Myself when Fourteen

Director: Arthur Cantrill    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Arthur Cantrill, born Sydney, Australia, 1938, has been making 16mm films with Corinne Cantrill since 1960. At first films for children and documentaries on art, interspersed with short experimental films. After working in London for four years, where Arthur Cantrill was a film editor at Halas and Batchelor Cartoon Films and then at BBCTV current affairs and documentary, they returned to Australia in 1969 to take up a Fellowship in the Creative Arts at the Australian National University in Canberra during which they made several films. From that time they have worked solely in film as a medium combining kinetic art with formal cinematic concerns and experimental sound composition, and also film-performance.

Director: Corinne Cantrill    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Corinne Cantrill, born Sydney, Australia, 1928, has been making 16mm films with Arthur Cantrill since 1960. At first films for children and documentaries on art, interspersed with short experimental films. After working in London for four years (where Arthur Cantrill was a film editor at Halas and Batchelor Cartoon Films and then at BBCTV current affairs and documentary), they returned to Australia in 1969 to take up a Fellowship in the Creative Arts at the Australian National University in Canberra during which they made several films financed by ANU, the main work being the feature-length Harry Hooton. From that time they have worked solely in film as a medium combining kinetic art with formal cinematic concerns and experimental sound composition, and also film-performance.

Director: Ivor Cantrill

Country: Australia

Year: 1989

Synopsis: Brightly coloured animated drawings rotoscoped from high contrast black and white negative film of Ivor Cantrill aged 14, are integrated with the original negative and positive images on an optical printer to create patterns of black, white and colour. The filmmaker reminisces about being 14 and describes the rotoscoping process. Ivor Cantrill is autistic, and his attention to detail and his preoccupation with repetition are positive aspects of his condition.

“MYSELF WHEN FOURTEEN generates a comparably hypnotic effect by recycling a couple of black-and-white shots taken in 1974 of the Cantrills’ autistic son Ivor running past the camera, rotoscoped by Ivor himself in continually shifting colours. On the screen, time essentially stands still; on the soundtrack, Ivor enumerates the colours of the pens used in the rotoscoping process, and otherwise seems struck by the distance between the two versions of himself, artist and subject (“I look very young…”). There are at least three temporal layers here: the time of Ivor’s commentary, the time he looks back on, and the explicitly referenced intervening time when he laboured to bring these images to their final form. Of course, from our viewing perspective all three of these layers belong to the past – something seemingly intrinsic to the film medium, though the Cantrills’ “expanded cinema” presentations fuse past and present by incorporating old footage into performances taking place before our eyes.” (Jake Wilson)

Language: without dialogue

Tags: Experimental film