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
