Wheeler Winston Dixon
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Wheeler Winston Dixon (born March 12, 1950) is best known as a writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of numerous books on film, as well as a professor who has taught at Rutgers University, New Brunswick; The New School in New York; and the University of Amsterdam, Holland. He received his Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University in 1982. He is also an American experimental filmmaker and is currently the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
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[edit] Film Criticism
He is, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Editor-in-Chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. He is also a prolific author of books of film criticism. His newest books as author or editor include:
- Hollywood Directors (forthcoming, Wallflower Press)
- Film Noir and The Cinema of Paranoia (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press)
- A Short History of Film, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Rutgers University Press, 2008)
- Film Talk: Directors at Work (Rutgers University Press, 2007)
- Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2006)
- American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations (Rutgers University Press, 2006)
- Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood (Southern Illinois UP, 2005)
- Film and Television After 9/11 (editor; Southern Illinois UP, 2004)
- Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema (Wallflower, 2003)
- Straight: Constructions of Heterosexuality in the Cinema (State University of New York Press, 2003)
- Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader, co-edited with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Routledge, 2002).
Dixon’s other books include Disaster and Memory: Celebrity Culture and the Crisis of Hollywood Cinema (Columbia University Press, 1999); The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of the American Experimental Cinema (State University of New York Press, 1997), on 1960s American experimental filmmakers; The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (State University of New York Press, 1997), on the life and works of the noted French filmmaker; and The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image (State University of New York Press Series in Postmodern Culture, 1998), on the impact of changing technologies (especially computer generated imagery and digital technology) in cinema and television.
Dixon has also written the books Re-Viewing British Cinema: 1900-1992 (1994) from State University of New York Press, a critical anthology on the history of the British film; It Looks at You: Notes on the Returned Gaze of Cinema, also from SUNY UP, on recent developments in interactive cinema; and The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut (Indiana University Press, 1993).
As editor of the State University of New York Press Cultural Studies in Cinema / Video Series, Dixon created a new group of books on cinema/video theory and practice. Published volumes thus far include PostNegritude Visual and Literary Culture by Mark A. Reid (1997); The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Commercial Cinema, 1930-1943 by Marcia Landy (1998); Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas: From Post-Revolutionary Mexico to fin de siglo Mexamérica by Susan Dever (2003); and Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen, Murray Pomerance, ed. (2004). The series is still ongoing, and will conclude in 2009.
Dixon is the author of more than seventy articles on film theory, history and criticism, along with numerous book and video reviews, which have appeared in Cinéaste, Interview, Film Quarterly, Literature/Film Quarterly, Films in Review, Post Script, Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, New Orleans Review, Classic Images, Film and Philosophy and numerous other journals.
Dixon is on the editorial board of the journal Film Criticism, and was a member of the editorial board of Cinema Journal until 2003. He also presented a paper, “The End of Cinema,” at the Columbia University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation on February 12, 2004.
He now devotes the majority of his time to teaching and lecturing, as well as writing and editing books. His latest project, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, is a new book entitled A Short History of Film, published in 2008 by Rutgers University Press.
Also in 2008, Dixon appeared in the documentary "Jean-Luc Godard: A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma," as part of a three-disc, four-film box set of Godard's films Passion, Prénom Carmen, Détective and Hélas pour moi, released by Lionsgate Films, offering commentary on Godard's later works.
A complete list of Dixon’s publications can be found in the MLA International Bibliography, available on CD-ROM, or as an Internet database. He is also the co-founder, with Michael Downey, of the proto-punk band Figures of Light, formed in 1970; the recordings of this band are available on Norton Records.
[edit] Filmmaking
In the late 1960s, Dixon was part of the Experimental film scene in New York, also called the "Underground Film" movement, while also working as a writer for Life Magazine and Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. He also worked with the pioneering video group TVTV in 1976, during the group's Los Angeles period, editing many of the episodes of their series Supervision for PBS, and later the group's final effort, The TVTV Show, made in conjunction with NBC. On his own, he made short and medium length experimental films from 1969 to 1976, and made his last film to date, a feature, Squatters, in France in 1995.
Dixon’s films and videotapes have been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, The British Film Institute, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum, The San Francisco Cinématheque, The Collective for Living Cinema, and The Kitchen Center for Experimental Art.
In the Fall of 1997, Dixon delivered four lectures at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, to celebrate the publication of his book The Exploding Eye: A Revisionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema, in conjunction with a series of screenings of classic experimental films he curated for the occasion.
On April 11-12, 2003, Dixon was honored with a retrospective of his films at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. At that time, his films were acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum, in both print and original format.
[edit] Filmography (Existing Films Only)
- Wedding (1969)
- Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969)
- The DC Five Memorial Film (1969)
- London Clouds (1970)
- Serial Metaphysics (1972)
- Waste Motion (1974)
- Tightrope (1974)
- Stargrove (1974)
- Gaze (1974)
- An Evening with Chris Jangaard (1974)
- Dana Can Deal (1974)
- Damage (1974)
- Un Petit Examen, and Not So Damned Petit Either, or, the Light Shining Over the Dark (1976)
- Madagascar, or, Caroline Kennedy's Sinful Life in London (1976)
- The Diaries (1986)
- Distance (1987)
- Women Who Made the Movies (1992)
- What Can I Do? (1994)
- Squatters (1995)
