A native of London, Ontario, Jack Chambers (1931-1978) was already renowned as a painter before he ventured into filmmaking. He completed six films; the last was his masterpiece, The Hart of London, begun the year he was diagnosed with leukemia. This feature-length experiment in “perceptual realism” combines newsreels, found photography, and original footage. “It's a film of startling juxtapositions that seems to be speaking to elemental issues of life and death, yet it also manages to interweave five or six grand themes and let the viewer feel that they are logically interrelated” (Fred Camper, Chicago Reader). Chief among them is our alienation from nature, evoked in the opening footage of the capture and killing of a deer that has wandered into London, and reprised in every major scene thereafter as one of the costs of civilization.

Just before I began work on my book Harmony and Dissent, I discovered a trove of photographs depicting participants in a radical German movement, Freikörperkultur (free body culture), the early years of which constituted something of a prototype for the hippie movement that would emerge in California in the 1960s. Many of the photographs were strikingly well composed, unlike more recent images of practitioners of social nudity. But these formal rigours were responsible for only a small part of their charm. More important was this: there was something unbearably sweet about these images of groups of people who were convinced that they might alleviate modernity’s depredation of charity through exposing, completely and frankly, their vulnerable naked selves to one another.