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“I was playing with colour, and its emotional effect...green for hope, red for violence, blue for a bit of mystique—a very dark purplish orange blue...but very basic. For instance, the only way I could think to convey jealousy, on film, was by shooting through a blob of yellow. Of course I knew all about Eisenstein’s dialectical montage. I intercut my own footage with old 8mm stuff. I kicked off with an innocent image...just white, then a stuffed toy dog. Later a red colour then an image of a warship coming into Sydney harbour...a primitive metaphor for war. This was some of my first film in a more abstract style, and it was greatly discouraged at the time...everyone was heavily under the influence of British documentary filmmaking. People said, ‘this isn’t really how films ought to be made.’” (Paul Winkler)

Thoms dedicated three months and a toolkit of pins, razor blades and scalpels to create the rich, abstract surface texture in Bluto. The result, according to the filmmaker, ‘was something like thunder and rain, interspersed with burps, belches and farts, which added an urgency that seemed to express the anxieties of the time’.

Life inside a late 1960s Carlton student share house plays out across six alternately comedic and melancholy real-time vignettes. When his friend takes a trip, cinephile Al is left alone for the weekend with three female housemates, a situation that only serves to exacerbate his social awkwardness. One of the most distinctive works to emerge from the ‘Carlton ripple’, David Minter’s 1969 slice-of-life comedy carries echoes of Éric Rohmer’s moral tales.

A lively succession of breasts are animated to the Fugs’ title hit.

This film looks at Nauru in 1962 when it had the highest per-capita income in the world but when the depletion of the country's phosphate resources was already on the horizon meaning the only industry they had, and the only source of foreign investment, was coming to an end. Having become accustomed to the ways of the modern, industrialized world but with no way of supporting themselves how will the Nauruans maintain their lifestyle?

Made by the Department of Immigration to entice immigrants from Great Britain, this film shows an idyllic picture of life in the Western Australian regional town of Geraldton in the mid 1960s.

The Leyland brothers make a six-month journey from Darwin to Sydney in an 18-foot open boat, following the Australian coast around Arnhem Land and Cape York.

A road safety lesson using puppets and animation kindergarten age children.

A short animation of Charles Lloyd’s dry points. Sound composition by Arthur Cantrill.

“An impressionistic documentary. Black and white, alcoholics, blind people, wheelchairs...the down and out in Sydney. I was greatly influenced by documentary films I saw at the Workers’ Education Association Film Group. Real images were cut together with footage I’d shot in Waverley Cemetery—a cemetery here in Sydney—in a sort of symbolising where I suppose we all finish up, whether we’re handicapped or not! The film has no narration. Someone said I ought to have a composer write a soundtrack, so I went to great lengths...working with musicians in a studio. It was completely new to me, and I wasn’t really comfortable with it.” (Paul Winkler)

A picture of life in the Tasmanian town of Launceston in the mid 1960s.

A documentary showing the life story of an Aboriginal man, Mr Clive Williams, and his family. Scenes and stills captured around the time of Mr Williams' childhood and youth in rural eastern Australia during the 1930s and 1940s. The film shows the movement of Mr Williams and his family from an Aboriginal settlement to a cottage on the outskirts of a country town, and from there to Rose Hill in Sydney. In Sydney Mr Williams works for 15 months as secretary to the Tranby Cooperative for Aborigines Ltd, then for the Department of Main Roads. He expresses satisfaction in achieving what he considers to be a better quality of life for his family and greater opportunities for his children.

"The Quatermass Experiment" was a 1967 Australian teleplay based on a novel by Nigel Kneale - "The Quatermass Experiment".

If you every needed to show somebody the effect Easyfever had on mid 1960’s Australia, then you would only need to show them their Australian “farewell” television special. Although completely mimed, the bands energy is absolutely electrifying as the storm through their set list in front of a studio audience of screaming teenagers complete with go-go dancers and pop idol Billy Thorpe to compère. Special guests of the program included Janice Slater performing her then current release ‘We’re Doin’ Fine’ with it’s flip side ‘If You Don’t Think’ and Tony Worsley with ‘Raining in My Heart’ and ‘Knocking On Wood’ (released that month on Sunshine).

