Wheeler Winston Dixon

Wheeler Winston Dixon

Wheeler Winston Dixon 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 the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies and Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and Coordinator of the Film Studies Program at UNL. He was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Film Criticism

He is, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Editor-in-Chief of the journal 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:

• Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood (forthcoming, Rutgers University Press)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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).

Cover of A Short History of Film

A Short History of Film has gone through six printings since its initial 2008 publication, the latest in December 2011. An audio book of the text was published in 2011 by University Press Audiobooks, and a Spanish language translation, Breve historia del cine, was published in November 2009 by Ediciones Robinbook, Barcelona, Spain. A revised second edition will be published in 2013.

Dixon's book A History of Horror has gone through two printings since its initial publication, and was chosen by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries as one of the Outstanding Academic Books of the Year for 2011. A History of Horror will be released as an audiobook by Redwood Audiobooks in 2012.

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.

Cover of A History of Horror

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. The more than twenty-five volumes in the series 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); Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen, Murray Pomerance, ed. (2004), and Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace by Anna Everett (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.

Cover of Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia

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 has appeared on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, discussing film production in the aftermath of 9/11, and his lecture, “The End of Cinema,” was presented at the Columbia University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation on February 12, 2004. He also delivered the keynote speech, "The Limits of Time," at the 2009 Film and History national convention in Chicago. 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.

In December 2010, he was appointed Series Editor with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster of the new book series New Perspectives on World Cinema, for the Anthem Press, London. Also in 2010, Dixon began appearing in an ongoing series of short videos entitled Frame by Frame, and in 2011 created a print blog, also entitled Frame by Frame, both discussing the history, theory, and criticism of film, digital culture, and related issues.

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.

Filmmaking

Wheeler Winston Dixon in 1969

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 later went to London, and briefly became part of the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, organizing a screening of his own work, and making short films.

Back in the United States, he 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. He also edited a demo reel for Bill Murray, which was directed by Harold Ramis, entitled "The World's Largest Car Wash."

On his own, in the United States and Europe, he made numerous short and medium length experimental films from 1969 to 1976, and made his last film to date, a feature, Squatters, in France in 1995. In 1974, he briefly worked as an editor for cultural anthropologist Alan Lomax on his series of films on Choreometrics. In 1979, he wrote and directed a series of speculative science fiction films for hire.

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 New Arts Lab, The Collective for Living Cinema, and The Kitchen Center for Experimental Art.

A still from Wheeler Winston Dixon's film Serial Metaphysics

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.

A still from Wheeler Winston Dixon's film London Clouds

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 independent films were acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum, in both print and original format.

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

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)

Filmography (Commercial Films)

• Amazing World of Ghosts (1978)
• UFO Exclusive (1978)
• Mysteries from the Bible (1979)
• UFO: Top Secret (1979)
• Attack from Outer Space (1979)
• World of Mystery (1979)

External links

• Wheeler Winston Dixon's Home Page
• Wheeler Winston Dixon at the Internet Movie Database
• Official Site for Dixon's Films
• Official Quarterly Review of Film and Video Homepage
• Interview with Wheeler Winston Dixon in Senses of Cinema 27
• "Vanishing Point," essay in Senses of Cinema 43
• "The Power of Resistance: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne," essay in Senses of Cinema 46
• "Beyond Characterization: Performance in 1960s Experimental Cinema," essay in Screening the Past 29
• "Some Notes on Streaming," essay in Flow 14.1 (June 2011)