Feature: Grain of the Voice – a Corinne and Arthur Cantrill retrospective: Interview with curator Jake Wilson
Film still from 'Harry Hooton' (1971, 83 minutes)
“Grain of the Voice” is a new retrospective focusing on the impact of sound in the work of well-known Australian experimental filmmakers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill. The Cantrills have been, and continue to be, prolific contributors to avant-garde filmmaking and film culture in Australia, having created over 140 films, a successful journal (Cantrills Film Notes, 1971-2000), and appearing as regular speakers at universities, galleries and art events. The Cantrills began making experimental films in the early 1960s, a time when avant-garde movements began to flourish, both globally and within major Australian capitals, particularly Sydney and Melbourne. One of the great things about the Cantrills is the diversity in their approach to filmmaking. As Jake Wilson, curator of the season, said to me: “When you talk about experimental cinema, you can be talking about lots of things – a very austere, modernist thing, or you can be talking about something that is trying to get the spectator on an immediate, sensory level. With the Cantrills, you have both of those things.”
We like to bemoan the absence of creativity, intellectualism and culture in our film industry – scholars and critics disingenuously cry for another Australian New Wave or wonder why more of the ‘eccentrics’ didn’t get made post-1990. The reality is, there always was a film culture here – one simply has to prod below the surface of officialdom to see how, since the development of the moving image camera, film culture has fluctuated and transformed alongside other global movements. Take, for example, the work of surrealist Dušan Marek in the 1940s and 1950s, the ingenuity of Dirk de Bruyn, the provocation of Philip Brophy, or (most recently) the combination of media from the OtherFilm movement, including writer, artist and academic Danni Zuvela. Thus, it is a refreshing change to see a retrospective of the Cantrills that not only brings a voice to the Australian avant-garde, but examines how we consider the cinema itself.
As mentioned, “Grain of the Voice” is a retrospective on the use of sound in the Cantrills’ work. It considers how noise, music and language impact upon the experience of the image, other cultures and our surroundings. The Cantrills are widely regarded for probing the plasticity of the image – but little has been written about their use of sound. I had the opportunity to chat with Jake Wilson about the program.
Screen Machine: What was the inspiration for having this retrospective focus primarily on sound? Tell me about the two programs “Voices of Artists” and “Voices of Others”.
Jake Wilson: This came out of discussions with the Cantrills. There were a couple of reasons for it: one is that they are no longer making films, but are still working on soundtracks for silent films that they made in the past. So their focus right now is very much on sound. I suppose the other thing is just trying to reposition the films.
This whole process was very collaborative. We watched the films together and discussed how they might be grouped. It is a challenge when you’re looking at all these short films, trying to find a heading for a program that will make it more than just a bunch of shorts. The title “Voices of Others” was obvious, in a way, because they have spent a long time going to different places. They have made films in the outback, in Bali and Germany and so forth, and they are very interested in the texture of the voices of people from different cultures – how you can learn something about the culture just by listening to the voice, even if it is in a language you don’t understand.
The title “Voices of Artists” came about because they have made a lot of films about all kinds of artists, from poets to visual artists to performers. At the start of their careers they were making art documentaries, films for television that were profiles of artists. Right away they decided they weren’t going to use third-person narration, and they weren’t going to use interviewers’ questions – they would cut them out of the soundtrack. They just wanted to have the artist’s voice, the authentic voice of the artist on the soundtrack. They were interested in how the voice of the artist, through its texture and the way the artist spoke, could express something about the artist’s personality or the history of creating the art.
For example, there are two films with the Cantrills’ son, Ivor, who is autistic. One film in particular, called Myself when Fourteen (1989) uses footage of him, when he was 14, that is repeated and rotoscoped so the colours are constantly shifting. Ivor did all of that himself. On the soundtrack, at the beginning and the end, you can hear him talking about that process and looking back on the footage of when he was younger. There’s also a film we didn’t use, which is one they made at the very start of their career that had to be cut for space. It’s called Bottles into Dolls. It was made for an arts and crafts movement for children, which they were involved in. It was literally showing children taking bottles and putting heads on them to make them into dolls. That was made for the ABC and it was fitted out with a third person commentary, this ABC announcer explaining what was going on. If we’d used that, it would have been to see it as a different sort of documentary about the process of making art and as an example of the kind of commentary that they wanted to do away with.
