In Myself When Fourteen that was made in collaboration with the Cantrills’ autistic painter son Ivor, the colours begin to dance to Chris Knowles’ music. The filmmaker reminisces about being 14 and describes the rotoscoping process.
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)