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
