The Second Journey (To Uluru) (Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, 1981) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: John Edmond

Few things are more gratifying than discovering a film that's not only major in and of itself, but seems to serve as a missing link in cinematic history. This is the first film I've seen by the Cantrills, the husband-and-wife Australian duo who until now I mostly knew from their Cantrill Film Notes, a self-published journal about avant-garde film. I realized they were filmmakers themselves, but I had no real idea what sort of films they made.

The Second Journey (To Uluru) is a landscape film, one that closely observes the spaces inside and around Uluru (aka Ayers Rock), a sandstone formation in central Australia. But calling it a landscape film is rather deceptive. The Cantrills' film is more like a protracted contour drawing, tracing and retracing the undulations of Uluru from a distance as well as from inside its shallow caverns. This results in a fascinating formalist document, one that explores and perhaps even exhausts the ways in which a handheld camera can describe shape and texture. But The Second Journey accomplishes something quite a bit more radical.

At the start of each section of the film, we hear the voice of Corinne Cantrill, describing their state of mind during production, their responses to what they found, and their despair that the land around this monolith -- a natural form of great spiritual importance to the region's Aboriginal population -- was being destroyed, first by a grass fire, and later by an influx of tourists. This "second journey" is a sequel to an earlier film which, according to Corinne, "filled [them] with hope," because the land was relatively untouched. The pain of returning to find Uluru in a damaged state is palpable throughout The Second Journey, even when it seems as though the Cantrills are just filming a big rock.

There is a lot of attention paid to the process of filming Uluru, and this is because the Cantrills recognize their own implication in the Western appropriation and despoliation of Aboriginal land. The Second Journey aims to capture an image of what Uluru looks like before it suffers any further degradation, but the filmmakers are aware that their very presence on this land is a violation of Aboriginal rights and beliefs. Regarding the inhabitants of Uluru, Corinne states, "where we intrude, they recede. Where we are, they are not."

Simply as a film, The Second Journey embodies these conflicts. For one thing, the burned ground and charred foliage creates a stark beauty that the Cantrills capture in brilliant Kodachrome. The worse off Uluru actually is, the more photogenic it becomes. So even if we excuse the Western "salvage paradigm" of the project, an attempt to save through representation what cannot be as easily protected in life, we can see that the Cantrills are stuck between displaying ecological crisis and honoring the radiance and spiritual significance of this place.

I suggested that calling The Second Journey a landscape film was misleading. That's because "landscape" as such tends to always imply a human presence, often even ownership. That's to say, the land becomes a metonymic subject for those who occupy and control it. The Cantrills, by contrast, are trying to convey geological solidity and its temporal dislocation from human existence. There has been a lot of geological cinema in recent years, occasioned not only by a "green" turn in experimental film but by a struggle to de-center human time, to cede the stage to something that may persist without us. Recent work by Ben Rivers, Daïchi Saïto, Deborah Stratman, and others has taken this approach, and this strand of inquiry appears to have at least part of its origin in the Cantrills' anthropological materialism.