The Hart of London is an endlessly layered tour de force. It explores life and death, the sense of place and personal displacement, and the intricate aesthetics of representation. It is a personal and spiritual film, marked inevitably by Chambers’s knowledge that he had leukemia. The late American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage said of The Hart of London, “If I named the five greatest films ever made, this has got to be one of them.” Even this high praise falls short of hyperbole. The Hart of London is at the centre of Chambers’s extraordinary achievement.

Jack Chambers was born in 1931 in London, Ontario. He studied art there, worked construction, traveled to Mexico, and spent eight years in Europe. He lived mostly in Spain, studying art in Madrid and converting to Roman Catholicism, returning to London in 1961 when he learned that his mother was dying of cancer. He became well-known as a painter (examples are in major Canadian museums) while also writing poetry, and in 1966 began making films.