Soundtrack by Honegger (composed also for Europe's Pacific 231).
"Hindle's works prove that film is not just a picture of a story one can read, but, rather, an experience which cannot be verbalized." - Michigan Daily
"Will Hindle's work is a technical and emotional tour-de-force." - Christian Science Monitor
"Hindle's color and post process work are brilliant." - San Francisco Chronicle
PASTORAL D'ETE is one of the nation's first works of the Personal Film movement. Hindle dovetails the lyrical images of a singular high summer's day heat. A poignant first work. Initially used camera settings and lens operations. Evidences the mastery of editing to come.
Award and Premiere: SF Int'l Film Festival
1958, 16mm, color/so, 9m, $30
Another granddaddy of the American Personal Film movement. Set to the music of Hindemith, filmed entirely in a Gothic cathedral and edited to precision counter-point. An almost somber beginning that rises to brilliant exaltation. As with PASTORALE, extremely innovative for its day and even now. Entire film was an "optical print" to retain light nuances. Has never been placed in competition.
1957-1963, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $30
A rude and abrupt departure from Hindle's two early visual poems. Between those early works and MERCI, Hindle was sought to film the Winter Olympics, 150 short works for Westinghouse/CBS, and the South Sea voyages of Sterling Hayden's schooner, "Wanderer." The inability to get on with his own work produced MERCI. A poignant comment concerning the film artist's dilemma. Aftermaths of Western Civilization. Including never-seen-elsewhere Nazi footage inserts.
Premiere: Intersection, SF
Awards: Kenyon and Kent State Festivals; Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour.
1966, 16mm, b&w/so, 30m, $90
Renewed income and the ability to work on one's own produced this feeling and work. A Promethean awakening, de-bonding of the human spirit ... reaching for the unfiltered blaze of Light and Life. The driving sounds of heart beat, fanfare for the Common Man and devotional chants. A time of sharing ... a touch of vision in the night.
Exhibition: Premiere, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Tour
1967, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
"The year's best short film, Hindle's CHINESE FIREDRILL is dazzling and sympathetic. By itself, the film demonstrates the importance of independent filmmaking and makes this a movie year to remember." - National Review
"Will Hindle's work is an experience, whatever else you want to call it, revealing a nearly perfect camera eye." - New Haven Register
"CHINESE FIREDRILL is an intellectually demanding film, but is essentially an overwhelming, disturbing unique emotional experience. I can't tell you how beautiful it is." - R. Corliss, Film Quarterly
Hindle's prize-laden work of cataclysmic visual and mental schisms stands as one-of-a-kind. Human universals crammed into a moment (infinity?) in one small enclosure (the universe?). The identifying viewer will judge.
Awards: First Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival; First Prize, Barn Gallery, Maine; First Prize, SF Int'l Film Festival; First Prize, Foothill College Film Festival.
Exhibition: Premiere, Chicago Museum of Modern Art; Yale Film Festival; Ann Arbor Tour.
1968, 16mm, color/so, 25m, $75
Winner of the main prize of the Oberhausen (Germany) International Film Festival, BILLABONG has gone on to even greater acclaim than its much-awarded predecessor. Now in collections and archives on three continents, BILLABONG ... mates verit� camera and violently creative and master editing ... revealing the mood of youths contained by the government. On location in Oregon. Empathetic in the extreme.
"Hindle's works are especially notable for their ability to generate overwhelming emotional impact almost exclusively from cinematic technique, not thematic content. Hindle has an uncanny talent for transforming spontaneous unstylized reality into unearthly poetic visions; as in BILLABONG, a wordless impresionistic 'documentary' about a boys' camp, and WATERSMITH, a spectacular visual fantasy created from footage of an Olympic swimming team at practice. FIREDRILL contains possibly one of the great scenes in the history of film." - Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema
Premiere: Robert Flaherty Film Seminar
1969, 16mm, color/so, 9m, $30
Perhaps Hindle's magnum opus to date. New York Times critic Vincent Canby calls WATERSMITH "beautiful abstract patterns of lines of energy. A kind of ode to physical grace." A deceptively "calm" film requiring an equally calm audience and a superior soundtrack reproduction system, WATERSMITH weaves its lone visual threads closer and closer until the screen is awash with multiple levels of artistic achievement, technical supremacy, physical and mental demands and rewards ... for the relaxed and receptive viewer. Not a flash and funk work. A film to be seen again and again.
"WATERSMITH is a mind movie. Hindle turns his film into a celebration of the freedom of bodies moving through water, the implacable grace of human forms freed from gravity. It ripples between reality and abstraction. There hasn't been a movie quite like this since Leni Riefenstahl's OLYMPIA." - Entertainment World
Awards: First Prize, American Film Festival, NY; Canadian National Film Festival, Montreal.
Invitational tributes: Cannes Film Festival; Int'l Moscow Film Festival.
Exhibition: Premiere, Chicago Museum of Modern Art
1969, 16mm, color/so, 32m, $90
Presaging details and intent of the Charles Manson's cult and actions was not meant to be one of this film's greater attributes. It was, however, filmed uncannily months before the facts were known. The resemblance is oblique. The film: the mysticism of a "calling," a journey to be made, a vision in mid-desert to behold and oneness with it all. Filmed in Death Valley.
1970, 16mm, color/so, 12m, $35
Hindle's first all-southern-made work, filmed shortly after moving his studio from San Francisco to the lower Appalachians. Jackie Dicie sings the song in disruptive out-of-synchronization. It is Hindle's first-water attempt to express the southern country mode of existence ... the alone woman and the lonesome land.
1971, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
What occurs to a bodily system following exposure to rabies and golden rod.
"The film seemed to me the ultimate portrait of an immigrant, or the Displaced Person - displaced in nature, displaced on the continent. With this pun or metaphor that he makes, and despite all the artifice, it seems quite natural, it comes across as both funny and sad. ... How odd it is to walk through this world and find there are things that poison you." - Stan Brakhage
16mm, color/so, 22m, $60