An Act of Reciprocity: Will Hindle and Shellie Fleming
The comprehension that one’s life is their art was the gift Will gave to me. That understanding is mine. And I am grateful. — Shellie Fleming
The story of Will Hindle and Shellie Fleming develops over many years and begins when Fleming, at a young age, sees Hindle’s Chinese Firedrill (1968), a central work in his oeuvre. The film won first prize at the renowned Ann Arbor Film Festival, bringing Hindle out of the obscurity of a small circle of filmmaker friends and establishing him as a founding figure of the Personal Film movement in the United States. Fleming disliked the film, but at the same time couldn’t get the images out of her head: “I dreamed these images… I thought about them out of nowhere. Why had I been split open by the ‘honesty’ of the darkness rendered on the screen?” Fleming, who was twenty-five years younger than Hindle, eventually went on to study under him at the University of South Florida. Years later, they became life partners.
Hindle and Fleming became close at a time when both were struggling with their artistic practice. Hindle, for his part, had not finished a film in many years. His move from San Francisco to Blountsville, Alabama in 1970, left him in a state of “geographic and spiritual exile,” prompting Linda Dubler to describe him as “a filmmaker who finds in his current condition an odd fulfillment of his romantic vision.”
When moving from the West Coast to Alabama, Hindle took with him seven finished films, a studio full of self-invented equipment and an idealistic vision of the South. After his move, he only finished three films in the remaining eighteen years of his life, two of which after he accepted an invitation to teach at the University of South Florida in 1972. He wrote: “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.” However, his ills at working creatively during these years were not solely because of his difficulties at adapting to the living conditions and his isolation as an experimental filmmaker – also the political climate rendered him at a standstill: “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. (...) 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, compact.”
Will Hindle dreamt of a new sort of film, a collaborative project with people who use the power of film to reflect on the social climate. Despite the process being very long and difficult, he took first steps toward reaching this goal with Trekkerriff, his last film. In the early eighties, Hindle and Fleming would work on the film continuously, going out to shoot on a semi-regular basis. Eventually, it was Fleming who encouraged him to take a sabbatical year from teaching at USF to finally finish Trekkerriff. Hindle completed the edit of the film in 1985, but would subsequently throw away the original soundtrack and spent the next two years creating a new one from scratch. In early 1987, he finished the film and decided, still not wholly satisfied with the result, to release it.
Trekkerriff is, in the words of Fleming: “an illustration of the things that had been abandoned along the side of the road… a contemplation of those who looked down that road, wondering ‘now what?’ (...) He was trying to capture change… flow… points after which ‘we’ would never be the same. (...) The debris on the side of the road is inevitable… it was evidence of a life lived. A carefully lived life devours experience… and makes it a part of itself. There is no loss.”
The description of the debris in Trekkerriff as “evidence of a life lived” rings particularly bittersweet, knowing that Hindle passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack at age 57, shortly after the film's completion. In hindsight, it feels especially poignant that Fleming and Hindle could collaborate on a film about moments that irrevocably alter a person's life. For Fleming, seeing Chinese Firedrill was exactly one of those key moments that brought her to this point. Conversely, Hindle had been struggling with his inability to make films, and it was Fleming's support that gave him the energy and focus to complete the project. For years, Trekkerriff was only seen by students of Fleming. In 2011, Academy Film Archive restored the film using the only surviving print and Hindle's original magnetic sound masters after which it reached new audiences. Still, screenings of the film and Hindle's broader oeuvre have remained rare, especially in Europe.
While helping Hindle make his eleventh film almost twenty-five years into his career, Shellie Fleming was only standing at the start of her life as a filmmaker. While Hindle was discouraged, Fleming was still very young and “outrageously distracted.” They would first collaborate on Fleming’s second student short film, The Selves. Hindle worked as the cinematographer under her direction. Although they bickered during the entire shoot, the film got made. Reflecting on it at the end of her life, Fleming remarks:
I have not seen the film in three decades even as it now sits in a pile of films to be packed up. What strikes me, however, is not only great wonder that thing actually got made in the first place … but as I recall the images from the film … I realize it has had a profound and lasting impact on me as a “direct quote” for my entire lifetime as an artist.
Shellie Fleming finished her graduate studies at USF with four short films to her name. Looking back on this period, she describes how she came to understand the power of true reciprocity:
My ability [to finish these four short films] was simple. Someone believed in me… not who they thought I should be… or who they wanted me to be… but simply who I was at that time. Who I was at the time was not pretty. Insecure… confused… coming out of a failed marriage… needing my independence and space to define… needing what I realize I would always need most in my life… ALWAYS… peace. And someone who provided that safe space for me with such grace that neither of us realized the profundity or depth of it at the time. It is a space I would protect fiercely throughout my life… that I guarded and reinforced because I knew, at times, my life depended on it.
In the years following Hindle's death, Fleming took on the role of a “reluctant but faithful archivist,” trying to safeguard the films left in his studio. In 1989, she made Left Handed Memories, an incredible ode to Hindle. Shot on outdated film stock, it combines footage Fleming captured upon returning from his funeral with outtakes from Hindle's own work, appearing at the bottom of the screen. Throughout the soundtrack, news stories from the day of his death are mixed with tracks from his record collection and a voice over which Fleming now finds “both embarrassing and revealing as a personal marker of that time.”
Following her death in December 2012, only four of Shellie Fleming's films remain in distribution at her own request. Life/Expectancy (1999) is listed as her final film. She would go on to make installations, books, photography and street art, all under the guiding principle she learned from Will Hindle: the comprehension that one’s life is their art. Ephemerality remained another core principle of her art: the effort to create experiences and person-to-person exchanges that are shared but eventually vanish. This led her to become a street artist later in life, using the city as an urban gallery. Though those pieces would naturally decay, be removed or be modified, they facilitated a wide range of unique encounters. As a teacher in Chicago, she inspired a whole generation of filmmakers thanks to her technical skills and unparalleled mentorship, helping students discover their “natural” path and build confidence. She taught them, as her former student Apichatpong Weerasethakul recalls, to view film as an exchange of empathy.
Anthony Brynaert
The quotes in this text and in the program notes are drawn from Shellie Fleming’s book Never Concluded… Half Erased, which she wrote during the final stages of her life as she lived with cancer. Rather than a nostalgic look back, this publication “is concerned with understanding a few of my life's passages and the lessons they have rendered.” It’s a book of traces, influences, journeys, ideas and flights: “They connect dot to dot… line to line… day to day… life to life. They are small ideas… but then… small things can change the world as readily as big ones.”