- The first two Will Hindle films that were shown in the complete recent Chicago retrospective Unknown Nostalgia (organized by InRO contributor and Tone Glow editor-in-chief Joshua Minsoo Kim) are a little different from the others in their simplicity. His first completed film, Pastorale d’été (1958), is built around the titular Arthur Honneger chamber piece. By pairing it with images of California’s wilderness in summer, with the sun’s rays causing the plants to glimmer, he achieves a simple and potent synchronization that’s hard to resist for sheer beauty.
- Will Hindle made only 11 films — 10 were fully completed between 1958 and 1976, and the the director stopped for 11 years. Right when he was finally able to conquer his years of stasis and return with another movie that was nearly complete, he passed away in 1987. This lengthy pause has an eerie echo near the start of his career with Non Catholicam (1963). After an aborted first attempt predating Pastorale where the lab lost the original materials, he illicitly shot it again and finally completed the film with the assistance of fellow experimental filmmaker Bruce Baillie, who would go on to eclipse Will Hindle in defining the West Coast experimental film style despite openly citing him as a major influence. Non Catholicam was designed as an optical print to retain the nuances of the B&W lighting, and its rhythms are set to a symphony movement by Hindemith. It’s a straightforward film, but the final closeup of Jesus’ hand with a nail in it foreshadows the exultance of the final film in his early trilogy of classical music miniatures.
- Hindle had been the youngest Disney animator of his era during the WWII years (he worked between two military tours), and began working on short segments for television programs on CBS to finance his subsequent films. He’d take a break from classical music and finally developed his mature style with his next film, 29: Merci, Merci (1966), a cannibalization of his old television material that also found him touring his studio, delivering voiceover in a phony Southern accent. Hindle was not fond of silent experimental films and believed that they were fundamentally accompanied by audience noises, and Merci, Merci utilizes everything from dogs barking to loud beeps over the course of its mad half hour. The title is devoted to the lengthy opening credits sequence, a long list of thank yous filled with enough jokes and wordplay to inspire a whole fleet of films by jokey experimenters like Michael Snow and Owen Land. When it finally comes to a conclusion, the first glimpse of his subsequent films’ tendencies to morph and shapeshift in their focus comes to the forefront as we see everything from outtakes to WWII footage, along with a multitude of explicit references to Last Year at Marienbad: some are transfigured into flicker, and there is a superimposed version of that film’s party game. The strangely ecstatic poses of some of the war footage would foreshadow what came next when Hindle played his newfound style straight and sincerely.
Credit: MUBI/Canyon Cinema - Hindle returned to something like the style of his first two films with FFFTCM (1967), a title inspired by the Aaron Copland piece “Fanfare for the Common Man” that he uses to accompany his most tightly focused film. The joy of being able to make another film after so much time spent on commissions resulted in a work as ecstatic as its title implies, with Hindle finally reckoning with his homosexuality and expanding upon the most beautiful images of Pastorale and Non Catholicam. A nude man asleep, filmed so sensually that you can see his hairs stand on end, dreams of trees as he shifts ever so minutely in bed, with a voice opening the film with a declaration of “be strong” as the piece’s darker tones play. Eventually, outstretched hands are superimposed on the trees, with the film seeming to be split down the middle as a result and Copland reaching a climax as the sleeping man seems to have an orgasmic dream.
- While working on the soundtrack for 29: Merci Merci, Hindle was working as an IBM punch card sorter, and he recorded additional material with a phony Hungarian accent as a parody of the Lithuanian Jonas Mekas. He more explicitly ventured into psychodrama with Chinese Firedrill (1968), but also parodied it via Mekas-style ramblings about the pain of dealing with dogs. It could come across as insincere, but Hindle’s unconscious ramblings wound up serving his shapeshifter qualities well: the sorting of the countless piles of the cards as a flood of memories appears on screen eventually causes an explosion of sorts, with the cards fluttering down as Judy Garland plays on the soundtrack. There’s blood in the water, a blatantly phony PTSD flashback to his war years, and a journey into a room filled with backwards graffiti and candles. It all manages to function as both a parody of the experimental psychodramas of Stan Brakhage and Gregory Markopoulos, and a one-upping of the more oneiric side of their preoccupations.
