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)
questioned, ‘What kind of film is it, will it ruin my career?’ There was none of that kind of thinking; the film was magic in that sense.” The skeleton of the film is, as in Merci, again a narrative. Hindle recorded a thick, Middle-European accented voice the night after the Texan’s monologue and retrieved that unscripted tape four years later to be incorporated as the unifying element in the film. Even before Chinese Firedrill’s titles signal a formal open ing, the narrator has ensnared us in his circular, self-contradicting tale. He begins: “When I was first alive, younger than I am now, it was a time when you were forming inside these opinions, these things, these ideas in your mind. I was living with a married woman during this time... and it was my mother. And it was very.. .it was sort of as if you were living at home, and it was very unusual.” The ambiv alent tone of his speech, at once comic and distressing, underlines the move ments of a handsome but dissipated- looking man (Hindle himself) who kneels on the floor, packing thousands of IBM cards into boxes. When he completes his task and steps out of frame, the camera presents an overhead shot of his narrow, clut tered lair. As a shower of computer cards descends from some hostile heaven, a militant burst of Chinese choral music claims the soundtrack and the film’s title appears, accented by a bright, bouncing red ball. After the sounds of thunder and clattering cymbals subside, it’s back to the protagonist’s den and to the rambling memoir of the storyteller. Chinese Firedrill’s action unfolds both within the limited confines of the hero’s claustrophobic cubicle, which serves as a metaphor for his own sense of imprisonment, and the unlimited space of thought and memory. The concrete chain of activities which he performs—crawling like some wounded beast from his fur-blan keted bed, scraping cards from the rubble on the floor, applying aboriginal lines to his face with a lipstick, searching through a book of photos—is interwoven with frag ments of flashbacks and subjective vi sions, among them a blond child bathing in a metal washtub, a sepia- toned, grainy chase scene in which uniformed officers pursue and shoot an unidentified young man, a stun ning woman lighting candles and luridly lit,glass eyeballs suspended in darkness. There are moments when the tangible and the ethereal are joined, when the power of the hero’s emotions dissolves the barriers be tween physical and psychological reality, allowing dreams to materialize. In a scene described by Gene Youngblood in Expanded Cinema as “possibly one of the great scenes in the history of film,” Hindle, prostrate on the floor of his room, reaches upward in a supremely romantic gesture. His hand is met by a mirror-like reflection revealed through the white, translucent wall. When he removes his hand, a woman’s body shimmers through. The shadowed figure of a naked man reaches toward her, their embrace describing the essence of erotic grace. The allusive, evocative quality of Chinese Firedrill’s visual text is balanced by exquisite technical preci sion. Through the use of unusual camera angles, extreme variations in focal length, slow motion, and the multi-layered imagery created via rear projection rephotography, Hindle mixes despair with visual pleasure, counterpointing the angst of Chinese Firedrill’s hero with the lushness of the film’s surface. Chinese Firedrill closes with the death of its pro tagonist, but with an image of re demption. After a bomb blows away the door of the hero’s room, the vision of the boy splashing in his bath is seen again. As shining drops of water surround him, the frozen frames begin to fade, vanishing final ly into pure light. Hindle returned to Chinese Firedrill’s themes of alienation and redemption eight years later in the creation of his most recent film. Pasteur 3 , made in 1976, differs from its predecessor, however, in one crucial respect. In the earlier film, the Hindle-hero was incapable of step ping outside his cloister to engage in a waiting, apparently normal world. In Pasteur 3 , the hero, again played by Hindle, has taken that step, ventured outside, only to discover that the en vironment has become enemy terri tory, that Mother Nature herself is conspiring against him. There’s a direct line from the ex perience of Pasteup’s hero to Hindle’s immediate experience, a line which begins in 1972 when Hindle ac cepted an invitation to teach at the University of South Florida. The position would provide a solution to the problem of “managing to stay alive,” but as is often the case, finan cial security had its price. Once in Florida, the physical problems that had plagued Hindle since his move to the South assumed gargantuan pro portions: “I was allergic to everything. Apparently the shift in climate and altitude from San Fran cisco to Tampa affected my body chemistry. Some of the allergies have eased a little now. The heat of the South still seriously hinders my ability to work. It slows the mind, which I know can work many times faster than it does here. I sweat so much I literally rust out my equipment. When I go out on a shoot, I take along a couple of bathtowels, but there seems to be an excessive amount of sweat pouring out of my forehead, right over the eye that’s against the camera. It’s downright demonic.” Pasteup is Hindle’s response to this trial by fire, a brilliant, 22 minute, cinematic poison pen letter to the state of Florida, starring its maker in an updated revision of his Chinese Firedrill role. This time the displaced foreigner is a comic strip Frenchman in striped shirt, suspenders and cap, whose improvised monologue (spoken in French, naturally) is a sar castic paean to the virtues of the sun shine state. When Hindle announces “Ici est Florida. C’est une belle place, touts les choses pour touts les peuples touts les jours, ” the viewer who miss ed French 101 is out of luck—he’ll have to partake in the experience of the outsider as he attempts to decode the untranslated film. Hindle claims that the foreign narration took him completely by surprise, but offers a retrospective explanation: “I didn’t have anything good to say about Florida in English. The monologue wasn’t a conscious creation, but I think it was a reflection of my total alienation.” The first hint of Hindle’s embattled position is contained in Pasteup’s titles. The film opens with a hand inscribing