Comfort Film Presents:
A 16mm screening of
THE HART OF LONDON (1970)
THE HART OF LONDON
by Jack and Olga Chambers
16mm, 80 minutes, 1970
“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 Hart, “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. -Mark A. Cheetham
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
Hosted and Presented by Josh B Mabe
About Josh B Mabe:
Josh B Mabe is a librarian, filmmaker, and programmer. His films have screened at the New York Film Festival, Images Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. He has programmed work in Chicago at Gallery 400, Links Hall, The Nightingale, University of Chicago, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. He was formerly Program Director of Chicago Filmmakers and Programmer for the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival (you can see him at work in episode 2 of the Netflix show Easy). He is currently a newspapers and microfilm librarian at the Harold Washington Library Center of the Chicago Public Library.
Programmed for Comfort Station by Raul Benitez, Emily Perez and Mat Tapey.
Free
Screening is indoors.