- Billabong (1968) was a return to a shorter running time, and Hindle’s notes on summer camp. Despite a nostalgic soundtrack of birds and trains, and some lovely summer lighting, the images of the Oregon boys camp that he filmed carry an aggressive charge thanks to his optical printing rendering them as silhouettes or shadows, frequently aggressively posturing for the camera. Hindle’s trademark shift in tone comes when we see a wall full of pictures of naked women, and then a penis being jerked off that glows in wild colors: all this energy is just adolescent sexuality and sensuality acting out.
- Hindle likely took some inspiration from Jean Vigo’s miniature documentary Taris when making his longest film, Watersmith (1969), a documentary of Olympic swimmers practicing that transfigures into a motion study. They both found themselves allured by swimmers in the pool’s waters, but Hindle’s hauntological tape music soundtrack conjures up an entirely different mood, and his use of optical printing and dissolves to add color and spatial dynamics conjures up mental images of barracudas on the prowl. The eventual abstracting of the pool water itself involves a fast-paced shot of the lane lines that makes them into something like a shot from a car driving at night, and the post-swimming trip to the showers is pure visual fireworks. Hindle wanted to be a “champion filmmaker” for “champion swimmers,” and the filmmaking here is as potent as a flexed muscle.
Credit: MUBI/Canyon Cinema - The epically titled Saint Flournoy Lobos-Logos and the Eastern Europe Fetus Taxing Japan Brides in West Coast Places Sucking Alabama Air (1970) largely takes place in Death Valley, involves penile knives and a baby doll floating into a fiery mandala void like a parody of how the right sees doomed fetuses, and was somehow filmed before the Manson murders. Los Angeles’ status as a desert party town results in the titular saint making his way through a barren sandscape punctuated by Brakhagian sunbursts, before the knives come out at a party and a light show reveals that perhaps it was all a sinister meditation.
- If Hindle didn’t know about the Manson murders when making Saint Flournoy, Later That Same Night (1970) functions as a sort of extended coda by feeling like the hangover from a party gone wrong. His first film made after he moved away from San Francisco to Alabama finds him in a lonely mood, with a woman (Jackie Dicie) singing “sometimes I feel like a motherless child” on guitar in a way that keeps going wrong or out of sync. His preoccupations were beginning to take a turn for the darker despite the odd humor being retained.
- Pasteur3 (1976) was described as “What occurs to a bodily system following exposure to rabies and golden rod,” and it found Hindle panning along a lengthy row of pill bottles while delivering deliberately nonsensical French (the highlight being his recitation of the lyrics to “Frère Jacques” as if he were having a conversation with the viewer). Hindle was beginning to suffer from health issues, and was in a position where he needed to take care of his mother (who would go on to live to be over 100). His preoccupations and conviction that he was being poisoned by life resulted in him taking a literal trip through his prior filmography, laid out in the form of an exhibit.
- The last Will Hindle film is a little different from the others due to his 11-year absence. Despite his homosexuality, he was partnered with fellow filmmaker and teacher at SAIC Michele “Shellie” Fleming, and she is the main reason we can see his odd swan song Trekkeriff (1987) today. A film that took a very long time to make due to Hindle’s health issues and was the work of someone desperately trying to get back into the groove, Hindle passed away shortly after completing an edit that he was planning to put into distribution. After a 24-year limbo, a restored version of the film was finally made accessible via Canyon Cinema, revealing it to be something like a road movie and something like Hindle’s study of the human face. While it’s hardly Hindle at his most assured, he remained as expressively odd as ever, and there’s something perfectly fitting that his body of work came to a close with one last self-portrait after once again flitting around at the speed of thought.
Comments are closed.