Experiments in Experience

In the doomed cell I have found love’s whole eternity.
Judith Wright, The Moving Image, 1946.

There are a set of films in the collections of the University of Melbourne that are very difficult—if not impossible­­—to see.¹ These films exist as 16mm prints in various parts of the University’s Collections: in the General Collections, the Archives, or the Special Collections. Many of these prints are to be found in the Education Collections in the University Library, while some have been remediated and are available in the Digitised Collections. This means that some films can now be seen immediately, as they are available through on-demand streaming video platforms like Kanopy. But not all of these films have been or can be digitised. The 16mm prints are available to be projected, however, but only if a projector (and projectionist) can be found. This difficulty is of course compounded by the fact that viewing film on film has more recently given way to the widespread use of digital video.

While the greater collection of films—as moving image works—remains difficult to define, that is my task, using a theory I’ve termed 'typical'. For the purposes of limiting what follows to a subset of these films, my focus will remain on 16mm, not only because the medium turns 100 years old this year, but because of its relative obscurity in the archives. Yet the context in which these prints appear is important, so I will briefly lay out this theory in advance. 'Typical films' develops an existing idea about visual art in the region, initially theorised for painting and drawing by the art historian Bernard Smith, in his book European Vision and the South Pacific. First published in 1960, Smith focussed his analysis on the way the 'essential qualities of a particular kind of geographical environment' were depicted by colonial artists and reproduced.² By showing how films from the University Collections also follow this logic, a typology emerges, one that cuts across existing genre distinctions such as narrative, documentary, and experimental.

These are films made on the lands of First Peoples, mostly without their permission. Wiradjuri artist Joel Sherwood Spring, referring to the work of Kathryn Yusoff, describes how 'the lineages and limitations of geological thought are an epistemological base by which racial difference is consolidated in this country', including the scientific-economic logic informing colonialist imaging of the landscape.³ By way of providing an example, Sherwood Spring examines concrete production early on in the Colony of New South Wales. Initially it was made in part with Aboriginal shell middens that were sometimes tens of thousands of years old, evidence of continual occupation. This practice has continued over the following centuries, it points to the essential qualities of the environment according to its colonial logic.

A screening exhibition program held between 2008 and 2010, titled “Figuring Landscapes”, sought to place the appearance of the landscape tradition into the contemporary context of artists’ film and video. Defending the traditional association of the landscape, the co-editor of the book accompanying the exhibition program, Eu Jin Chua, writes that the landscape tradition has 'been an aesthetic tool complicit in the domination of human beings by other human beings.'⁴ Yet by focussing on artists’ moving image works from the UK and Australia, this lineage unmistakably tackles the problems with the landscape tradition that have been brought to bear witness to the legacies of settler colonialism. In his 1960 study, Smith uses the term 'typical landscape' to describe the art of European colonists and convict-settlers.⁵ They were attempting—Smith’s argument in European Vision suggests they were failing—to recognise the worlds they had encountered in the Pacific at the end of the eighteenth century. It is Smith’s framework which has been pressed into service here, with the aim of ordering the set of works, including films and photos, scans, and prints made to document and experiment on the region that are now in the collections of the University of Melbourne. Some of these works document the landscape, like Albie Thoms’s, Bohemians in the Bush (1993), which accompanied an exhibition recounting the history of nineteenth century artists camps in Mosman held at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1991. But the 16mm films, like Arthur and Corinne Cantrills’ Eikon (1969), are experiments with the film form. And then there are some films, like Chris Knowles and Maggie Fooke’s One View (1985), which explicitly take the representation of landscape as their principle subject.

In the same moment as Smith, filmmaker and theorist Hollis Frampton posited the idea of an infinite cinema. Frampton’s metahistory of film imagines that a 'polymorphous camera has always turned, and will turn forever, its lens focussed upon all the appearances of the world.'⁶ This idea, combining lens with appearance, is predicated on the fateful intermixing of modern scientific endeavour with art. At the end of European Vision, Smith gives an example that focusses this reality on early photography in the 1840s. Describing how the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt once claimed, in a letter to the English photographic pioneer Henry Fox Talbot, 'Daguerre is my Chimborasso!' {sic}.⁷ In other words, before the cinema, photography—represented for Humboldt by French photographer and artists Louis Daguerre—was like the Andean mountain in Ecuador that experiences all of the different types of natural climates. Furthermore, it is so high that reaching its summit seemed beyond the humanly possible, as it was to Humboldt and his party when they surveyed the mountain in 1802.⁸

This image is a curious one, conquest of the landscape for scientific purposes is a modern notion that also corresponds to the process of colonisation in Australia and many other countries. Often called the long nineteenth-century (following Eric Hobsbawm’s writing on empire and revolution), the appearance of cameras during the industrial revolution and during the “settling” of Australia after 1788, further complicates the aesthetics of filmmaking as it developed into the twentieth century.

