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The Hart of London (Jack Chambers, 1970)
🕑 Added 2020-02-27 04:51:15 +0000 UTC
In Bart Testa's essay on Jack Chambers' experimental classic The Hart of London, he compares the film to two other feature-length Canadian avant-garde works that were made around the same time: Michael Snow's La Région Centrale (1970) and Joyce Wieland's Reason Over Passion (1971). Whereas those two films are somewhat self-contained, summary works, The Hart of London is defined by its open-endedness. (The word "sprawl" comes up several times.) It certainly hangs together, but it is more like a conceptual system that conditions the various images and scenes that are entered into it.
Largely composed of manipulated found footage shot in and around the city of London, Ontario, The Hart of London is harrowing in its directness. The first part of the film shows a deer skittering around a snow-covered suburb, hoping over backyard fences and trying to find its way back into the forest. We then see a group of men load their guns and kill the animal. Chambers' superimpositions and optical printing of the material frequently washes the images out to a faint gray-on-gray, tuned to the very outskirts of visual discernment. Here and there, a high-contrast image (e.g., a close-up of shells being fed into a shotgun) will jump out of the murk, serving as a disruptive anchor for the largely abstract passages that surround it. The soundtrack, meanwhile, is a repetitive loop of a sound that seems to gradually evolve from the "white noise" of rushing water to the close but distinct sound of a train going by.
The next movement consists of cityscape images of London, overlapping and superimposed, with a Constructivist tendency to penetrate buildings with pans of walls or streets. Often, Chambers sandwiches the positive and negative printings of the same piece of film atop one another, resulting in a strange electric ghosting effect. The killing of the hart, it seems, is the prerequisite for the city of London, a mid-sized town shown in the first half of the century, its architecture and transport technologies pointing to an "unfinished" project of Canadian expansion and development.
From here, Chambers takes us quite unexpectedly into an abattoir, where we see two sheep slaughtered on a butcher's block. They are bled out, their throats slit, and the long passage of film displays each excruciating twitch and thrash as life literally pours out of these creatures. A bit later, Chambers will reintroduce the slaughterhouse footage in living color, the blood captured in stark Kodachrome. He juxtaposes these scenes with images of a human birth (the baby's head roughly removed from the birth canal with forceps), and aborted sheep fetuses scattered among other, more fully-formed slaughtered lambs.
The third portion of The Hart of London is rather unnerving in its tonal shift. It consists of a different type of found footage, largely unprocessed but seemingly taken from the same early 20th century period as the city scenes. We see members of a men's lodge at a carnival event, boxing in beer barrels and zipping through flume rides. Officious citizens stand around; we enter the oppressively well-appointed home of an elderly couple who interact with (presumably) their grandchildren; more hunters gather into expeditions. From a contemporary standpoint, the glaring Protestant whiteness of English Canada fairly blares in these images. Again, Chambers is moving us through the absurd psychopathology of the civilizing process. This section, I believe, owes much to the films of Arthur Lipsett (especially Very Nice Very Nice) -- the destruction of the natural world is so absolute that it has been forgotten completely, clearing the way for smug folly.
The Hart of London concludes with another color segment, this one comprised of home movies taken by a mother as her young boys go up to various deer in the woods and hand-feed them, the boys' father popping into the frame now and then. The rumbling soundtrack is a semi-diegetic loop now, as the boys mutter, the leaves crackle under their shoes, and the mother warns, over and over, "you have to be very careful." The hart, who at the start of the film "encroached" on human space (which, of course, humans encroached upon first), was summarily dispatched, as hidebound hunters defend their tract homes, embodying a stereotype of Canadian masculinity. In the end, these young boys are slowly inculcated into that same gender and nationalist ideology, meeting the creature on its home turf.
Is this a cyclical narrative? Will these same boys, offering corn to the gentle beast, meet him again later in life, armed with shotguns, and a fully formed sense of prerogative? Based on the fact that The Hart of London marks its textual center with the slow oozing away of life, the odds of a rapprochement with untamed surroundings seem slim indeed. If for Snow, Canada is defined by isolation, and for Wieland, the nation is marred by self-serving liberalism, clearly for Chambers it was born in blood.
