Remembering Corinne Cantrill

Reflections on the life and work of a great filmmaker.

(Photo credit: Darron Davies)

The following incorporates material included in different form in speeches given in honour of Corinne Cantrill on March 23 and March 30, 2025. See also the separate tribute to Corinne published in The Age on March 14.

1. C For Corinne

“She was one of the pushiest women I ever knew,” the filmmaker Paul Winkler told me over the phone a few weeks after Corinne Cantrill’s death in February 2025 at the age of 96. I’m reasonably sure he meant it as praise, but anyhow he wasn’t wrong. She pushed her way through life, forcing it to yield up whatever treasures it had to offer. To watch or rewatch her cinematic autobiography In This Life’s Body is to be astonished by the range of experiences, contexts, countries, passions and preoccupations she recalls herself as passing through, not merely over the course of her life as a filmmaker, but during her equally rich previous existence as Corinne Joseph, before the meeting with Arthur Cantrill at the age of around thirty that led to her becoming Corinne Cantrill, and then to the pair becoming “the Cantrills,” lifelong collaborators and leading lights of Australian experimental cinema.

Even before the narrator of In This Life’s Body leaves Australia for Europe at the end of her teens, we’ve heard about her childhood in working-class Sydney in the midst of the Depression, her Jewish Communist father and Theosophist mother and the protracted war between them, her years at Fort St Girls High School with its “lioness” headmistress Fanny Cohen, her terror at the outbreak of the Second World War, her innocent dates with servicemen on leave, her introduction to the bohemian Pakie’s Club and its cosmopolitan regulars, her well-paid work modelling in artists’ studios all over the city, her weekends in the bush, her botany research at Sydney University while the male students who generally monopolised the labs were off fighting, her agonising three-year entanglement with a practised seducer of young girls, her joyfully straightforward physical relationship with a boy her own age, her periods of self-intoxication when she felt she could walk on water, her bouts of depression and despair…

These adventures, along with others over the next decade, could be the basis for at least half-a-dozen novels, all of them page-turners (there are several points of resemblance to an Australian woman of genius from the previous generation, who I don’t remember ever hearing Corinne refer to: Christina Stead). Nor is there any reason to doubt that her account is substantially true as far as names, dates and facts are concerned, even setting aside the accompanying images, mostly still photographs, that appear to corroborate much of what we’re told.

If there’s a frustrating aspect to the film, it’s that despite the running time of two and a half hours many long stories have to be cut so short they’re barely stories at all. Instead, the voiceover is full of condensed but definite verdicts, as sweeping as they are memorably expressed. “My mother was full of genteel pretensions,” the narrator says, an annihilation in a phrase. Later, looking back on her travels: “I am glad to have lived in Paris before the cars ate it up.” Later still on her many lovers, some but not all of whose portraits are ranged across the screen: “How fine these men are!”

Even as she pronounces equally assured, occasionally severe judgements on her younger self, it’s clear that the speaker has lost little of her romantic sense of life, a grand adventure for those with the courage to embark on it. At the same time, it’s clear that with this courage goes the practical shrewdness of a survivor, aware from an early age of how much depends on the ability to size up situations and people accurately, and on grasping the rules of the world before deciding whether they’re to be followed or dismissed. “I’ve always had my own money,” she says, looking back on those teenage years, “known its value, and how to use it well.”

Yet for all their ring of certainty, enhanced by the speaker’s early elocution lessons, these judgements are open to question from the moment they’re put forward. Indeed, they’re constantly being rethought and questioned by the speaker herself—and after completing the film in 1984, Corinne immediately began once more to rethink and question what she had done.

The primary art of In This Life’s Body is neither in what’s said nor what’s shown, but in the gap between the two: the stunning assurance of the language, juxtaposed with the mute “found” images the narrator alternately interprets and refuses to interpret, scrutinising them not in the manner of a judge sorting through evidence but as an artist faced with objects that possess the same shifting, uncertain significance which objects do in general. Periodically the voiceover switches from first person to third person, allowing us to understand the “I” who is telling us her story as one more object of scrutiny, rather than as the creative force behind the whole, whether we identify that force as Corinne Mozelle Joseph or Corinne Cantrill or “the Cantrills”—the film is credited equally to Corinne and to Arthur, who helped with the editing—and whether or not we think a name really matters all that much.