Two Aboriginal families live like their ancestors have for centuries in this anthropological documentary. The gathering of food is the main focus as women harvest grass seeds to make a primitive flour for bread. Grubs, lizards, and fruit are also on the menu, with the only contact with the modern world being their trek to a government compound for much-needed drinking water.

The way of life for people living along the tropic of Capricorn in Queensland 1965. Farming and mining are the main industries in this area of Australia and the only way to get around is by road train, train or plane. The hard way of life for these people is portrayed in this film.

This film showcases an idealised version of life in the Victorian regional city of Geelong — complete with stable jobs, family homes, bustling shops, and thriving sporting and cultural life.

This film makes a general survey of the Northern Territory of Australia and indicates its potential in regard to many already established industries. These include agriculture, mining, fisheries, cattle raising, pearling and the like. The Territory is still a land of many challenging problems; its greatest limiting factor being the lack of water. In recent years transportation has been improved and education approached with vision and imagination. Housing is also being developed. Two thirds of the Territory’s work force is in Government employ.

A blank screen is filled with random lines and shapes.

A film about recreation and learning, made during the Cantrills’ four-year residence in London, similarly tinctured by Herbert Read’s notions about children’s education as self-directed, creative, and free. The adventure playground provides a space in which children can shape and reimagine the environment according to their own sense of play.

An avant-garde audiovisual essay riffing on the work of Marshall McLuhan.

Above the tip of Cape York, beyond the northernmost point of the Australian continent, are the Torres Strait Islands. The economy here is based on home gardens and pearlshell fishing. The culture, with its basis in music, dancing and ceremony, provides a striking contrast to that of mainland Australia. This film, shot in the late 1960s, shows how strongly old traditions still affect Torres Strait Islander people, even though they also have most of the trappings of modern life.

Gives impressions of Australia’s national capital and the life of its inhabitants. Shows government buildings and other architectural features, but emphasises the merits of the pace of life, climate and scenery.

A film of repeated movements toward the camera, away from the camera, and across the camera's field, punctuated by a 360-degree rotational movement of the camera itself. Aside from being a reference to the repetition characteristic of home movies, the film is an exploration of a specific space. By repeatedly traversing it, the two figures reinforce their sense of depth, beginning as distant blobs in the long shot and ending with the face of one of them filling the frame. Repetition has become an important strategy in many of our recent films, which often involve reshoots or reprints. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

A series of Public Information Films eventually compiled and released as a single feature.

A film poem with multiple superimpositions.

Made for inclusion in a student theatrical production at the University of Sydney, this film was based on an allegorical play by Antonin Artaud.

This film about Library services in Australia shows some of the work of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library, the National Library with its varied resources and examples of State, University, special and public services suggesting their value in meeting needs for information at all levels. The library movement has become a vital part of Australian life. How libraries have fitted into society all over Australia, from the bustle of Sydney's Kings Cross to the remote outback.

Based on a story by Frank Moorhouse, this is a satire on left intellectual manners in Sydney at the time. Moorhouse's story was in turn based on an actual event, a party thrown by members of the Sydney Push for visiting American poet Kenneth Rexroth.

In the Brisbane Creative Leisure Centre, conducted by the Cantrills, children are shown reproductions of stained glass windows and then make large transparent pictures with black paper, coloured cellophane, and other materials such as discarded x-ray pictures and textured fabric, with a minimum of instruction. These are taken indoors and fastened to window panes.

Peter Ashbury is a young man who lives on Palm Beach, Sydney, with an expensive wife Mary and house he cannot afford. Their neighbours and close friends are Liz and Charles Barcher. He makes a £25,000 bet to murder Liz, the wife of the wealthy Charles. When the wife dies, blame attaches to Peter and then to his wife Mary.

