This title was digitized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA).
About Art papers. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1981-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 1, 1981)
Emblems of Transcendence: The Films of Will Hindle Linda Dubler I love San Francisco, especially its weather, and the inherent beauty of the town was conducive to my work. When I first came to the South, I thought leaving San Francisco would be worth it, that Fd find a more sim ple life. A great many of America’s outstanding writers, musicians, and stellar personalities come from the South, more by proportion than any other part of the country. I hoped to work with artists in this area, whose seemingly innate talents would emerge through our collaboration. I would be living in a place where no other filmmakers even appeared, let alone moved. I didn’t know how I was going to eat and manage to stay alive, but that didn ’t really seem to be primary. The important thing was to get there and work, to show the com plex beauty of a place whose best press had been Mardi Gras, Cypress Gardens, ‘‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. ” Outside of James Agee, no one had gone at the area with a truly wonder ing heart. That’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to play down where I was; I didn’t want to play it up either—I just wanted to quietly be there.—Will Hindle When Will Hindle moved to Blountsville, Alabama in 1970 to quietly live on land purchased with a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, he brought with him an idealistic vision of the South. He arrived bear ing a studio full of self-invented equipment, seven films including such celebrated works as Chinese Firedrill, Billabong and Watersmith, a reputation as one of the foremost personal filmmakers of the day, and pieces of a work-in-progress. Then titled simply St. Flournoy, the film was a bizarre reflection of some of the grimmer aspects of the late 1960’s; it took as its subject a particularly Californian crime—tfte still unsolved murder of Sharon Tate. Perhaps working on St. Flournoy brought the growing climate of violence in his native state into clearer perspective for Hindle, prompting him to con sider a move. In any case, he knew someone in Alabama, and land was still affordable there. He relocated with the hope of building a studio, consolidating his energies, and tap ping the stream of “natural” talent in the region .Eleven years later, Hindle is rather surprisingly still in the South. The South has not yielded to him though: he has not been assimilated and has not realized his dream. Will Hindle is a confounded artist living in geographic and spiritual exile, a film maker who finds in his current condi tion an odd fulfillment of his romantic vision. Hindle’s films are a celebration of romanticism. They are very much a part of the tradition of American avant-garde cinema, a movement whose most persistent unifying ele ment is the privileged status awarded to individual perception. They are equally the product of an artist whose image of himself is steeped in our culture’s mythology of the artist as in spired deviant, and of a time when avant-garde film was the cutting edge of the arts, a brilliant, unmapped ter ritory. Hindle’s career traces the Art Papers September-October 1981 startling changes that have marked the realm of personal filmmaking over the past twenty years; his transi tion from a filmmaker working in his bedroom in San Francisco to Associ ate Professor of Film Art at the University of South Florida, Tampa, mirrors avant-garde film’s own transformation from an affordable, non-institutionalized, underground movement to one that is historically self-conscious, academically ap proved, media-center supported and phenomenally expensive. Hindle’s rise to international recog nition in 1968 with Chinese Firedrill was not a case of overnight success. A self-taught filmmaker who began working in the late 19$0’s, Hindle ar rived at filmmaking through an in direct path. He studied English at Stanford University, then moved to Casablanca for two years to edit an English language newspaper. Return ing to the U.S., he ghost-wrote for a number of authors in California while working on his own drawings, paint ings and sculpture, and labored brief ly as the youngest member of the Disney animation team. Then in 1958, he gravitated toward film as an avenue for uniting his artistic and literary skills and, after investing in basic film equipment, immediately shot two films. Pastoral D’Ete (9 min.,color), completed first, was scripted to music by Honegger and shot in the mountains of northern and central California; NON catholicam (10 min., b & w), finally completed in 1963, was edited to music by Hindemith and filmed in a Gothic cathedral in San Francisco. Both works are essentially filmic poems; they are conventionally beautiful, im maculately crafted lyrical explora tions of visual rhythms, cinematic form and camera movement. What Pastoral D’Ete and NON catholicam have in common with all of Hindle’s work is their polish. Whether presenting sexual fantasies in Billabong, the chaos of a person ality in the process of disintegration in Chinese Firedrill, or an embittered travelogue in Pasteur ! , Hindle’s work has an impeccable quality. The T.V. executive who happened to see Pastoral D’Ete on a chance viewing probably reacted to that look when he offered Hindle a job with Westing- house/CBS making films for national broadcast. Over a three year period, Hindle made 150 short films, an ex perience through which he gained the technical expertise that would later enable him to build much of his own equipment. The stint at Westinghouse was followed by a four-month assign ment filming the South Sea voyage of Sterling Hayden’s schooner “The Wanderer,” a project which was abandoned when funds for comple tion evaporated. Upon his return, Hindle resumed his own filmmaking while working for San Francisco’s educational television station as a video journalist. His next film, 29; Merci, Merci (1966, 30 min., b & w), is of interest chiefly for its never end ing credits, which unreel the film maker’s grateful thanks to a multitude of sources of inspiration, ending in an acknowledgement to “all those wonderful people out there in the dark,” and for the Texan voice which follows, narrating over imagery described by its maker as “aftermaths of Western Civilization.” The voice is Hindle’s own, recorded in 1964 dur ing a time when money for film- making was not forthcoming and when the tape recorder acted as a substitute for the movie camera. Hindle took to producing spon taneous monologues, trying on a variety of personae; the Texan sprang forth from Hindle’s lingering feelings about the assassination of John Kennedy: “1 thought I’d do a young Texan who was growing up in the same manner as his western forebear ers—he delights in owning a gun.” FFTCM(5 min., color), which follow ed in 1967 is not currently distributed, but was described enigmatically by Richard Corliss in Film Quarterly, Spring 1969, as fitting in “the pastoral or fascist category.” In the Canyon Cinema catalogue, Hindle writes: “Renewed income and the ability to work on one’s own pro duced this feeling and work. A Pro- methian awakening, de-bonding of the human spirit... reaching for the un-filtered blaze of Light and Life. The driving sounds of heartbeat, Fan fare for the Common Man and devo tional chants. A time of sharing.. .a touch of vision in the night.” The Promethean awakening that Hindle experienced in the making of FFTCM heralded his arrival as a mature artist. Chinese Firedrill (25 min., color), made in 1968, is Hindle’s first great film, a work of in credible visual complexity which ex plores the romantic themes of man’s loss of innocence and erotic grace, his subsequent alienation from a world become chaotic, and his struggle with the prison of self-consciousness. Although it has elements of storytell ing and a hero, Chinese Firedrill is not a narrative film. It’s a work that operates on levels of psychological association, using primal imagery and constructing its meaning through an accretionary process. The logic of dreams and the unconscious animates its rapidly shifting, multilayered texture. Chinese Firedrill cost an incredible $280 to make, was shot in two week ends, and edited in less than a month.Hindle remembers its charmed creation: “Somebody took lights and trailed behind me and the film came out of me. What I shot, we used. Everything turned out directly—the ratio was almost one to one. And the people who worked on Chinese Firedrill were wonderful.When I asked Mimi London, a lovely model who worked as an announcer at the educational T.V. station in San Fran cisco to be in the film, she answered, ‘Of course, Will.’ I didn’t know that she even knew I existed, but she never
