, in part, by none other than Harun Farocki, Holger Meins, Gerd Conradt, and Oimel Mai who were present protesting the festival’s emphasis on experimentalism and its apparent lack of political commitment.¹⁹ Meins was a German cinematographer (later of the Rote Armee Fraktion/Baader-Meinhof Group, and who died after a hunger strike in Wittlich prison in 1974), with others he had made a short film titled How to make a molotov cocktail (1968). This precipitation of protest at events, amongst others, would eventually see the 1968 Cannes Film Festival curtailed at the height of the student protests that took over much of Germany and France. As Xavier Garcia Bardon writes in 2013: ‘The strength of EXPRMNTL ^lay in the articulation of ^its three parts… These are, according to Ledoux in 1974: first, the film competition, second the non-film related activities, third the unexpected. The first and the second lead to the third.’²⁰ EXPRMTL 4 jury-member and artist-filmmaker from New York, Shirley Clarke, stated in an interview undertaken soon after the events: ‘I think Rome is burning. Which is always a good time to let oneself go. ^… A new world is coming. The end of this world is coming, but a new world will take its place.’²¹

When the Cantrills encountered the arts-collective Bush Video in the early 1970s, they were particularly impressed by the work of multi-media artist Joseph el Khourey. This influenced their turn to pre-colonial and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures through the anthropology of Baldwin Spencer, it also meant shift away from the doctrinaire avant-gardism and it correlative experimentalism of their earlier work. Spencer’s films from 1900/1901 provided them with an archival model for making work that was no longer about novelty. It was El Khourey who had suggested these films to them, and their encounter with idiosyncratic cultural historians and practitioners like Harry Smith during their time in the US (between 1973-75) also alerted them to the broader context in which their work might be situated. Andrew Pike, whom Arthur Cantrill had first worked with at ANU in 1969, described the work of Japanese artist Terayama Shuji as an example of ‘intermedial creative practice’ in the context of a ‘Pacific community of poetry’ made explicit for the Cantrills in the mid-1970s.²² Things began to shift away from Harry Hooton’s technocratic vision of the future, which is where the Cantrills began their experimental work, to less concrete visions of an expanded cultural practice.²³ The experimentalism of EXPRMTL indicates the presence of an avant-gardism that is the other side of the same coin. Today it seems as though it is impossible to distinguish the experiment from its political implications, yet disentangling these dual tendencies in the work will prove central to understanding it.