Will Spoor is a Dutch performer, working in the abstract side of movement and mime. He has considerable knowledge of the potential of film and his intention was to extend his work into realms that were impossible for live theatre. We used a combination of animation and in-camera superimpositions to create structures of body movement. Our work on sound composition came to a head in this film with organically and electronically complex sounds. It was the most valuable collaboration we had done with another artist since Larry Sitsky; an intense concentration of our energies and skills and of his energies and skills. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

Live Between Evil is a departure from Shead's experimental style and aims at realistic recreation of bourgeois life on Sydney's Upper North Shore.

Records the backwaters and docklands of Sydney Harbour accompanying a young woman with a red umbrella.

“In Robert Klippel – Junk Sculpture No. 3, 1963 (1965), a spiky Klippel creation resonates almost visibly with the high, piercing tones of Larry Sitsky’s music. (Here the “voice” belongs to a harpsichord; another film in the same series creates a similar effect by electronically altering recordings of human song.)” —Jake Wilson, Senses of Cinema

Surf documentary

Australian sculptors discuss their attitudes towards modern sculpture. In sculpture, as in the other arts, Australia has achieved a world reputation in recent years. In this film, Tim Burstall examines the Australian sculptors working in Australia and overseas, analyses their attitudes and asks them to sum up their views about modern sculpture.

This experimental documentary about two young Paddington dress-makers was banned for nudity, but was screened widely in Australia without complaint.

A picture of life in the West Australian capital of Perth in the mid 1960s. The social, business, sporting and other activities of an average Australian family in Perth are told through the eyes of the local newspapers.

Pilot for proposed Ned Kelly film. An avant-garde re-creation of the murder of the three police officers at Stringybark Creek.

Photographer and filmmaker Perry’s concise film-poem uses graphic matches (grapefruits, balloons and bubbles) to convey anxieties about fatherhood.

“I was in Germany again because my father had died, and I was at his grave. Flashes of terror struck me for fractions of a second, which I immediately tried to forger. I wanted to film my state of mind, my thoughts, my relationship with my father now that he lay below. I wanted to live. Once I conceived the treatment, I shot the film in two days. I wanted the camera to go very loose...off the tripod...I was zooming rapidly and running around the cemetery. I wanted the gravestones to disappear and dance...and I wanted to stay out of there, myself. I began to understand that if you want to interpret feelings you have to look for and create filmic images beyond simple photographing. I used the sounds of the graveyard and sometimes no sound.” (Paul Winkler)

A picture of life in the South Australian capital of Adelaide in the mid 1960s, social, commercial and recreational.

A spoof of the early James Bond films and Ian Fleming universe from Australia. Bumbling overweight Aussie secret service agent Jim Bond alias Agent Minus 007 blunders his way against arch rival villains Ernest Stavro Blowfly and Dr. Yes down under in Sydney, Australia.

Using sounds from the past, over pictures of the present, the film glimpses a man’s life in pioneering days. Set in the historic town of Richmond, Tasmania, the film shows some of the classic colonial Georgian houses and churches.

1967 David E. Perry short

Made from image fragments from Will Spoor's footage, it was our first direct foray into the relationship between cinema and visual perception. It has two parts: Retina Imprints, an experiment on the persistence of vision, stretching and reorganizing movement in time, and Memory Imprints, fragments of strange images that remain impressed on the memory. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

“The film was made spontaneously one afternoon in 1966. When a few friends got together... We were all in love with the film medium...” (Garry Shead)

This assembly of home-movie footage, shot between 1961 and 1966, was made by artist and filmmaker Shead. Homegrown pop artist Martin Sharp and writer Richard Neville appear in a sequence covering the birth of Oz magazine. The film’s impressionistic fragments capture the mood of the youth counterculture in early 1960s Sydney.

