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)
the images of swimmers transmute in to the iconography of tran- cendence. The romantic notion of ecstasy as a door to mystical comprehension translates into a flight of abstract images—exploding starry configurations, dancing ka leidoscopic fragments of light, complex geometries suggesting a perfect natural order. This visualiza tion is at once Hindle’s impression of the transcendent experience attained through rigorous activity, that same transcendence envisioned as orgasm become metaphysical embrace, and the artist’s recognition and celebra tion of his own capacity for vision and creation. Hindle sees the act of making art as a triumph over physical and psycho logical barriers: “When I put my eye up to the eyepiece of the camera, I lose my fear of what I might be doing. I’m deathly afraid of heights, but I remember in San Francisco climbing up to the edge of a forty-two story building, straddling a parapet, just clamping my legs around it and film ing straight down. When I look at that footage, I wonder ‘What kind of fool are you?’ The same thing happened with the filming of Watersmith. I know very little about swimming—I can dogpaddle. In order to stay at the bottom of the pool, I had to weigh myself down with a belt of forty pound weights. It should have been designed to just pop open like a seat belt, but you had to take the whole thing off before returning to the sur face. I tried a snorkel once, but all I got was water. So I’d take five deep breaths, that’s all I could do. There I was filming people who were bronzed and healthy—and I smoked and curs ed; I was pale and came from the city. But I’d enter the water and people would go back and forth above me and I’d still be there, sitting on the bottom. I’m still not sure where the extra breath came from. Being locked at the bottom of a deep pool without the weights, without the camera would have frightened me, but I was filming so it was all right. Since that time, I’ve heard that people do have extra oxygen in their blood long after their lungs have been exhausted of air.” In describing the twelve months spent editing Watersmith, Hindle recalls a similar period of unobstruct ed energy: “When I shot Watersmith, it was totally void and without form; the grant allowed me to film pro- lifically, at the highest ratio I’ve ever enjoyed. It was only as I reviewed the footage that I began to impose a shape on it. When it came to editing, it was like an explosion of grey mat ter—my mind just flew in all direc tions. For a year, without really ques tioning where we were going, I followed it. I knocked out a wall in my apartment to create a studio and began to build equipment to achieve the effects I wanted. I didn’t know what an optical printer was, so I made my own. Later, when people saw the film they’d ask, ‘Did you work in Hollywood to do this?’ I’d answer, ‘No, I work in my bedroom in San Francisco.’ I began to live in a little world made of the viewer, the water, the earphones through which I’d listen to the sounds I was creating.” Watersmith’s soundtrack is a masterpiece, an orchestration of mysterious echoes, haunting melodic strains, and dark tonalities. Much of it was composed from the sound of bubbles re-recorded and distorted. Hindle also made periodic trips around San Francisco in search of material: “I’d walk around the city and take recordings of things like the Coke machine at the San Francisco Art Institute. I’d go to Fisherman’s Wharf and get the sounds of water lapping against a boat, or go outside a building equipped with air condition ing or a huge fan and record that. I’d take it home and rework it and rework it. I got deeper and deeper into the film; there were some weeks when I didn’t leave the house. Finally, I became completely absorbed—the rest of the world did not exist. I ac tually became a part of the film, and the film became a part of me. It was not a very healthy way to make a film, to be so cut off from reality, so separate from the real world.” When Hindle finally returned to the world of the living he found it a less than welcoming place. As describ ed by Joan Didion in her title essay of The White Album, it was a time when “everything was unmentionable and nothing was unimaginable,” when “the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.” The hysteria and lack of control that Hindle detected around him materialized into a film whose title reflects those qualities. St. Flournoy Lobos-Logos and the Eastern Europe Fetus Taxing Japan Brides in West Coast Places Sucking Alabama Air (1970,12 min., color) is a work defined by Hindle as “nine miles deep and still burning.” The film, which takes as its ostensible subject the Manson family’s murder of Sharon Tate, was begun before authorities had discovered the identi ty of the killers and shot during the period when details of the crime were gradually being pieced together. St. Flournoy (from the French fleur noir, black flower) was unsettlingly pro phetic in its casting and scenario. The actor chosen by Hindle to portray the demonic perpetrator of violence bears an uncanny resemblance to Charles Manson, while the sites where much of the film was shot were located just twenty miles from Manson’s Death Valley turf. The work is constructed via a montage of images disclosing the visions of the possessed “saint.” They are hieroglyphs of violence—a plaster mannequin of a pregnant woman, first perfect, then damaged; the shadowed figure of the visionary gripping a knife; a group of people silhouetted in orgiastic dance moving to the sound of insistent drums. They are also terrifying, primal pictures—a naked woman, raised on her arms lizard-like in the desert; a hideous fetus spinning in darkness; whirlpools of acid green and blood red webs. Mounted together in an escalating collage, culminating in a volley of frenzied geometric fragments reminis cent of Watersmith's ecstatic