Film can therefore be traced to the cataclysmic moments that led to the formation of what is now known as the Commonwealth of Australia, within which the University of Melbourne operates today. Because of this, a lot of work on this new media also addresses, directly or indirectly, to the legacies of imperialism. For example, take the involvement of the University of Melbourne in producing films like Gil Brealey’s 30-minute documentary from 1958, A Queen Who Returned, and produced by the State Film Centre. An educational record of the visit of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother to Australia, it now appears as an early experiment in state-sponsored screen culture. The political economy of these works are therefore able to be foregrounded in their historical significance. Seen from the reverse perspective, most of these films were made on, and capture images of Aboriginal lands, peoples and cultures. There is a tension, therefore, traceable to the invention of film, in what might be called the 'doomed cell'—extending John Hawke’s reading of the line in the Judith Wright poem, The Moving Image, as a biological image.⁹ What, then, are the typical films in the collections of the University of Melbourne? And how do we begin to understand the inter-disciplinary status of these films and their role in nationalist, documentary, and artistic enterprise?

By gathering and ordering a collection of published documents, writing and materials around the University of Melbourne’s collection of films, this project draws upon work from the Education library, from visual art, poetry, as well as from disciplines such as botany and chemistry. As such, film can be positioned at the nexus of these disciplines of study, and the incomplete set of writing on these films, collected here, offers itself as an educational resource and a way to re-imagine the collections. The texts by Adrian Martin, Danni Zuvela, and Dirk de Bruyn highlight the significant of artist moving images for this endeavour. Collectively, these objects speak to the 'typical' works in the collection, which are at present mostly catalogued as experimental.

Typical Films 

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, 'One View' in Cantrills Filmnotes, 1986.

It is no new thing that the Australian landscape has long provided perpetuation of an Australian identity—that highly desirable Australianness—through photography, films and, later, television and videos.
Gary Lee, 'lying about the landscape', 1997.

What are these experiments, however, and how can we understand them? Many films by key experimental filmmakers of their era, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, are in the University’s collections. Very often, they took the Australian landscape as the subject and focus of their work. Writing and researching the practices and performance of music in New York after 1950, musicologist Benjamin Piekut has framed the experimental arts in the post-war period by pointing to the heterogeneity of the network model, which allows for the interpretation of experimentalism as 'a messy mix of all types of things.'¹⁰ While this may be true internationally, our local anxieties over the status of the landscape tradition necessarily temper this radicality for the possibilities of Australian experimentalism, and have been summarily explained by Larrakia artist and anthropologist, Gary Lee, in the following way:

It’s puzzling that there is a debate at all about the so-called landscape tradition in the history and practice of white Australian art. It is blindingly obvious what the function of the landscape tradition is: it is about the theft of indigenous land.¹¹

With historians like Smith explicitly in his sights, Lee describes the particular qualities shared by work made over the more than two-hundred years since colonisation. By focussing on the colonisation of Australia during the beginnings of the long nineteenth-century, Smith highlighted the confluence of academic art and the science of the Royal Society—specifically figures like Joseph Banks. In the final pages of European Vision and the South Pacific, Smith turns to the invention of the camera lucida, a proto-photographic device for recording and documenting onto paper the image laid out before its operator. Patented in 1806 by the English chemist William Hyde Wollaston, it was presupposed by the Dioptrice of Johannes Kepler in the early part of the seventeenth century. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, the subsequent shift in scientific imaging that was brought about by the use of lens-based photography, influenced the shift away from draughtsmanship and artists accompanying Royal Society voyages to the South Pacific and elsewhere.

