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
