Wheeler Winston Dixon

Wheeler Winston Dixon
Wheeler Winston Dixon in 2016
Born	(1950-03-12) March 12, 1950 New Brunswick, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupation	Film critic, film historian, filmmaker, scholar
Language	English
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Rutgers University (B.A., Ph.D.)
Subject	Film
Notable works	A Short History of Film, A History of Horror[1] Experimental films[2]
Partner	Gwendolyn Audrey Foster[3]
Website
wheelerwinstondixon.com

Wheeler Winston Dixon (born March 12, 1950) is an American filmmaker and scholar. He is an expert on film history,^[4] theory and criticism.^[5] His scholarship has particular emphasis on François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, American experimental cinema and horror films. He has written extensively on numerous aspects of film, including his books A Short History of Film and A History of Horror. From 1999 through the end of 2014, he was co-editor of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video.^[6] He is regarded as a top reviewer of films.^[6] In addition, he is notable as an experimental American filmmaker with films made over several decades,^[7] and the Museum of Modern Art exhibited his works in 2003.^[2] He taught at Rutgers University, The New School in New York, the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and is currently the Ryan professor of film studies and English at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.^[8]

Early years

Dixon in 1969.

Dixon was born in 1950 in New Brunswick,^[9] a city in New Jersey halfway between New York City and Philadelphia. He grew up partially in Connecticut. In the late 1960s, he was a member of New York's "underground" experimental film scene while working as a writer for Life magazine and Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. In 1970, he co-founded the musical group Figures of Light. In London, he participated in Arts Lab in Drury Lane, making and screening short films. Returning to the United States, he worked with an experimental Los Angeles-based video collective called TVTV. Dixon received a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1982.

Experimental films

A still from Wheeler Winston Dixon's film Serial Metaphysics

A still from Wheeler Winston Dixon's film An Evening with Chris Jangaard

A still from Wheeler Winston Dixon's film London Clouds

During the course of several decades, Dixon made numerous experimental films. In 1991, along with filmmaker Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, he made a documentary entitled Women Who Made the Movies.^[7] In 1995, in France, he made a film entitled Squatters. In 2003, the Museum of Modern Art^[2] acquired all of his experimental films, including the following:

• Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969)^[2][10]
• Madagascar, or, Caroline Kennedy's Sinful Life in London (1976)^[2][11]
• Serial Metaphysics (1972)^[2][12]
• What Can I Do? (1993)^[2][13]

His films have also been screened at the British Film Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Jewish Museum, The San Francisco Cinématheque, The New Arts Lab, The Collective for Living Cinema, and The Kitchen Center for Experimental Art.

Scholarship and film criticism

Dixon writes extensively. He has published in Cinéaste, Interview, Film Quarterly, Literature/Film Quarterly, Films in Review, Post Script, Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, New Orleans Review, Film International, Film and Philosophy and other journals. His book A History of Horror was reviewed by Martin A. David who criticized it as a compilation lacking a narrative structure, although David noted there were "generous and moving portraits" of horror masters such as Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr.^[14] Dixon was quoted commenting on horror films,^[8][15] women directors,^[16] Hollywood film moguls,^[17] new technologies for delivering movies such as streaming^[18] and 3-D,^[19] and public relations of movie stars and directors.^[20] He has been quoted about the film business,^[21] such as discussing firms such as Miramax.^[22] His views have been quoted about particular movies.^[23][24][25] In addition, he has talked about late night television shows.^[26] He is regarded as an authority of future trends in filmmaking; for example, in 2013, he described the current decade as a "postfilmic era" when "movie film will no longer exist and all movies will be shot digitally".^[18] He predicts that film will cease to exist, since all movies will be digitally delivered to theaters.^[18] He has been critical of filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino:

It's sheer exploitation filmmaking with no resonance, taste or value, but it delivers what the action crowd wants: violence, violence and more violence, all served up with a knowing wink in a very postmodern fashion. In short, Quentin Tarantino movies are long, empty, derivative and junk food for the mind, with no substance or nutritional value.

— Wheeler Winston Dixon, 2012, in USA Today.^[5]

As a film historian, he wrote about the moguls of the 1950s:

(The corporate rulers of film) all figured they’d be immortal ... They couldn’t envision a world where they didn’t exist. They couldn’t envision a world in which they were not the head of 20th Century Fox or the head of Columbia or the head of Paramount or the head of MGM or the head of Universal. When they died, a huge corporate scramble began.”

— Wheeler Winston Dixon, October 2012^[17]

In 2014, when computer hackers infiltrated Sony Pictures Entertainment, Dixon was quoted in the Los Angeles Times that the exposure of confidential studio emails and films served as a "wake-up call to the entire industry."^[27] In December 2015, he was quoted by Manohla Dargis in the New York Times on the demise of the DVD format, saying that "if you go on Amazon and you see some great black-and-white film, and it’s going for $3, or any kind of foreign or obscure film, buy it, because it’s going out of print, and they’re not going to put them back into print.”^[28]

In 2016, Dixon returned to experimental cinema working in HD video, with such films as An American Dream, Still Life, and Closed Circuit. In addition, he coordinates film studies at the University of Nebraska.^[5]

Personal life

Dixon is the nephew of the artist Nina Barr Wheeler.

Publications

His books (as author or editor) include:

• A Brief History of Comic Book Movies, with Richard Graham (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
• Hollywood in Crisis or: The Collapse of the Real (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
• Black & White Cinema: A Short History (Rutgers University Press, 2015)
• Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
• Cinema at The Margins (Anthem Press, London, 2013)
• Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access (University Press of Kentucky, 2013)^[18]
• Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood (Rutgers University Press, 2012)^[17]
• 21st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Rutgers University Press, 2011)
• A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press, 2010)^[8]
• Film Noir and The Cinema of Paranoia (Edinburgh University Press and Rutgers University Press, 2009)
• A Short History of Film, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Rutgers University Press, and I.B. Tauris, 2008; Second Edition 2013)
• 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).
• 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)
• The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (State University of New York Press, 1997)
• The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image (State University of New York Press Series in Postmodern Culture, 1998)
• Re-Viewing British Cinema: 1900-1992 (1994) from State University of New York Press
• It Looks at You: Notes on the Returned Gaze of Cinema from State University of New York Press
• The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut (Indiana University Press, 1993).

Filmography

Independent films

• 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 (1974)
• Madagascar, or, Caroline Kennedy's Sinful Life in London (1974)
• The Diaries (1986)
• Distance (1987)
• Women Who Made the Movies (1992)
• What Can I Do? (1994)
• Squatters (1995)
• An American Dream (2016)
• Summer Storm (2016)
• Still Life (2016)
• The Shapes of Things (2016)
• Closed Circuit (2016)
• City (2016)
• Lago di Garda (2016)
• Acceleration (2016)

Commercial films

• Amazing World of Ghosts (1978)
• UFO Exclusive (1978)
• Mysteries from the Bible (1979)^[29]
• UFO: Top Secret (1979)^[30]
• Attack from Outer Space (1979)^[31]
• World of Mystery (1979)^[32]

References

External links

• Official website
• Wheeler Winston Dixon on IMDb
• Dixon’s Frame by Frame Text Blog
• Dixon’s Frame by Frame Video Blog
• Dixon's Films on Vimeo