Will Hindle
www.willhindle.net
Will Hindle was a passionate proponent of the "personal" film. The term "personal" meant that the artist was fully responsible for the making of the film: responsible for the subject matter, for the direction and for the choice of images, for the camerawork and for the editing.
Will was not a comfortable man, but he had the courage to express his pleasures and terrors in powerful time based imagery of his own invention. He could be an exacting teacher and an demanding colleague, but his passion was inspiring. Haunted and exalted by turns, his work is truly marked by genius.
Will Hindle and the personal film
Will Hindle worked at a time when the Hollywood film machine, and the two hour feature, had for years dominated most people's concept of what movies could be. But there was an undercurrent. The film industry had, as an offshoot, developed equipment and film stock for the amateur market which was relatively cheap, yet capable of quality and resolution still unmatched by today's digital video.
Artists began to use it to make short films as an art form. They were called underground or experimental films, and shown outside conventional theatres in special venues such as coffee houses or museums. These could be technically crude, but Will Hindle became the master of this new medium.
Will Hindle burst on this growing film community when his "Chinese Firedrill" bagged the top prize at the Ann Arbor Film festival in the late 1960's. Its style and its beauty and its personal subject were a huge influence on several generations of filmmakers. It was polished and luminous work, psychological and clearly autobiographical. Its powerful imagery was derived from his own life and observation: his face painted with cabalistic patterns, cascades of computer cards abandoned on a roadside, shards of glass edged with blood, suggestion of sex in profile, all woven together with surprising connections and double exposures. It was mysterious but intense and personal.
Will Hindle was a passionate proponent of the "personal" film. The term "personal" meant that the artist was fully responsible for the making of the film: responsible for the subject matter, for the direction and for the choice of images, for the camerawork and for the editing. Will scorned corporate filmmaking, in which decisions were made by agreement amongst a group of people, heavily influenced by financial and political considerations and driven by plot and suspense. His films would be about his life and perceptions, he wanted to express what he knew best and cared about most. "Pasteur 3" (cubed) was about his move to Florida, where he began teaching in the new film area of the Art Department at the University of South Florida (his colleagues were Stan Vanderbeek and myself). He hated the climate, which gave him allergies, and the fluid camera movements of this film are unexpectedly shaken by sneezes.
Despite the extraordinary quality of his films, Will was not a technician - in the sense that his approach to making a film was his own invention. He ignored conventional professional approaches to filmmaking and invented his own machinery and techniques. He worked directly with the film as it came from the camera, the irreplaceable" original" which was liable to dust and scratches or even total destruction as it was handled. Contemporaries working with film in the conventional way edited with a workprint of this original, and only used the original itself in the very last stages of the process of making a final print. Wills technique required meticulously clean lab conditions, and an almost fanatic focus on the process. Like a sculptor, he manipulated the material with his own hands. He often described producing "Watersmith" by locking himself into his San Francisco loft, declining all visitors, and only opening the door to accept take out food from the Chinese restaurant. In his determined isolation, and in his reworking of images shot and times past, he reminds us of Marcel Proust in his velvet study, producing "A la Recherche des Temps Perdu" and "Swann's Way". Among other amazing images he produced those underwater swimmers who rush toward the camera in a shifting cocoon of darkness. He did this by projecting a single frame at a time across the studio to a rear screen and a camera which rephotographed them. As he operated switches with his feet he put his hands in the projector beam to enclose and surround each swimmer with a shifting shadow. Click, new frame, new hand position, twenty four times for each second. The finished film is a hallucinogenic evocation of competitive swimming, autobiographical in its evocation of male beauty, a breathless, mesmerizing visual mantra which plunges the viewer in and out of reality for an hour.
Today the film techniques he developed with weeks of patient labor can be imitated quickly by a skilled digital editor. Will rejected the video of his day as cheap and shallow. His imagination vaulted him to images which artists today reach with rapid experimentation, if at all. Synchronous sound, intricate color manipulation, frame accurate sound mixing, transparency and mirror images, the ease and economy of DVD reproduction, all constitute a new landscape of the moving image. But his ideas, and the concept of a "personal" film, are as fresh and inspiring as ever. How I wish I could show him my own "Tamie Stew Gets Married" (2006).
Will was not a comfortable man, but he had the courage to express his pleasures and terrors in powerful time based imagery of his own invention. He could be an exacting teacher and an demanding colleague, but his passion was inspiring. Haunted and exalted by turns, his work is truly marked by genius.
Prof. Charles Lyman
Art Department
University of South Florida
April 2007