The other program, “Terra Australis”, was something Arthur and Corinne talked about right from the outset, which is bringing in not only human voices, but also voices coming out of the landscapes and voices of animals, insects and the wind. So those categories came about fairly naturally when we were looking at the films.
SM: The program’s title comes from the essay by Roland Barthes. How did this relation come about?
JW: They had both read the essay, “The Grain of the Voice”, back in the ‘70s. That was an inspiration for a series of films that they made in Central Australia, including one film (Two Women, 1980), which was a recording of a song cycle by three Indigenous women. That film was paired with two others under the heading “Grain of the Voice”, but in fact they are more interested in just that phrase, ‘grain of the voice’, rather than trying to echo directly what was in the original essay.
SM: What was happening with the Cantrills and with Cantrills Filmnotes is something I see happening in the OtherFilm movement that Danni Zuvela is a part of in Queensland. What I mean is, it’s a combination of experimental filmmaking and film criticism. With a lot of avant-garde movements in Australia, it seems many people don’t recognise its existence or don’t realise these things are happening and have been happening for a long time. It’s weird to me; it isn’t recognised as a part of an international movement or even as part of the history of Australian cinema.
JW: I think the Cantrills have been great publicists for experimental cinema. Those magazines are great resources for anybody who wants to look back and find out what was going on in Australia, films that aren’t easy to come by now. I think they have done something to make it more visible. I absolutely think the Cantrills are really vital to any history of Australian cinema. How widely that is recognised is hard to say – they were widely recognised earlier on, at the start of the ‘70s. When they returned to Australia after some time in the UK, they won a couple of AFI awards and took their films around university campuses.
Today, one obvious thing is that they refuse to transfer their work to DVD and make it available that way. Most of the time when their films are shown in Australia, they are shown with the Cantrills there to present the films. When you see the films, there are obvious reasons for that because they are interested in the material qualities of the film medium. Certainly a lot of their work with colour you aren’t going to get replicated on video.
SM: And certainly not on a television set!
JW: No, not at all.
SM: I’m interested in what’s being done with the film on Harry Hooton (Harry Hooton, 1970). I knew a little about what they had done with that film and the history of the Sydney Push.
JW: The Hooton film was one that came up early on in discussions. We wanted to show one film that was roughly feature length. The reason we are showing that one is that it’s all built around Hooton’s voice. He had died some ten years before the film was made, and the voice all comes from a recording that was done just before he died. It’s a sort of testament where he reads his poetry, while also talking about his philosophies and his vision of how life could be transformed. The starting point of that film was the voice. In a way, that film is a coming together of a lot of the different ideas that the Cantrills had been working on over the previous decade.
SM: I love Corinne’s film In this Life’s Body (1984). Why aren’t you showing it in the retrospective?
JW: I have to make a confession: I have not seen it! To my knowledge, it’s not been shown in Melbourne for the last decade (if it was, I was away and I apologise!), but it’s certainly something I’ve always wanted to see. I’m hoping (and the Cantrills are hoping) that it will be shown early next year as part of an Australian Perspectives program that ties in with the new exhibition that they are also doing at ACMI. The film would have worked very well with our focus on the voice. It is Corinne’s film, and she was very clear that if we were going to show one feature film, it should be the Hooton film.
SM: I’m also excited to see Waterfall (1984), I have read about it and what it does to expand time.
JW: Waterfall is a very exciting film in terms of sound. I don’t know if much has been written about this, but they actually recorded some of the sound standing right under a waterfall. It has a very overwhelming quality that gives an extra dimension to the image, which has several dimensions already.
SM: What are you hoping for with this retrospective? What do you want for its impact?
JW: I’m hoping it will introduce the films to an audience that hasn’t seen them before or hasn’t had the opportunity. I’m hoping it will draw more attention to the importance of sound in their work. There are a lot of very carefully sculpted soundtracks in their work, and that is something that has been underrated. Also, to draw attention to the range of their films – sometimes they are considered primarily landscape filmmakers or makers of a certain kind of experimental film, but in fact the range of subjects, techniques and approaches in their body of work is very wide.
Grain of the Voice begins 10 October at ACMI.
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[...] filmmakers Corinne and Arthur Cantrill. The full program, curated by Jake Wilson (who we interviewed recently), is here. The retrospective is running until October [...]