From Painting into Cinema: A Study of Jack Chambers’ Circle

From Painting into Cinema: A Study ofJack Chambers' Circle BRUCE ELDER The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something.... To see clearly is poetry, philosophy and religion all in one. John Ruskin When Jack Chambers began working in film in 1966, he had already established a solid reputation as a painter. Over the next few years this reputation continued to grow; indeed, Chambers can be said to have acquired a measure of popular fame. This fame rests largely on a series of canvasses completed between 1968 and 1971. These paintings seem to have been admired for their objective description of everyday reality. Curiously, the films Chambers made during these same years are hardly known. They are rarely shown and even less frequently written about. This saddens me, not only because I believe they are fine works but also because I see the films as an integral part of Chambers' oeuvre - as are his writings, which are just as infrequently mentioned. It should be interesting to art historians to ask why an artist with Chambers' perceptions and ideals embarked on projects in filmmaking. In the process of formulating an answer to this question, some insights into Chambers' work, both in painting and in film, should emerge. It is my conviction that Chambers' art and thought are Romantic in character. His preoccupations , far from being centred on objective description, are really idealist in nature. It was these interests that led him to the cinema, a medium which enabled him to further his exploration of perception. * * * Traversing the range of artwork concerned with important epistemological questions, there are two basic and, in large measure, conflicting strains. The first is concerned with affirming the 60 status of the artwork as object and with understanding the perceptual effects of the real material from which a work is made, rather than with those effects which derive from its illusory subject matter . The development of this sort of practice was predicated on a particular understanding of the nature of the aesthetic response. It was alleged that for a person's response to be genuinely "aesthetic" it must be characterized by "distance"; that is, it must involve a setting aside of everyday concerns and a focusing of attention exclusively on the formal construction of the artwork. I Such a view leads logically to the attempt to eliminate "subject matter" or "content" from a work on the understanding that a preoccupation with such content tends to cause what was commonly called "underdistancing." Underdistancing was viewed as problematic because it interfered with that disinterested contemplation through which a work's formal properties ~ere apprehended and its aesthetic value experienced. Behind this view lay a critique of the role of illusion in traditional representational art. The illusionistic features of a work of art, it was argued, served only the artist's attempt to provide a convincing impression of reality. Oversimplifying matters enormously, one could state that the craftsmanly concern with the convincingness of the illusion was predicated on the belief that the greater the degree of likeness between "image" and "model," the finer the work. But this view led to odd consequences. For if the degree of likeness between image and model determined the value of a work of art, then that art would be finest which overcame all distinctions between the image and the object of which it was an image. It could almost be said, in the traditional view, that the work of art aspired to become that which it represented. That, however, would suggest that the work itself was ontologically deficient and that the degree of reality it possessed (its "reality value") was somewhat less than the "reality value" of that which it represented. The formalists maintained that a work of art's strength lay in the fact that it was not simply another object in the world but was a very special sort of object, inasmuch as it possessed a particuRevue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 16. No. 1(Printemps1981 Sprin~) larly interesting visual structure. This visual structure need not have any relation to other objects in the world, but was important in its own right. In other words, the formalists...