2. Remembrances

“I’m not very well, Jake,” Corinne would say to me, when I came to see her and Arthur at home in Moonee Ponds, or later in Castlemaine, and unimaginatively went through the conventional ritual of asking how she was. As a rule this response would be followed by “I’m in terrible pain,” and by the observation either that she would be dead soon, or that she hoped to be. Remarks of this sort were a constant in my friendship with Corinne, across fifteen or twenty years; gradually I came to take them for granted, along with many of her other distinctive but regular habits (as well as those of Arthur and the third member of the household, their autistic son Ivor). In other words, I stopped hearing what she was saying, or at least stopped asking myself what it meant, beyond being a typical instance of her bluntness.

Before the recent commemorative screening of In This Life’s Body at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, it had been a number of years since I’d seen the film. Going in, I remembered the narrative as framed by Corinne’s account of a recent, sudden life-threatening illness, prompting her to take stock of her past. What I had forgotten is that she also speaks of chronic pain as a familiar companion for years prior to this illness, more or less acute but never fading entirely. Reflecting on this now, I don’t find it hard to grasp why the Corinne I knew referred to her pain so insistently—or why anxiety about mortality looms large not just in In This Life’s Body but in the Cantrills’ work more generally from the 1980s on.

Of course Corinne dramatised her pain and her anxiety, as she dramatised every aspect of herself: a thoroughly down-to-earth person in many ways, she also gloried in the theatricality excluded from the Cantrills’ cinema (or nominally excluded: the exceptions are frequent, and not restricted to their “expanded cinema” performances). But self-dramatising doesn’t always mean exaggerating: often it entails speaking the truth, or what feels like the truth, in a manner intended to set it at a distance. That’s what I think Corinne was largely doing when she turned her complaints about her health into rituals of her own, performed with her customary immense vigour and often an unmistakable relish in their shock value. What she wasn’t doing was telling me that I was responsible for her pain, or that I should somehow try to fix it (she was, in all my dealings with her, reliably direct rather than passive-aggressive). In a way she wasn’t talking to me at all; in another way she was warning me about what it would be like when I grew old in turn.

The Corinne I knew was always old, in my youthful eyes—youthful at least in a comparative sense. She would have been around seventy when I first observed her doing her hard-sell routine on behalf of Cantrills Filmnotes, the long-running magazine she and Arthur edited and published, at the screenings of the Melbourne Super-8 Film Group—which I joined at the end of my own teens just in time to buy a copy of the final issue, with its farewell editorial in Corinne’s best scorched-earth style (“To continue the magazine would be to bring distinction to Australian society, which would be inappropriate”).

By the time I really started getting to know her she was at least seventy-five—and she was over eighty when she and Arthur asked me to collaborate on curating a 2010 retrospective of their work at ACMI. That retrospective focused on sound, and was presented under the title “Grain Of the Voice,” taken from the essay by Roland Barthes—all of which was mainly Corinne’s inspiration, certainly not mine, though I did offer suggestions for which films to include and what order they should go in, which she and Arthur accepted or rejected (notably, she had no interest in showing the atypically human-centred In This Life’s Body, which at that point I hadn’t seen).

Perhaps I wouldn’t have been enlisted for the retrospective if I hadn’t started writing regularly for the Age newspaper a few years earlier. But while it’s true this is partly what made me a useful person for Corinne to know, it’s equally true that if Corinne liked you she would find a use for you one way or another, whatever your station in life. She probably also thought, not altogether wrongly, that I could use the fee ACMI were offering: one of the forms taken by her enormous kindness to me is that she never ceased to worry about my well-being, in particular the likelihood that the Age weren’t paying me enough, judging by how often my by-line as a freelancer appeared there or didn’t.

