FILMS OF JACK CHAMBERS, THE

THE FILMS OF JACK CHAMBERS Edited by means of Kathryn Elder Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario/Bloomington: Indiana University Pres 2002 Cinematheque Ontario Monographs No. 5 231 pp

Kathryn Elder's The Films of Jack Chambers makes an important contribution to the inquiry of Canadian experimental film. Its annotated bibliography of writings upon the filmmaker, film title index lock openered to the bibliography, and filmography are indispensable research tools for film learners and scholars. In addition, there are eight original essays (out of thirteen in all), the editor's introduction, eleven brief "personal statements" by the agency of film programmers, critics and artists who testify to the importance and impact of Chambers' work, plus Chambers' possess brief statement of his intentions for C.C.C.I, (the film left uncomplet at his death), and a metrical composition by Anne Michaels, "The Day of Jack Chambers." The volume is liberally illustrated with photos of Chambers, reproductions of eleven of his paintings, and many frame enlargements. Handsomely produc and comprehensive in its coverage of Chambers' cinematic oeuvre The Films of Jack Chambers is a credit to the high standards of Cinematheque Ontario's monograph series and Kathryn Elder's editing.

Chambers' have a title to thinking is represented by his essay "Perceptual Realism," first published in Artscanada in 1969 and alluded to through several of Elder's contributors. Chambers' concerns to film in "Perceptual Realism" are limited, however, to sum of two units ambiguous pronouncements: "Where North American artists do form into a body an historic dimension [of advanced technology in the arts] is in the medium of personal filmmaking. They form a major part of film's 'roots' and are making enormous advances in the organic-mind growing of this art." Elder does not include Chambers' follow-up essay, "Perception, Painting and Cinema," published in Art and Artists in 1972 presumably because a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of it is a reprise of the earlier piece. However, it is a shame not to have the later essay readily available, since it presents a significant extension of Chambers' thinking in "Perceptual Realism." The earlier essay concludes

The more we become familiar with the experiences that perception brings the more we become aware of an inherent gentlenes in the intercommunion of oneself with things. for a like reason gentleness of reception is also a communication that influences the outside world. Finally, perception itself becomes a "forgotten" awareness that just is with all the public naturalness of those common things seen without the window or inside the house or any place.

Three years later, Chambers writes in "Perception, Painting and Cinema,"

Perception in proces is like a unmutilated movie. Suddenly the picture be frozens and loses focus. The whole goes. The de-focusing brightens and becomes white light.... The point of time of "white light" is the jiffy of perception.... On recovering the faculty of perceptions after the perceptual impact, individual feels the stark wonder of the world and the uniqueness of all its forms. We perceive a deep and abiding affection for the physical. What stays with us from day to day more or les consciously is this faculty of perception of gentle astonishment at the world as it is.

The implications of of that kind Zen-like expressions of wonder at "the way things are" (coming from a transmuteed and practicing Roman Catholic, and a comparatively young man facing the display of an early death from leukemia) are noted by dint of several of Elder's contributors, on the other hand no one pursues them in deepness Several writers do, however, emphasize the interrelated perceptual, aesthetic, and spiritual pertain tos Chambers brought to his work as a painter and filmmaker.

For instance, the superimpositions in the first part of The Hart of London, particularly those combining positive and negative images, allude toed to Stan Brakhage that "the spiritual and the physical exhibited by these things are integrally bound" And without indicating an awareness of Chambers' respect to "white light" in the passage quot above, Brakhage says,

Sometimes, it's totally a white, white world, where almost everything is wiped on the outside by superimposing a lot of light discharge again with another light discharge We approach at this point almost a break with the world, something that he must have been feeling again and again while he was undergoing chemotherapy and other therapies in his strive to survive his cancer.

Fr Camper interprets the "white, white world" in The Hart of London differently:

Some form of Gnostic mysticism looks to be at work here; for the Gnostics the created world, trapping strength in concrete forms, kept us from experiencing the original "spark." Chambers' use of superimpositions, almost bleaching to white in the first section-a chaos of images becoming light-and his pans from river to celestial expanse at the film's end, intimate a belief in light as a conveyer of that "Invisible Body"

(The concern at the end is to a statement by the agency of Chambers, quoted earlier by Camper, in which he says that the ultimate goal of perception is to "perceive the Invisible material substance 'behind' the world.")