Early Monthly Segments

Parallel to the exhibitions of Jack Chambers’ artwork at the Art Gallery of Ontario, running until May 13, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, running until January 15, we’re pleased to present a 16mm screening of his breathtaking film, The Hart of London.

Jack Chambers’ 16mm masterwork begins as an elliptical portrait of his hometown of London, Ontario as depicted in footage gleaned from a local TV station. Chambers layers these fragments, bi-packing positive and negative black and white film together, lending a ghostly quality to the city and its inhabitants, including the ill-fated eponymous hart. The Winter city-scape gradually gives way to the Spring thaw, a rebirth and finally the possibility of transcendence, in the form of a gentle accord between his children and deer in a local park. Throughout his career Chambers consistently found extraordinary beauty in ordinary places and things, and many of his paintings and films reveal a depth and profundity in the daily life of a small city.

“The houses were unlit and, without their orange banners of human warmth, the street looked abandoned of life. My feet became numb with the cold as the day darkened, and tough little grey flakes began falling from the sky. I looked around to find what it was that had hurt me, and all I saw were the dumb houses, the glitter of steel through a crack in the closing sky, and the hard snow” – Jack Chambers on The Hart of London

“Jack Chambers’s 80-minute The Hart of London (1970) is a sprawling, ambitious film that combines newsreel footage of disasters, urban and nature imagery, and footage evoking the cycles of life and death. It is one of those rare films that succeeds precisely because of its sprawl; raw and open-ended almost to the point of anticipating the postmodern rejection of “master narratives,” it cannot be reduced to a simple summary, and changes on you from one viewing to the next…” — Fred Camper

Info on the AGO exhibition here; on the McMichael here; and CCCA info on Jack Chambers here.

@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Monday December 5, 2011 | 7:30 pm screening, $5 suggested donation

Special thanks to the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) and our lovely hosts at the Gladstone Hotel.

Upcoming:
#35 = Monday 16 January 2012 = PUBLIC Journal launch of 2010 Experimental Media Congress issue WITH special EMS screening of a recently restored rarely screened avant garde film!