Wheeler Winston Dixon - Filmmaking

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 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.

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