"Every Frame Was Precious": An Interview with Wheeler Winston Dixon (Interview‪)‬

"A grittier residue of '60s pop surrealism erupts in the works of Wheeler Winston Dixon. Though he's best known today as a scholar (his 1997 book The Exploding Eye provides a who's who of 1960s experimentalists), Dixon's short films [...] are themselves visual catalogs of underground techniques: snarky Bruce Conner-ish montage, psychoactive Conrad/Sharits flicker effects, and Mekasian home-movie diaries. The distinctive Dixon kick comes from witty edits to far-out music. His loopy Americana remix Serial Metaphysics (1972) grooves to an increasingly trippy reverb and teen portrait The DC5 Memorial Film (1969) prowls through Charles Ives, while the magnificent acid-structuralist London Clouds (1970) rocks to a Henri Pousseur electronic psych-out. The rich filmic collapse of personal memory into cultural history is summed up at the end of Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969), a Fluxus performance set to a Gerard Malanga poetry reading. "It will take you a long time' intones Malanga, 'to understand why I wrote poems for you.'"--Ed Halter, The Village Voice, April 9-15, 2003. Wheeler Winston Dixon, the prolific author of books on Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, American experimental cinema, and film theory, history, and criticism, has also been making experimental films and videos of his own for the past three decades. Dixon's career spans the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, including such early works as The DC Five Memorial Film (1969), which interweaves home movies of Dixon's 1950s Connecticut childhood with footage shot in 1969 in New York City and at a farm upstate; Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969), featuring a Fluxus group performance piece and a poetry reading by Gerard Malanga; and Madagascar, or, Caroline Kennedy's Sinful Life in London (1976), in which a fictional Caroline recovers from a hangover. Later works include the cleverly edited Serial Metaphysics (1972), an examination of the American commercial lifestyle recut entirely from existing television advertisements; and the feature-length What Can I Do? (1993), a rigorous and tender portrait of an elderly woman who holds dinner party guests in thrall to her difficult family life. In April 2003, Dixon's films were honored by a retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art. Here, Dixon discusses his work with the Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, in an interview conducted February 10, 2003.