Wheeler Winston Dixon

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 (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster) and A History of Horror. From 1999 through the end of 2014, he was co-editor, along with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, 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 as of May 2020, is the James E. Ryan professor emeritus of film studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.^[8]

Wheeler Winston Dixon

(1950-03-12) March 12, 1950

New Brunswick, New Jersey, U.S.

American

Rutgers University (B.A., Ph.D.)

Film critic, film historian, filmmaker, scholar

A Short History of Film,
A History of Horror^[1]
Experimental films^[2]

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster^[3]

wheelerwinstondixon.com

Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969)^[12]

[2]

Madagascar, or, Caroline Kennedy's Sinful Life in London (1976)^[13]

[2]

(1972)^[2]^[14]

Serial Metaphysics

What Can I Do? (1993)^[15]

[2]

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:

His films have also been screened at the British Film Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Jewish Museum, The San Francisco Cinématheque, Arts Lab, The Collective for Living Cinema and The Kitchen Center for Experimental Art. In March and April 2018, along with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, the BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice, Poland, presented a month long retrospective of Foster and Dixon's new video work.^[16]^[17] In May 2018, he presented a screening of his videos, along with the work of Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Bill Domonkos at The Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, Texas.^[18] In the summer of 2018, he had a one-person show at Filmhuis Cavia in Amsterdam,^[19] and his "Catastrophe Series" of ten videos were screened as part of a group show at Studio 44 Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden.^[20] In the fall of 2018, he had a one-person show at La Lumière Collective in Montreal, Canada.^[21] In December 2018, he had a one-person show at Studio 44 in Stockholm,^[22] and a one-person show at the OT301 Gallery in Amsterdam.^[23] In January 2019, his complete video work was collected in the UCLA Film and Television Archive in Los Angeles. On June 23, 2019, he had an invited one person screening of his new digital video work at the Los Angeles Filmforum at the Spielberg Theater.^[24]

Personal life[edit]

Dixon is the nephew of the artist Nina Barr Wheeler.

Synthetic Cinema: The 21st Century Movie Machine (, 2019)

Palgrave Macmillan

The Films of Terence Fisher: Hammer Horror and Beyond (Auteur / , 2017)

Columbia University Press

A Brief History of Comic Book Movies, with Richard Graham (, 2017)

Palgrave Macmillan

Hollywood in Crisis or: The Collapse of the Real (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

Black & White Cinema: A Short History (, 2015)

Rutgers University Press

Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Cinema at The Margins (Anthem Press, London, 2013)

Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access (, 2013)^[29]

University Press of Kentucky

Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood (Rutgers University Press, 2012)

[28]

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; Second Revised and Expanded Edition, 2023)

[8]

Film Noir and The Cinema of Paranoia ( and Rutgers University Press, 2009)

Edinburgh University Press

A Short History of Film, co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Rutgers University Press) and , 2008; Second Edition 2013, Third Edition 2018 ^[42])

I.B. Tauris

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 (, 2005)

Southern Illinois UP

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)

It Looks at You: Notes on the Returned Gaze of Cinema (State University of New York Press, 1995)

Re-Viewing British Cinema: 1900-1992 (State University of New York Press, 1994)

The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut (Indiana University Press, 1993)

Wheeler Winston Dixon