Composed almost entirely of still photographs and narrated by Corinne Cantrill, this singular and deeply moving work explores her childhood in 1930s Sydney, her quest for personal, creative and sexual authenticity, and her relationship with her body, through motherhood, illness and recovery.
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Corinne Cantrill (1928-2025), in partnership with her husband Arthur, was among the most prolific avant-garde filmmakers in Australia, with a career spanning 60 years. Much of her work is devoted to abstraction and landscape studies. In This Life's Body is a different, in that it is her only film concerned with the narrative retelling of a person's life – Corinne's own, a richly varied and absorbing story, told at the point when death seemed imminent (she recovered and survived for a further four decades). This intimate epic, told primarily through a remarkable archive of still photographic images, is a singular achievement, and has fair claim to be the greatest film in the entire history of Australian cinema.
Rarely has such a minimalist arrangement – photos plus two-and-a-half hours of voice-over text – afforded such a maximal emotional effect. The film builds a powerfully resonant metaphor, wherein the most basic properties of the celluloid film strip – its grain, its duration, its ephemerality and fragility – reflect a particular conception of existence as something lived materially, bodily. But this vessel of life's body is not bound to a single identity or destiny; rather, it is discontinuous, relative, forever open to possibilities of transformation. (Adrian MARTIN | Film Critic)
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The Cantrill Family | adjudah@iinet.net.au
Corinne CANTRILL
