The Hart of London
Jack Chambers’s 80-minute film The Hart of London (1970), being presented this Saturday by Kino-Eye Cinema at the Chicago Cultural Center, is hardly ever screened; in fact, when I polled eleven local critics, curators, filmmakers, and academics interested in experimental film, only three of them had even seen it. Some viewers consider it a masterpiece, some give it mixed reviews, and some are merely baffled. I fell into the third category when I first saw the film, finding it disorganized and confusing, but on each successive viewing I’ve loved it. A sprawling, ambitious work that evokes the cycles of life and death by combining urban and nature imagery with newsreel footage of natural disasters, The Hart of London succeeds precisely because of its reach; raw and open-ended, it manages to interweave five or six grand themes in a way that makes them seem logically interrelated.
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Speaking to writer Avis Lang (whose article is reprinted in a 1984 issue of the Capilano Review), Chambers said that The Hart of London is about “generation.” The filmmaker was diagnosed with leukemia in 1969, the year he began work on the film, which might explain its numerous disasters and frequent juxtapositions of life and death. But there are other major threads as well. Like many avant-garde films it explores objective versus subjective perception, and Chambers also suggests that all things are mystically unified by light. His theme that we’re alienated from nature is hardly novel, but it’s intertwined with a brilliant analysis of how news cinematography caters to the viewer’s voyeurism.
As part of his attempt to deal with the unruly sprawl of life, Chambers embraces contradiction. Perhaps the most dramatic example occurs when he cuts from black-and-white footage of a baby being born to color footage of lambs being slaughtered, the latter shot during a return visit to Spain. The Christian symbolism may seem blatant, yet by juxtaposing color with black and white Chambers startles the viewer, short-circuiting the most obvious interpretation. Writing in Artscanada in October 1969 and December 1972, Chambers described his work as “perceptual realism” and later “perceptualism”; his writings are dense and theoretical, but apparently he wanted to prolong the moment of perception before a person interprets what he sees, placing him in “a state of receptive passivity that somehow releases a higher…sense.” By opening himself up to such “wonder,” a viewer might be able to “perceive the Invisible Body ‘behind’ the world.”