In his 1997 book Imagining the Antipodes, a study of culture, theory, and the visual in the work of Bernard Smith (1916-2011), Peter Beilharz considers a central theme in Smith’s work as a theorist of art and colonial history:

The mode of art history which Smith had been subjected to worked on premises of individual genius and great masterpieces which were linked together serially by means of stylistic and iconographic analysis. The result was an art history at once too exclusively European and ahistorical… The types at work in Smith’s thinking are not the schematic two-by-two boxes which force all history into pre-existing schemata; they are the looser types of precedent, of dèja-vu, of recycling, return, re-formation, transformation, of context rather than abstract logic.¹²

Indeed, as Smith wrote in European Vision and the South Pacific, images of colonial exploration and settler art in the South Pacific began by 'leading the landscape painting of the expeditions away from the neo-classical and the picturesque towards a form of landscape best described as typical.'¹³ This focus on 'types' de-emphasised artistic genius in preference for the idea of a 'European vision' of the lands previously uncharted by Western models. At the outset of these expeditions, Smith argues, the academic arts and the Royal Society had seemed to combine forces, creating typical ways of seeing the country, its botany, animal life, and peoples of the South Pacific, in newly objective and yet also fanatical ways. Smith identified this vision as not quite fine art, and not quite science. This is how the documents of visual culture in Australian colonial history after 1770 began to shape settler-colonial ideas of the region.

As an apparatus, 16mm film (and the camera arts more broadly) encode one type of this 'typical' vision, in that it is central to the apparatus of the cinema, encoding knowledge visually as images in film frames, or cells, that maintain their context for particular histories of art in Australia and globally. Yet these moving images are not so easily subsumed by the existing discourses on painting and photography. As a result, they have been deposited and left languishing in the archives. If the camera and then the film print are the visual technologies particular to the era of imperial expansion into the South Pacific, they might still exist as unexamined evidence of the effects of enlightenment rationality, as well as its discontents, on colonial subjects becoming objects for study, and vice versa. 

Film on Film

All we want now is the film experience—the optical and aural stimulation it can give. We want to be intellectually involved with the film form. Concerned with the matter of film, rather than its content. (The greatest films are those in which the form is the content, as in music.)
Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, 'Cinema Manifesto', 1970.

It is not surprising, therefore, that many of the films that have found their way into these collections are artist-films. That is, they were made by studio artists or small, independent production companies like the Cantrills’ Firebird Films, who worked on film as their medium. Importantly, experiments in the form of filmmaking coalesce with documentation on camera, revealing the didactic foundations of the practice prior to and after the invention of video. As these new media formats became more dominant in the 1970s, film became increasingly redundant. Simultaneously, film began to enter the art academies as a discipline for research and teaching. Today, film as a medium has experienced a steady return as the preferred medium of photographers and cinematographers around the world (somewhat like the revival of vinyl records for music). Even Netflix has recently released a new film shot on 35mm film stocks; Cities of Last Things is a Mandarin-language drama film that was directed by Ho Wi Ding and released in 2019. The second season of the acclaimed teen drama series, Euphoria, was mostly shot on 35mm and 16mm film stocks and released by HBO in 2022. In this sense film has become both the past and present of these types of visual techniques.

Nevertheless, the location of film prints in archives around the world remains unstable and uncertain; the Library of Congress in the USA provides the safest way to deposit film images in the archive, as paper prints. A result of their collection policy, the Paper Print Collection is how many early films remain preserved today, frame by frame. If stored in the right conditions, however, film prints may last several hundred years before deterioration. By way of comparison, magnetic tape, for video and sound recordings, degrades and becomes unplayable after only two decades. As a result, recent projects have focussed on the preservation of video and magnetic media, as evidenced by the National Film and Sound Archive’s Deadline 2025 project.¹⁴

Yet why must these typical films in the University of Melbourne’s collection be seen on film, you may be wondering? As just one example, consider the organic processing used for one work held in the Media and Film Preservation Collection, Nathanial Dorsky’s Ariel.¹⁵ This film premiered in New York at the Musem of Modern Art in 1983. Dorsky himself describing it as 'a film that came about through circumstance':

I had purchased quite cheaply a number of rolls of out-dated 16mm Anscochrome, which at the time was a small competitor to Eastman Kodak. Their color scheme was red and white, setting them apart from the Yellow Kodak and the Green Fuji. Anscochrome was their Kodachrome, so to speak, but with an extremely different process and look.¹⁶

An American experimentalist, Dorsky is a highly respected artist-filmmaker who lives and works in California. Here he is describing the contingency of artist-filmmaking, and its reliance on industrial chemical processes by dominant manufacturers like Kodak.

As these things seem to happen, one day Anscochrome suddenly announced the termination of its processing labs. So now I had these lovely rolls of film that could not be processed.¹⁷

Instead, Dorsky chose to develop this expired film in buckets of expired Anscochrome chemistry by hand, without the use of a camera, preferring to experiment directly with the abstract qualities of the film stock itself. In this way the film is about the film stock, about film as such. Therefore, only a projection of the print can reveal the true meaning of the work. Today, the film is only in distribution through Canyon Cinema in San Francisco (Dorsky has also kept two personal prints of this work). In advance of its three-decade anniversary screening at the New York Film Festival’s Views From the Avant-Garde in October 2013, he further noted that 'a few copies have been also sold to museums and universities. Perhaps that is all there will ever be.'¹⁸ One of those prints is here in the collections of the University of Melbourne. It is also in excellent condition.