words on a board. “A sketch,” it writes, and then, slashing a line through that phrase, replaces it with “A treatment, if you will.” The treatment referred to is not simply film language for an abbreviated script, but a punning allusion to Louis Pasteur’s cure for rabies, consisting of a painful series of injections ad ministered to the stomach of the luckless victim over a 14-21 day period. Hindle, who endured this medical martyrdom twice, views his newly required self-administration of allergy shots as a cubing of the Pasteur treatment; his description of the film reads: “What occurs to a body following exposure to rabies and goldenrod.” The theme of the human body under attack ironically gives birth to Pasteup’s most magical imagery- electric blue, three dimensional linear wave forms, oscilloscopic in appearance, suggest the iconography of modern medicine, the newly recognized sublime dance of atomic particles that constitutes our very being. Whether sliding up and down the edge of the screen or occupying a dominant central position, these repeated abstract forms have an im maculate beauty. Like the geometric forms in Hindle’s earlier, ecstatic film Watersmith, they suggest a perfect order and represent the redeeming possibility of a core of harmony, even in a hostile, pollen-laden realm. Hindle leads us on a tour of that realm through the course of the film, beginning with a trek through a nighttime jungle. A single flashlight pierces the darkness as a hand brushes aside malignant vegetation; the soundtrack relays the sounds of crickets and anonymous sniffles. A blade of grass in extreme close-up, grass bathed in Sterno-blue light, plants blurred by soft focus, build the tension of a scene which anticipates, De Palma style , the violence of a psycho-killer coming upon a hapless victim. Playing against these expecta tions, Hindle instead reveals a line of allergy medications and a parade of syringes stuck in a block of styro foam. A fast dolly through the grass and into the house reveals the hiker, Will Hindle, quickly readying a fix and poking the needle into his thigh. Thus armored, he steps outside prepared to address his audience. “Aujourd’hui ma mere est morte. (Today my mother is dead),” he begins. “I speak only English,” he continues in French. “Frere Jacque is dead,” he comments as he sits under a cluster of Spanish moss draped trees. In quick succession he’s in a speed boat, hanging onto his cap, paddling a canoe, standing as if posing for a snapshot while someone picks oranges behind him. With a snap of his fingers he lights up the towers of an onion-domed palace like Walt Disney illuminating Sleeping Beauty’s castle. A woman’s face appears momentarily, then fades. As a tourist, Hindle walks through an exhibition of stills from his films, installed in a university gallery. Again the woman’s face surfaces, a haunting apparition, head thrown back, laughing. “There is everything for everybody every day in Florida,” he notes. “Lots of oranges, lots of orange juice, lots of french fries.” The hero’s odyssey had led him to the beach where, nearly trampled by bronzed youths heading for the water, he observes the expanse of the sea. Magnificent choral music plays. Across the water a point of light burns, then begins to mount the sky. A rocket launch? Abstract designs climb up the screen, becoming a montage of patterns of light. Pasteup’s coda features a return to the allergy theme of the film’s begin ning, and as a parting shot, that famous line from the Wizard of Oz, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.” If Chinese Firedrill and Pasteup are the opening and closing notes of Hindle’s existing mature oeuvre, Watersmith is its triumphant central passage. Completed in 1969, Water- smith (32 min., color) was first con ceived during a trip to California’s Foothill College where, visiting to accept an award for Chinese Firedrill, Hindle was struck by the beauty of the college aquatic club’s pool and im mediately decided to film it. Later, submitting a proposal for an unre lated project to the American Film In stitute’s grants program, he added as an aside that he intended to make an abstract film focusing exclusively on water. Hindle then learned that a group of swimmers preparing for the upcoming Olympics would be practic ing at the site for months. When the AFI responded to his grant applica tion, it was not to the painstakingly outlined script, (Hindle does not or dinarily script his work), but to the offhand reference. Hindle received the single largest grant awarded by the AFI to an individual filmmaker. Watersmith holds several levels of accessibility for the viewer. It is first and, for many, foremost, a very beautiful film. Its color is saturated, deep, glowing; its movement is liquid as water—transitions occur through dissolves or superimpositions, rarely through abrupt cuts. Poolside, the camera performs graceful glissades, following the swimmers as they travel the pool’s length. Seemingly freed of the constraints of gravity, the camera’s eye takes in aerial and suba- quatic views. Overhead shots capture the parallel linear patterns created by strings of floats and swimming bodies, the emphatic geometry of col or and shape, where turquoise edge of pool meets adobe-red tile. Under water photography exposes a scin tillating, cosmic realm in which air bubbles become expanding clouds of white light and water is transformed to mercury, cream, viscous green glass. Anchored at the pool’s bottom, Hindle imbues the purposeful, com posed progress of athletes passing above him with a cool sensuality. A more energetic sexuality emerges in the edited repetitions of a diver’s hurtling descent and in a passage where divers, penetrating the water’s surface, unleash milky explosions of bubbles. Hips twist, legs scissor, bodies collide and tangle. Magnified by close-ups, the swimmers’ suntan ned skin seems more tangible, their flesh, glistening with water, more alive. But Hindle’s celebration of the potentialities of the flesh is not limited to the boundaries of eroti cism; his discovery of the sexual cur rent in the swimmers’ practice is a product of his own capacity for vi sion. In Watersmith’s finale, the energy contained within substantial reality is released as pure energy when The heat of the South still seriously hinders my ability to work. It slows the mind...Isweat so much I literally rust out my equipment. —Will Hindle 3 Art Papers September-October 1981
