"One of the few GREAT films of all cinema." - Stan Brakhage
"The Hart of London (1970) extends Chambers concerns with light, time, perception and the relation of the visible to Vision. It is a sprawling work that conjoins the public and the personal, history and memory, man and nature, self and other." - R. Bruce Elder.
Back and forth, between life and death, the film creates a "real" view of the world around, and gradually, as the real world comes in to focus, there develops an almost subliminal theme of the "Hart of London" - a deer which was trapped and killed in downtown London, Ontario in 1954. In the second part of the film, the images become symbolic of the pursuit and death of the deer. This theme is repeated again and again in the real images of everyday life.
The Hart of London "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