The story of Will Hindle and Shellie Fleming as life partners and creative collaborators unfolds in several stages 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, an accolade that lifted Hindle out of the obscurity of a small circle of filmmaker friends and established him as a prominent figure in the “personal film” movement in the United States. Fleming hated the film, but 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 went on to study under Hindle at the University of South Florida. They later became life partners, but their time together was cut short. In 1987, Hindle died unexpectedly at the age of 57.
Shellie Fleming was a filmmaker and artist whose work spanned a wide range of forms: films, installations, street art, books and photography. Much of her work had an ephemeral and time-bound character, leaving only remnants today. For Fleming, her life was her art, and the physical objects she created were not always intended to be preserved or, by extension, shared with a wider audience.
“The fact is I have worked every day as an artist for many, many years. Most of the ‘material’ work I created has never been seen. That wasn’t the point in my making it. My insistence on living creatively was because it gave me access to a creative flow or ‘zone’. It gave me peace.”
Fleming made more than four films in her lifetime, but chose to allow only the four in the current program to be distributed after her death in December 2012. For Fleming, her life’s work was her teaching. She was one of the most beloved and inspiring teachers of an entire generation of filmmakers, including David Gatten, Amie Siegel, Jodie Mack, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lee Jang-wook and Lawrence Brose, all of whom studied under Fleming and cite her as an important mentor and formative influence.
In collaboration with Art Cinema OFFoff
This is Shellie Fleming’s tribute to Will Hindle, created roughly two years after his sudden death from a heart attack. Shot on a minimal budget using outdated film stock, Left Handed Memories combines outtakes from Hindle’s work with new footage by Fleming, including scenes in Baltimore following her return from his funeral. Passages from his films appear as memories at the bottom of the frame. The audio mixes radio clips from the day of Hindle’s death with music from his record collection.
“This film would be the first artwork where I would insist that I always remember how small I was in the global reality.” (Shellie Fleming)
In Private Property (Public Domain), Shellie Fleming explores the effects of postmodernism on her personal life. Just as we see in other films in this program, Fleming weaves a (new) narrative through disparate and fragmented texts without (intending to present) a clear narrative thread. Two voices speak simultaneously: one recites the Latin names of seashells, the other one words and phrases by Italo Calvino, Anaïs Nin, Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin, among others.
“My question was how to put meaning back… How to self-define in a time that had turned things to rubble and then created either unnecessary caution or superficial ‘copying’.” (Shellie Fleming)
In Devotio Moderna, Sylvia Plath’s Tulips both undermines and structures the work. Fleming deconstructs the poem and creates new combinations with the words – primarily “flesh,” “stone” and “light” are crucial terms – that transform the poem and place it at the service of Fleming’s audiovisual vision. The poetry can be heard, seen and felt in Devotio Moderna, which becomes a highly physical, tangible experience that is amplified layer by layer. The title of the film refers to a religious practice in which collective prayer is exchanged for a gentle, inner prayer.
“Despite the fact that the poem is about illness and is expressed in dark language… fundamentally… Devotio Moderna is about light. Luminosity.” (Shellie Fleming)
In Life/Expectancy, the explicit reference to and recombination of various sources extends into the visual realm. The postmodern mode of Private Property is continued and expanded here: Fleming uses images and stills from well-known films (Intolerance, The Lady from Shanghai, Persona, Hiroshima Mon Amour) and the voices of famous Hollywood actresses as a “repository of stories in fragmented form.” The soft, tactile color palette found in Left Handed Memories, Private Property and Devotio Moderna gives way to an expressive black-and-white photography. Life/Expectancy is structured into chapters, each of which attempts to represent a different kind of storytelling.
“Life/Expectancy would be my last personal film… even as I continued to advocate for and teach the form.” (Shellie Fleming)
