Among Jack Chambers’ early notes for The Hart of London is a drawing of the Chambers family backyard. The yard is a square crossed by lines and arrows, with family entering from one side and flowers opening onto the other.
Christ descends into it. There are two numbered stations, a sun, scattered circles, a hand holding another sun. Beneath the drawing Chambers begins to work the passage out. Jesus comes from out of the darkness, descends into the yard, knocks at the door. Olga and the children enter through the gate. Sheep wait for slaughter. The sun rises on a lake, cows, horses, dogs, birds, chickens at roost, the Good Shepherd, milk, the white sun seen through cupped hands.
Chambers' notes were published in 1984, six years after Chambers’ death, in a special issue of The Capilano Review dedicated to his cinema and edited by Tom Graff. The notes suggest an alternative version of the film, one that remains in keeping with his principle concerns of life cycle and lived experience. Chambers assigns durations, shooting speeds, months of production. Family: three quarters of an hour. Yard: one hour. Flowers: one hour. Jesus at the door: ten minutes. Sheep, slaughter, skinning: ten minutes. Olga and the boys move through winter and spring. Flowers become vegetables, vegetables pass into the supermarket, into tins and wax fruit, returning finally to the handmade flower. Photographs age in close-up and become young in long shot. Doukhobor girls, Lee Harvey Oswald, racing drivers, Mackenzie King, the Rolling Stones, Trotsky, a love button, flames, accidents, animals bleeding in the snow.
Jesus did not survive into the finished film, nor did many of these elements. In his place comes the hart, from out of the woods descending down into the maze of suburban fences, where he is wounded, bound, enclosed and killed. Chambers had already joined the animal to the heart of London, an antique Christian body burdened with sacrifice.
In Codes for North, I describe the sequence that follows as a resurrection of London’s photographic dead, a silver chorus of civic history in which positive and negative occupy the frame together, faces and buildings rising briefly out of the grey.
The yard had already become a place of passage in Chambers' earlier film Circle, made while The Hart of London was still taking shape through open calls for the images that would form that silver choir. Chambers fixed a camera on the backyard of their Lombard Avenue home, exposing a few seconds each day, its aperture unchanged, while Olga, the children, toys, snow, leaves and shadows entered and departed. The house and fence remained, but the vagaries of light remade them. Among Chambers’ surviving film notes, Circle had at one point borne the title The Heart of London: Circle 4.
C.C.C.I., his unfinished film organized around circumference, centre, curve and insert, belonged somewhere in this larger, shifting conception.
The second document printed below, a letter written in September 1972, finds Chambers trying to name the condition that these films had pursued. Perception occupies the instant before recognition, consciousness momentarily neutralized while the world remains without its names. A picture freezes and loses focus. Sound dissolves. White light appears. Then objects return. Behind their appearances Chambers imagines the “Invisible Body,” reality passing into matter by attenuation, taking the temporary forms of trees, river, people, sky.
By that time The Hart of London was finished, but its silver chorus seems close to this thought. London’s discarded photographs and television images pass repeatedly through positive and negative, each picture laid against its pale inverse until figures emerge, vanish and emerge again. The past persists as an energy in the present, the anonymous faces of Londoners gathered into what Chambers imagined as a municipal work, thousands of snapshots accumulating around the life of his city.
The early notes are less serene. Sheep are stuck and bled, n assassination sits beside a screen test, a racing-car accident is a passage into flames, beer, popular music, politics, faces. Family and flowers remain at the edges of the first diagram while the other materials gather inside it. At the centre is the yard, with arrows passing through it.
Stephen Broomer, August 29, 2026
EARLY NOTES FOR THE HART OF LONDON
by Jack Chambers
LETTER TO SIMON FIELD