climax, these images represent the darker side of romantic vision, the contamination of individual perception with deluded egotism. Although Hindle completed his prescient labors on St. Flournoy in Alabama, he doesn’t consider it southern-made. His first project undertaken after the completion of the Blountsville studio was Later That Same Night (1970, 10 min., color), a work which expressed the intense isolation he felt as “the only noted ex perimental avant-garde or personal filmmaker in the South,” in his words. It is a film as depressing as Watersmith was ecstatic. Later That Same Night’s soundtrack is a blatant confession of Hindle’s feelings. Jackie Dicie, a self-taught singer and guitarist, sings and accompanies herself in a rendition of “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.” The film opens with a section shot in infra red color film, lending a sci-fi strangeness to images of naked hip pies stationed below a highway under pass. The remainder features Dicie wandering through the wooded Southern Appalachian landscape in what Hindle calls “the southern country mode of existence...the alone woman and the lonesome land.” Later That Same Night lacks the authority of the rest of the post-1968 films; its diffusion suggests that Hin dle was discovering in the South not only a new “complex beauty,” but also different versions of uncertainty and despair. Later That Same Night uses autobiography to express feelings of abandonment and isolation. In an earlier film titled Billabong (1968, 9 min.) Hindle used a form of per sonalized documentary to capture those same emotions as they existed outside himself, at a Job Corps train ing center in Oregon. An Australian word describing “water that has turn ed back on its course to form stagnant pools,” billabong is an apt metaphor for the frustrated, immobilized ex istence of the young men housed in the center’s rural barracks. Formally, Billabong uses a collage of images to convey Hindles impressions of the place and its inhabitants. Within this seemingly modest framework, the filmmaker creates a melancholic and touching work. Most of the film, apart from its beginning and end, is shot in black and white, some of it high contrast, though Hindle often uses tinting and one passage features the addition of psychedelic color. As in Chinese Firedrill, he makes extensive use of superimposition, but here the layers of stripped down black and white im ages seem more an accumulation of evidence than a sensual barrage. Hin dle moves his camera down dark deserted hallways and into the institu tional bathroom, captures an intimate moment of a boy having his hair combed and reveals another’s proud posturing for the camera. The pace of the film builds to its dramatic center, moving from a close-up of a seated young man rocking back and forth to a montage of masturbation images. The impact of this section is heighten ed by musical accompaniment, with the soundtrack, which previously consisted of the repetitious rhythm of a train running over tracks, yielding to a gentle guitar solo, segueing into a passage of acid rock. Black and white footage of hands rubbed together in a gesture of boredom and despair, darkness, a short reprise of some tinted green stock, and a shot of an empty bed terminate the section. Billabong closes with a classic image of liberation as Hindle moves his camera in an extended smooth dolly through a darkened room to a solitary window, through which he reveals the unexpected vision of the sea. The moments of epiphany with which Hindle punctuates his films seem to occur less regularly in daily life. Speaking of his problems adap ting to the South he admits: “I just may never get used to it here, but I’m wondering if I can tap that disability to adapt and produce something out of it.” Meanwhile, he finds himself an exile and an alien, not only geographically but politically: “Dur ing the Viet Nam war, there were any number of films protesting what ar tists believed to be wrong doing. I’m sure that we’re not much better a country since that time—it’s simply that we’re not currently at war. I do think it’s wrong to create as if business were as usual. We’re not in nocents—we have the media con stantly telling us about our society’s ills. It’s very difficult to make films, very difficult to do anything without keeping in mind the fact that I am a member of a society which is callous and careless.” Championing the romantic idea of the artist as society’s conscience, Hindle assesses his past and looks at the future: “I’m thankful more than anything for the films I have been able to make—I feel extremely fortunate. The complica tions of filmmaking at the level I insist upon are great; it’s hard for me to say ‘OK, so times are a little hard, so you sweat a little, so the soundtrack isn’t right, so you have to send away 2,000 miles to get things done, go ahead and work anyway Will, just work.’ I don’t know whether in hard times one should keep working, but my answer is if I am to make films in a new vein, they should be works conscious of the world’s conditions, cognizant of how much we use, how much we consume. I’d like very much to foster a new kind of film, haiku-like, brief, com pact. I’d like to start a school where people who saw how destructive our country is capable of being and how powerful film is could work together in a calm environment. Leave the big blasting statements to the people with 85 million dollar budgets. I believe that we could gain world-wide atten tion if we made simple, very powerful statements. I would like to do that. I would like to be part of that sort of activity. It could happen here.” As a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts’ Critics’ Fellowship, Linda Dubler is examin ing southeastern filmmakers and their films; this profile is the fifth in her series. Will Hindle, frame from Chinese Firedrill, 16mm., color, 25 min., 1968. Art Papers September-October 1981 4