How this film relates to the colonial context I have outlined so far, requires further elaboration. Consider Dorsky’s experimental film in relation to another, by the local documentary filmmaker Peter Drummond, which takes as its subject a visiting craftsperson, Stephen Hogbin, who had come to the Melbourne State College as the 'craftsman-in-residence' for one year in 1975, to work with students on timbers from the Noojee State forest in eastern Victoria. Woodcraftsman was produced on 16mm film in 1976 for Beaumaris Film Productions, in association with the Crafts Council of Australia. Today a print of the film is in the same University of Melbourne preservation collection as Dorsky’s Ariel.

While Ariel is not, Woodcraftsman is also available digitally through Kanopy, where it was recently scanned as a part of the University of Melbourne-owned content studio.¹⁹ The continued significance of the work, which deals with organic materials—timber in particular—made by hand in a way not dissimilar to Dorsky’s experimental film, lies in the fact that the Melbourne State College was amalgamated as a part of the University of Melbourne in 1989 (today it is known as the 1888 building on Grattan Street, at the Parkville campus). This helps to illuminate why a number of films and collections are now part of the larger collections of the University of Melbourne, and it also suggests a further reason for how the two films might be connected, as different “types” of film. One of the leading proponents of film in Australia at the time, Arthur Cantrill, began teaching at the Melbourne State College in 1975. He retired as an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne in 1996. It was Cantrill who had acquired the print of Dorsky’s film for the College in 1984 (the receipt for the purchase is still in the film’s cannister).

Experimentalism

The presented image of a landscape is necessarily a sign. 
Ross Gibson, 'Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films', 1983.

 In a recent essay for the Art Gallery of South Australia, Cantrill writes about the climate for experimentalism in Adelaide following WWII,

Adelaide was becoming a centre for experimental filmmaking in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1956 Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski, who arrived from Poland in 1949, had made a 20-minute live-action surrealist film, The Quest of Time; a 7.5-minute abstract film, Translucencies; and a 10.5-minute abstract/dance film, Four Movements (all black-and-white), before he launched into live multimedia ‘Sound and Image’ performances. In 1964 Ludwik Dutkiewicz, also from Poland, made Transfiguration, an accomplished 4-minute live-action ‘film poem’, distinguished by fine black-and-white photography and intricate editing. Ian Davidson also assisted in the making of these films.²⁰

Cantrill’s focus is on the films of Dušan Marek, however, with whom Davidson also worked alongside in Adelaide in the early 1960s. In the past few years, Marek’s films have featured in exhibitions held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Tate in London, and the National Gallery of Victoria. Marek and his extended family—including his brother, the sculptor Voitre Marek—arrived in Adelaide via Bathurst after leaving war-torn Europe by ship in 1948. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1926, Dušan Marek would go on to win the highest prize at the 1962 Australian Film Awards competition, the Grand Prix and Gold Award in the Experimental Section, for his animated short film Adam and Eve. Cantrill points in particular to its elegant simplicity: 'using little else than dots, circles and lines', it tells a story that depicts the cycle of life through the Christian creation myth.²¹ In the same year, however, Arthur Cantrill and his partner, Corinne, would produce their first work for Firebird Films, an experimental short titled Mud. Shot in New Zealand, it was shown on the ABC’s national television broadcast. It is a particular type of film that, significantly, took the natural elements of the landscape as its subject, combining the images with sound compositions Arthur had written to match the thermal springs, which the Australian Centre for the Moving Image describes as 'evoking the creation of a world'.²²

Only three years later, in 1965, a feature-length film made by the Melbourne-based, Italian migrant auteur, Giorgio Mangiamele, would debut at the Cannes Film Festival in France, when it was nominated for the Palm d’Or. Clay is symbolic of what filmmaker and theorist Bruce Hodsdon has termed the 'Carlton ripple'.²³ This belies the proximity of the Melbourne avant-garde to the Parkville campus of University of Melbourne, and in particular the Carlton Picture Palace (est. 1924) on Faraday Street, which became the Carlton Movie House in 1979, a site for the screenings of films taught by members of the University’s Arts Faculty. Again, the primeval title of Mangiamele’s work evokes the creation of a new world, a new type of filmmaking in the region, which could be seen to respond to the landscape tradition from outside its colonial administration. The academic or institutional mode is shaken off by an avant-garde working in a newly enterprising arts environment.

