City of chromatic dissolution

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill used footage of Melbourne’s cityscapes and buildings from the mid 1980s to create this evocative piece on movement, colour and the city. The various parts of inner city Melbourne were originally shot on black and white negative in three colour separation, then printed on Eastmancolor film. The results are static shots of the city, where the movement of people and vehicles have a quality that is colour saturated and ghostly. This is complemented with a sountrack both urban and discordant in tone.
This is one of a series of films made by the Cantrills that experiment with dramatic distortions of colour through three-colour separation processes. The original inspiration for this project (as the filmmakers report in the final edition of Cantrills Filmnotes) came back in the mid-1970s when Kodak stopped making the Cantrills’ preferred 16mm reversal colour film stocks.