“By this time we had a Filmmakers' Cinema here in Sydney. I made the film on the spur of the moment...to go over a band. Red and green leader was very cheap—you got it for a cent a foot or something. Scratching and 'injuring' the flat colour of the leader . . . I interspliced it with old 16mm footage, breaking up and creating tension between the shots...you know, a native in Papua New Guinea was shooting an arrow, and just as the arrow leaves, the film cuts back into red and green 'travelling' lines (the scratching on the leader). For quite some time this line is running, then the next minute it stops and you see the arrow actually hitting a target. So it gives the impression the arrow is travelling for a long time, on red leader toward the target. The film was shown with different bands, and each time the film looked different.” (Paul Winkler)

Shot around the 1968 Arts Vietnam protest—where artists gathered to oppose Australia’s role in the war—this experimental collage film splices festival footage with news imagery, photographs, commercials, and televised material to expose how Vietnam was “experienced” through media and to implicate the viewer in that mediation.

This film shows events in the biennial Festival of Arts and the annual Flower Day of 1968. Adelaide celebrated Flower Day annually from 1938 to 1975 and it made a return in 2021. The footage includes a ‘welcome said with flowers’ to performers Marlene Dietrich, Marcella Reale, Morag Beaton, Lucero Tena, and the Elizabethan Theatre Trust Orchestra. There is also a look inside the Art Gallery’s display for the 5th Adelaide Festival of Arts. This is quite possibly the moment the phrase “Mad March” was coined!

Lovemaking in water has Antarctic repercussions.

Esperance, a small town on the southern coast of Western Australia, is a community centre for wealthy pastoralists and graziers. A smaller number of First Nations people also live thereunder the control of the Western Australian Department of Native Welfare. The establishment of some First Nations farming businesses is an economic opportunity but also a challenge to the town’s culture.

It was filmed from photographs of a rehearsal by Will Spoor of a Tardieu work at the Arts Laboratory, Drury Lane. The photos were taken before starting Moving Statics and were a way to familiarize ourselves with Will Spoor's work. The soundtrack consists of a recording made at the time of the photo shoot. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

With 'Ninety Nine Per Cent' Giorgio Mangiamele harnessed satiric, surreal and slapstick comedy to tell his most socially probing story of the impact of urban as well as cultural isolation. Where his earlier films, including 'Il Contratto' and two versions of 'The Spag' had portrayed problems specific to being an Italian migrant in an often racist and uncaring Australia, 'Ninety Nine Per Cent' made the impact of isolation within a multiracial society more universal. The film is a visual advance on Mangiamele’s earlier films, aided by its being filmed on 35mm stock (all the earlier works had been shot on 16mm), bringing a new sharpness, depth of field and exposure range to images. 'Ninety Nine Per Cent' was to be Mangiamele’s only comedy and in many ways it is his most adventurous, accessible work.

Charles Lloyd is an Australian artist whom we met in Sydney. He began working with printmaking when he moved to London around 1960. The film showcases his drypoint etching technique, then moves on to printing with a multicolor plate. Lloyd discusses the endless possibilities of plate engraving and then shows how he develops a color philosophy for each plate during the grading and printing process. The film ends with an overview of his prints as he discusses the ideas behind his work, many of which come from the Australian landscape. The film takes us from these images to a final sequence of animated printed details interspersed with a composition of electronic, musical, and natural sounds. The film is essentially a documentary, but we felt the need to include a more experimental coda that would free us from the confines of documentary. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)

A neo-realist drama set near the crumbling Arrow Theatre. Two street bodgies hang around near the station and try to terrorise an Italian girl. A boy tries to fight for her and is beaten up. The dry streets of Middle Park reflect the crabbed lives of the star-crossed lovers.

Experimental film using fireworks, often superimposed and in soft focus, printed in negative form with a black image on a white background. Plucked piano strings reversed xylophone and cymbal with an electronic vibrato effect form the background sound effects.

Life in Australia: Hobart shows scenes illustrating daily life, industry, recreation and the tourist features of Hobart, Tasmania.