If Gino Moliterno is correct in his assessment of art cinema in Australia, there are multiple strands and concurrent moments that could be included in this designation. It was during this time, while living and working in Brisbane, that Arthur Cantrill began to correspond with Meanjin editor, Clem Christesen, who had been based at the University of Melbourne since 1946, in a plea for his support. Eventually, Cantrill was awarded the prestigious Creative Fellowship at ANU in 1969, allowing both Arthur and Corinne (and their son Ivor) to return from England, where they had been living and working since 1965.

Prior to the 1960s, historian and curator, Danni Zuvela, has tracked a number of films made in Australia that date right back to the origins of filmmaking in the region, and which may be considered a part of the hazily defined notion of an Australian Avant-Garde Cinema. Her assessment of this earlier period is reproduced here as a way to support the notion of typical films in the University’s collections. Yet, it was only during the climate of the 1960s, when filmmaking became an increasingly desirable medium for creative expression and the new spirit of the arts after the Second World War, that we first begin to see the declarations of a “new” cinema in Australia, as indeed elsewhere. Coincidentally, this ties in with the birth of the Film and Television School at the Victorian College of the Arts (also in the same year as the establishment of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, the dffb).²⁴ A number of primary documents describing this “new” cinema are also included here, by filmmaker practitioners such as Albie Thoms, Roy Little, and the Cantrills. As well, important secondary sources by Dirk de Bruyn and Adrian Martin—who both remain actively involved in the history and theory of filmmaking—expand the frame for a variety of work made in the 1970s and 1980s in the region. Martin’s essay from 1989, “The Cutting Edge”, updated and reprinted here, situates local films through the stakes for theories of montage from as early as 1921, and the work of Jean Epstein, returning us to the origins of 16mm filmmaking.²⁵ De Bruyn’s essay from 1994, “Text—Texture—Gesture”, subtly refines the materialist aesthetics of film practitioners aware of the problem of nationalism in the reception of their work.

Film Fanatics

In 1970, Marek’s And the Word Was Made Flesh became one of the first round of films to be funded by the Australia Council For The Arts’ Experimental Film and Television Fund, yet of the $5000 requested only $2000 was granted and the film could not be completed on 35mm colour film stock as Marek had proposed.²⁶ It is perhaps the austerity of the state arts body’s support for this new work, which leads to the inclusion of a quote from H.G. “Nugget” Coombs at the end of the Cantrills’ Cinema Manifesto, in the first edition of their long-running journal Cantrills Filmnotes (1971-2000), but written in Canberra during their Creative Fellowship at ANU in 1970:

'Frankly, I find aspects of that statement frightening in its arrogance and its fanaticism.' – Dr H.C. Coombs, Chairman of the Australia Council for the Arts.

That Coombs was the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, prior to his position as first chairman of the newly established Australia Council for the Arts (one of the last acts of the Prime Minister Harold Holt before his untimely death in 1967) speaks to the incoming and ongoing economic logic for the arts as a federally instituted sector by a modern federal government. Very soon, in 1975, the Australian Film Commission was established, and the Australian Film and Television School (now AFTRS) began to promote the Australia film and television industry. Soon the distinction, as Mark French and Lisa Poole have argued, between “production” and “screen culture” was established, which similarly perseveres.²⁷ In Victoria, the State Film Centre—established in 1946—has evolved to become VicScreen and ACMI, reflecting this division. It is by cutting across this split, however, that typical films encapsulates all of the types of filmmaking that developed out of the pioneer industrialism of colonial Australia. In doing this, it reveals another distinction, as identified by Gary Lee, 'the virtual absence of recognition for indigenous ownership and representation of the landscape.'²⁸

In the final decades of her life, the poet Judith Wright lived in Braidwood, NSW. Her relationship with “Nugget” Coombs had begun in the early 1970s and has been reported on and documented by Fiona Capp, in her essay for The Monthly in 2009, and titled “In the garden.”²⁹ Wright’s first book of poetry, published at the University of Melbourne in 1946 by the editor of Meanjin, Clem Christesen, is titled The Moving Image. Coombs, of course, was a pivotal figure in the developments of the arts in Australia. In 1970 he had established the Experimental Film and Television Fund with $100,000 from the Australia Council. It was this fund, which despite Coombs’s reservations about the “fanaticism” of these new artists, recognised the significance of the new medium of film as art in Australia that helped opened the door and establish artist-filmmaking as central to the arts in Australia. The University of Melbourne’s role in this story, which has remained somewhat subterranean, continues to this day.