Regardless, once we got down to working on the retrospective I was treated by both Corinne and Arthur as an equal collaborator to a degree which amazed me then and amazes me more now—especially knowing that if I saw Corinne as old, she saw me as very young, barely grown-up at all. The year after the ACMI retrospective, she and Arthur were jointly given the Order of Australia, something I had long been aware was on the horizon; like other Cantrill associates, I had received a letter months earlier soliciting my views on the proposed honour and swearing me to secrecy. Perhaps a week or two after the ceremony, I unwisely told Corinne and Arthur about this, and about the letter I’d sent in response, affirming that they were indeed among the most important of all Australian filmmakers.

There weren’t many occasions when I managed to astonish Corinne, but that day I did. “They asked you?” she demanded, in a tone of sincere disbelief bordering on outrage. “A little 32-year-old like you?”

3. The Immaterial Truth

Even in the cult-like realm of experimental film aficionados, where obscurity is a currency in itself, the Cantrills’ work is more gossiped about than seen, especially internationally. There’s an obvious reason for this: to this day, none of it has officially been made available for home viewing, on the grounds that its significance is inseparable from the material nature of the film medium, a stance the Cantrills have stuck to more stubbornly than all but a few of their avant-garde peers. It’s true that over the last decade or so a handful of their films have been digitised with their consent, for purposes of scholarly research and even for cinema screenings on specific approved occasions. But we’ll be waiting a long time for the Blu-ray box set, if it ever eventuates.

While this might sound like self-defeating purism, the position is entirely reasonable on its own terms. When the work is properly projected from well-preserved prints, all becomes clear: red in a Cantrill film is really red, not an idea about the colour but the thing itself. My one real quibble is with the words “material” and “materiality”; while a film print is a material object, a print is not a film, any more than a musical score is music. The film is what we see on the screen: projected light, to borrow the title of one of the Cantrills’ film-performance works. And light, going by what I recall of my high school physics classes, is not matter.

I never had this conversation with Corinne; I’m not sure she would have been very interested. Perhaps more significantly where she’s concerned, terms like “materialist” or “anti-illusionist” applied to artworks suggest a striving for detachment and an emphasis on theory over feeling, qualities that couldn’t be further removed from Corinne either as an artist or as a person. To the degree she cared for theory at all, I suspect she never ceased to be a disciple of the poet Harry Hooton, a crucial influence on her in the later 1950s—and as the Cantrills record in their 1969 feature Harry Hooton, made after its subject’s death, Hooton defined art as “the communication of emotion to matter and nothing else”.

The notion of materialist filmmaking also often implies some form of demystification, an insistence on the literal that precludes metaphor. But this too was very far from Corinne’s approach—as is evident from many Cantrill films, but perhaps most directly from At Eltham, made in 1974 after the Cantrills first moved to Melbourne and the first film she considered to be more hers than Arthur’s (unlike with In This Life’s Body, the credit on screen goes to Corinne alone, though Arthur was still responsible for the sound). Literally it’s largely a documentary record of changing light in the Australian bush, but the opening and closing passages identify it as a elegy for the poet Charles Buckmaster—and its longer title, used in some Cantrill filmographies though not on screen, is At Eltham: A Metaphor On Death.

Indeed, across the Cantrills’ body of work the breaking waves of the ocean, the changes in light over the course of a day, the life cycles of plants and trees and the transmutation of reality through the medium of film itself are all offered as metaphors—or, more precisely, as specific instances of broader processes unfolding constantly on different scales and in different contexts, in both the “natural” realm and the human one, to the degree the two can meaningfully be separated. Even a straightforward early work like Bottles Into Dolls, one of half-a-dozen short documentaries about after-school activities made by Corinne and Arthur in the early 1960s for the Children’s Library and Craft Movement, can be taken as illustrating a much broader conception of what making art entails—and of how this relates to the task, never complete for any of us, of shaping a self to face the world.

The elemental forces in the natural world exemplify the movements of our many natures...that forming, breaking and receding wave of movement. Perhaps our problems arise when the flow of our natures is blocked, and hate, spite, fear, treachery become dominant, never receding, never allowing the waves of other natures to form and move within us.

—Corinne Cantrill, “Notes on In This Life’s Body,” Cantrills Filmnotes 45-46, October 1984

With love to Arthur and the Cantrill family.