I finally watched a film in Reg Hartt’s living room theatre this week. Visiting his “Cineforum” is a Toronto indie tradition I’ve meant to participate in ever since I first saw, decades ago, his posters on lampposts for “The Sex and Violence Cartoon Festival” and screenings of Nosferatu and of Salvador Dali films. I thought recently I might never get the chance to actually go, since city officials, once again, seem intent on shutting him down.

Why would they do that? The place is a boho civic treasure: as Hartt will tell you, the Lonely Planet travel guide lists the “off the wall experience” of Cineforum as one of the top entertainment attractions in Toronto, and the late Jane Jacobs was an enthusiastic member of his audience and vocal advocate of his work.

He’s been showing films and giving talks to accompany them in Toronto since the 1970s, at first in rented theatres and bars. In 1992, a bartender gave him some grief during one of his presentations, so Hartt moved the whole crowd to his living room down the street. Since then, he’s hosted them there.

Earlier this month, the now 70-year-old Hartt announced that the Cineforum is dead. The reason? Toronto’s government issued him a notice that they consider him in violation of zoning regulations, as they say he’s running a “public art gallery” in his home. Hartt insists he is not running a public art gallery, and has never run one. Instead, “The Cineforum, indeed the whole house, is itself a work of art, a living, breathing work of art,” Hartt says.

That it is. One afternoon this week, Hartt met me on the front steps of his rented Victorian house on Bathurst St. south of College, filming my approach on a handheld 3D camera. Inside his living room/dining room, decorated with monster masks and movie posters and filled with rolling office chairs, he hands me a pair of glasses and shows me on the big screen what I look like in three dimensions, while giving me a bit of history on the development of the technology and some discussion of the meaning of the name of God in the Old Testament.

Then he screens a 2004 Jane Jacobs documentary, stopping it frequently to talk about his study of her ideas — observations that frequently digress into disquisitions on civic governance, the I Ching, Christianity, Judaism, film and animation history, Ancient Greece, pedagogy, his own biography, the past and future of newspapers, and many other topics. He’s self-taught, as Jacobs was, and he’s skeptical about the value of classroom education.

Onscreen, Jacobs is heaping scorn on the classroom-educated urban planners she encountered when she started writing. They wanted a city that is “neat, clean, orderly; quick to understand,” she says. But cities and urban economies don’t work that way, and can’t. They are complex ecosystems, she says, webs of messy, disorderly interactions.

“It’s such a simple and obvious conclusion, it’s amazing anybody would object to it,” Hartt says.

This point is not unrelated to Hartt’s current troubles. His Cineforum is a tribute to the virtues of the unplanned, the uncorporate, the uncertified, the unregulated. What a treasure to live in a place where a character like Hartt can make a place for his passions and his art and where anyone can go and share them.

Cities, Jacobs says onscreen, need to fight everything that keeps people from “developing their own work.” A city economy, like the weather, “is making itself up as it goes along.”

Yet city regulators cannot figure out how to leave Hartt alone to develop his work. Standards officers asked him to apply for a zoning review to categorize his place as a public art gallery, a process that requires all kinds of fees and architectural drawings to complete. “I would ask that you check-in with the Planning Dept. and/or an individual familiar with municipal law prior to using the property in any manner other than a residential dwelling,” property standards officer Elliot deBarros wrote in notifying him that he and his landlord were being cited for a bylaw violation.

They came after him before, in 2010, until then-mayor Rob Ford intervened. Now, they have once again decided he’s a problem.

It’s not just this, of course. In this city, signs posted in the park tell you a permit is required to play Frisbee. In this city, immigrant kids trying to throw a skating party near Jane and Finch have to cancel because they don’t have two million bucks in insurance.

Maybe it’s a miracle Hartt’s been able to continue this long.

Fighting to save his work, he says, is fighting to “seize the moment to turn Toronto into a Jane Jacobs city.”

Hart says Cineforum is dead. But he’ll continue giving presentations this summer at the house — posters he put up toward the end of the week just gave the address at 463 Bathurst, without mentioning a name. And he says he’ll continue to fight to save his work of art, his home. He tells me he invites people to come see the Shroud of Turin replica he has in his hall, elaborating on what it shows as a 3D rendering of the post-crucifixion body of Jesus.

What he is doing here, Hartt says, inviting people into his home, is testifying to his beliefs, practising his faith. In response to that line of argument, deBarros, from property standards, wrote that use of his home as a place of worship “in whole or in part” is “a violation of the city’s Zoning By-Law.”

“Are you saying that under the city bylaws I am not allowed to practise my faith in my home?” Hartt wrote back.

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I don’t know about faith and all that. But my own belief system says that if a law forbids Hartt to give film and lecture presentations here, it’s a bad law.

Toronto’s government constantly proclaims its belief in the Gospel of Jane Jacobs. But bureaucrats can’t see the value in the kind of fascinating, eccentric home Hartt keeps. Instead, they try to shut him down in the very year they are loudly celebrating the 100th anniversary of Jacobs’ birth. If they understood the first thing about Jacobs’ work, they would let Hartt continue to develop his own.