The Knokke Connection is the third program in a four-part screening series dedicated to the work of the Australian filmmaking couple Arthur (1938) and Corinne Cantrill (1928−2025). The screenings take place in Ghent (Art Cinema OFFoff) and Brussels (Cinema Parenthèse, CINEMATEK) between May 18 – 20 and on June 1.
Arthur and Corinne Cantrill did not show work at the famed EXPRMNTL 4 festival of 1967/68 at Knokke-le-Zoute – their film Skin of Your Eye would screen at the next iteration of the festival in 1974 (and will be screening at CINEMATEK in Brussels on June 1). However, the Cantrills did attend the 1967/68 edition and considered it to be “life-changing”: “at that time… the most important event in our filmmaking lives.”
Both Robert Nelson and Gunvor Nelson featured films at EXPRMNTL 4 and they left a profound impact on the Cantrills – they would, many years later, still recall the importance of seeing these works. The festival represented such a decisive moment in the Cantrills’ careers as filmmakers as it provided the nudge that they needed to dedicate themselves more totally to an experimental film practice.
Like the Cantrills, the filmic beginnings of Robert and Gunvor Nelson can be traced to the home movies they made together as husband and wife in the early 1960s. They would go on to make work solo or within other partnerships, e.g. with another married couple, William and Dorothy Wiley.
→ Curated and introduced by Keegan O’Connor, Audrey Lam and Anthony Brynaert
→ In collaboration with Art Cinema OFFoff & Cinema Parenthèse
Fog Pumas, a fantastical and hallucinatory film populated by strange figures, represents something of a departure in Gunvor’s work and its skewering of domestic life. It won her and Dorothy Wiley a Knokke festival prize.
Another festival winner was Robert Nelson’s short The Grateful Dead, but it was his The Great Blondino (made with William Wiley), which also screened there, that he thought better deserved that recognition. Blondino follows a young, wandering, daydreaming naif on risky adventures, “living at great risk for the beauty of it.”
The two Cantrills films in this program were works that the couple made while still living in London, in between attending the festival in Belgium in late 1967/early 1968 and returning to Australia in 1969.
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska is an idiosyncratic documentary about the eponymous Vorticist artist, studying his key sculptures in the Tate Britain and their formal attributes according to changes in motion and light.
Red Stone Dancer studies one of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s most famous sculptures – with offbeat camera movements and an offbeat rhythm, enhanced by Arthur’s electronic soundtrack.
In both films in this program, the Cantrills were finding new liberating possibilities for their cinema – “celebrating that we were abandoning the limitations of the documentary form.”
