The Hart of London is an experimental film concerned with several themes and constructed out of a variety of material; newsreel, found footage and film shot by Chambers himself.
Visually and thematically it shares much common ground with the work of Stan Brakhage, whose influence, when watching the film, is hard to ignore; Chambers postulates the primacy of light using a number of techniques, and uses his material of a Spanish slaughter house and the birth of a child (amongst other things) to riff on the themes of life and death, all to stunning effect. The maintenance of the film's tension, and its complexity of scope, however, pushes The Hart of London way beyond any reductive comparisons. Brakhage called it 'one of the few GREAT films of cinema'.
Like the Bible, The Hart of London exists in two clearly designated halves/reels and the second begins with the sacrifice of a lamb. The red blood running from the animal's partially severed neck, cut with the birth of a child, also emphasises the change from the high contrast black and white of the first reel, to the sharp, highly saturated colour of the second. The film is well structured and compelling, but not to the degree that meanings or intentions are resolutely clear. Much of the film, however, is concerned with how people act as 'stewards' of the(ir) world, and through its rendering, how we perceive events and phenomena. (Other discussions of the film, including Fred Camper's excellent essay, convincingly consider the Gnostic dialogue between the visible appearance of the world; which is in fact an illusion, and the spiritual dimension; the true reality, in relation to the objects and animals within the film and its use of light.)
The title and beginning of The Hart of London demonstrate Chambers' desire to capture the essence of the frontier town of London, Ontario, Canada (and not the capital of Great Britain). The film begins with the striking image of a hart jumping in the snow. It bounders and bounces, slowed by the film and then due to a double exposure, moves in the snow with a twin. Its sublime energy, however, remains elusive, for men amongst a gathering crowd shoot the deer, as it struggles, hemmed in by fences and buildings. Two uniformed policemen (or is it four? the double exposure continues) then take up its body, while snow tries to cover the dark neighbouring buildings. The sound of pouring water and the white bathed images that flicker by, increasing in speed, at once calm the scene but also neatly crown the feeling of underlying tension and violence, which is later brought to the surface with the footage of the slaughterhouse. Chambers later again confirms the location of this feeling, with the glib and ironic sign, 'Come to London'.
Through the course of the film, man broaches on nature from every angle. People emerge from underground transport, parachutes fall from the sky and bridges cross water. Even children make sand castles on the beach preparing for the next image of concrete buildings. In the final analysis, nature seems to confront London's inhabitants as an enigma or threat. At the film's very end, children (Jack Chamber's own) approach a hart with food, and their mother whispers warnings; the animal as object, filmed from afar, suffers from a perceptual uncertainty. In the case of a dead wolf, its hunters turn it into their image and have it wave and greet their woman at home, like a man returned from the woods.
While man thrusts himself on the environment, containing it and turning it into his image, Chambers treatment of the filmed image creates a fracture between the filmed and the 'film'. His jarring superimposition of positive and negative creates particularly interesting deployments of light. In the case of newsreel footage of a horse and cart ploughing the field, he overlays a positive and negative of the same image, and only a small time displacement between the images makes the superimposition readable. (The jump of the horse's movement due to the time displacement makes the action more difficult to fix in the film frame, as opposed to the fences, buildings and gardens that try to contain the various animals and plants.) If there were no time displacement, light would dominate, giving us a pure white image. Whilst light in cinema creates image and thus life, here Chambers acknowledges this but pushes further asking what it is interpret and recognise, unlike the objective view as propagated by the newsreels he uses and subverts to this end.
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| Still from The Hart of London |
The lamb's blood, an aborted cow foetus (its blood red skin match subsequent images of burning red flames) and the sheen of internal animal organs all reflect and throw light back at us. Liquid and blood give life but it's visible presence imply an absence elsewhere, and thus death. The immediate and disturbing successor to these images is the shot of a boy with light shining in his wet hair. He sits on the beach and is healthy and exuberant. Chambers uses unsettling means to make his point apparent.
Having presented us with many pairs or dualisms: positive and negative, life
and death, colour and monochrome, urban and rural, a film in two halves, at
first two lambs being killed, and even the twin blades of shears cutting the
double sides of sycamore keys, Jack Chambers gives us two sorts of light that
neatly allude to his densely theoretical 'perceptualism', or what he roughly
identified as a mental perception before mental recognition or identification.
In the Bible there is a light that gives us physical sensation; lumen, and
a light of the psychic, an awareness that goes beyond the physical; a light
called lux. Lux was the light that existed in Genesis before the creation of
the world, and as a term aligns with both Chamber's 'perceptualism' and the
spiritual sphere as identified in Gnostic thought.
Jack Chambers was born in 1931 and began work on The Hart of London in 1969,
having been diagnosed with leukaemia only shortly before. He died in 1978,
struggling with his own care for nine years. He was a Catholic and a poet,
and as an artist he secured a reputation as a critically acclaimed and financially
successful painter. He began making films in 1966. The Hart of London was the
last of five films made by Chambers, and despite the support for experimental
film within Canada at the time of it 's making, remains sorely under screened
in both Britain and North America.
© 2002 William J E Fowler
read more about Jack Chambers on Senses of Cinema (opens in a new browser window).
A new 16mm print of Hart of London has generously been provided for distribution with LUX by the Canadian High Commission. Thanks to John Chambers, Mark Webber and Maggie Warwick.
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