#38 Landscape on Landscape: Australian Shorts

Thursday 31 May, 8pm @ Arena Project Space, 2 Kerr St Fitzroy. $7.

One View.JPG

AFW + NFSA #38 presents a program of three shorts that play with one of the central motifs of our national cinema: the Australian landscape.

 

Placing the Cantrills’ Earth Message & Simple Observations of a Solar Eclipse alongside Maggie Fooke & Chris Knowles’ One View, the program will expand this cinematic trope into the realm of our experimental film heritage.  

One View (1985) Maggie Fooke & Chris Knowles, 13 mins (16mm)
A single wide-angle view creates an obsessive concentration on a single frame image through processing and re-photography as the representation of a landscape becomes an increasingly manufactured image.

Earth Message (1970) Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, 25 mins (16mm)
A landscape film of the Australian bush. Carefully layered images and choreographed camera movement present the Cantrill's personal response upon returning to the Australia after four years overseas.

Simple Observations of a Solar Eclipse (1976) Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, 15 mins (16mm)
A study of a total eclipse of the sun recorded in Royal Park, Melbourne on 23rd October 1976. The film records the changes of light on the landscape at specified times before and after totality. The Cantrills regarded the spectacle of the eclipse as a cosmic metaphor for the process of image projection: the moment by moment gradual interruption of a beam of light by an opaque medium.

 

Maggie Fooke will be present to introduce ONE VIEW.

 

"One View explores the common assumption that the Australian landscape is featureless and unchanging, and looks at the deeper question of what might be meant by an unchanging landscape. We began from the premise that watching a place (or more generally, any more complex scene) involves the appreciation of much more information than is consciously perceived. One View  searches and re-searches an image...This obsessive reiteration is designed to arouse in the viewer the experience of recognition, of remembrance of a scene known but constantly re-interpreted" 
 
- Maggie Fooke published in Cantrills Filmnotes nos.49/50, April 1986, p.36