DC's

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‘Our culture is experiencing a profound radiation of new species of media. The centralized, dinosaurian one-to-many media that roared and trampled through the 20th century are poorly adapted to the postmodern technological environment. The new media environment is aswarm with lumbering toothy digital mammals. It’s all lynxes here, and gophers there, plus big fat venomous webcrawlers, appearing in Pleistocene profusion.

‘Nothing gives me greater pleasure as a professional garage futurist than to ponder some weird new mutant medium and wonder how this squawking little monster is going to wriggle its way into the interstices between human beings. Still, there’s a difference between this pleasurable contemplation of the technological sublime and an actual coherent understanding of the life and death of media. We have no idea in hell what we are doing to ourselves with these new media technologies, and no consistent way even to discuss the subject. Something constructive ought to be done about this situation.

‘Plenty of wild wired promises are already being made for all the infant media. What we need is a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free, even lugubrious book that honors the dead and resuscitates the spiritual ancestors of today’s mediated frenzy. A book to give its readership a deeper, paleontological perspective right in the dizzy midst of the digital revolution. We need a book about the failures of media, the collapses of media, the supercessions of media, the strangulations of media, a book detailing all the freakish and hideous media mistakes that we should know enough now not to repeat, a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn’t make it, martyred media, dead media.

‘It’s a rather rare phenomenon for an established medium to die. If media make it past their Golden Vaporware stage, they usually expand wildly in their early days and then shrink back to some protective niche as they are challenged by later and more highly evolved competitors. Radio didn’t kill newspapers, TV didn’t kill radio or movies, video and cable didn’t kill broadcast network TV; they just all jostled around seeking a more perfect app.

‘But some media do, in fact, perish. Such as: the teleharmonium. The Edison wax cylinder. The stereopticon. The Panorama. Early 20th century electric searchlight spectacles. Morton Heilig’s early virtual reality. Telefon Hirmondo. The various species of magic lantern. The pneumatic transfer tubes that once riddled the underground of Chicago. Was the Antikythera Device a medium? Or take the zoetrope.’ — Bruce Sterling

 

 

‘The earliest zoetrope was created in China around 180 AD by the inventor Ting Huan. Ting Huan’s device, driven by convection, hung over a lamp and was called chao hua chich kuan (the pipe which makes fantasies appear). The rising air turned vanes at the top, from which translucent paper or mica panels hung. When the device was spun at the right speed, pictures painted on the panels would appear to move.

‘The modern zoetrope was invented in 1833 by British mathematician William George Horner. He called it the “daedalum”, most likely as a reference to the Greek myth of Daedalus, though it was popularly referred to as “the wheel of the devil”. The daedalum failed to become popular until the 1860s, when it was patented by both English and American makers, including Milton Bradley. The American developer William F. Lincoln named his toy the “zoetrope”, meaning “wheel of life.” Almost simultaneously, similar inventions were made independently in Belgium by Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (the phenakistoscope) and in Austria by Simon von Stampfer (the stroboscope).

‘The zoetrope worked on the same principles as the phenakistiscope, but the pictures were drawn on a strip which could be set around the bottom third of a metal drum, with the slits now cut in the upper section of the drum.The drum was mounted on a spindle and spun; viewers looking through the slits would see the cartoon strip form a moving image. The faster the drum was spun, the smoother the animation appeared.’ — André Gaudreault

 

 

Mat Collishaw

‘Mat Collishaw’s interest in the Victorians is no coincidence: 19th century Britain viewed itself in the light of scientific progress and empirical soberness. An age inhabited by educated and prosaic people. In retrospect however, child prostitution, poverty, perversion and a collective blood-lust ran parallel to what was deemed an enlightened age. Collishaw references the Victorian period by simulating its elaborately decorative, romantic style, but he indirectly conjures up that society’s dark side, the corrupt underbelly so pertinent to the present day. He drags our darkest urges into the light – illustrating that humans will never overcome their baser instincts, regardless of aesthetic or scientific advancement.’ — Blain/Southern

 

Retchy

‘Retchy (aka Graeme Hawkins) is an animator, vj and sound designer based in Dundee, Scotland. He has worked on feature films (Sylvain Chomet’s Oscar nominated ‘The Illusionist’) and nationally broadcast TV adverts, and is now going freelance with his idiosyncratic, experimental approach to animation. He likes playing about with animation techniques, and is especially interested in the combination of old and new technologies and ideas, like hand drawn projection mapping and 3D Zoetropes.’ — retch.com

 

Aston Coles

‘Aston Coles is part of the independent art production body known as Planet Goatsucker, creators of art, film, and noise events. He plays an instrument called The Swamp Badger in the noise band Deaf Squab. “I am making machines which delineate movement in space. Specifically by animating my sculpture-making process. The machines are working models of the themselves. I find that mirrors are tools which propagate images of other things. Shadows are useful in the same way for looking at sculpture. These things are vision multipliers. My aim is to expand the parameters of the known world by the addition of new features.”‘ — Aston Coles

 

Jim Le Fevre

Watch here

‘For a few years I have been playing around with a nice little technique using a record player and a camera to create a different kind of Zoetrope. It is one of those things that is more pleasurable watching in real-life however Malcolm Goldie has edited some of the footage from our night at the last ever Heavy Pencil at the ICA in May. Although the evening went well, it really was a testing ground for some of Malcolm and I’s thoughts and it threw up promise and mistakes in equal measure. Malcolm has re-cut a track for this edit and in typical inspired fashion used only (mostly) a box of old 45s he got handed from a retiring wedding DJ for the samples.’ — Jim Le Fevre

 

John Edmark

‘Blooms are 3-D printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light. Unlike a 3D zoetrope, which animates a sequence of small changes to objects, a bloom animates as a single self-contained sculpture. The bloom’s animation effect is achieved by progressive rotations of the golden ratio, phi (ϕ), the same ratio that nature employs to generate the spiral patterns we see in pinecones and sunflowers. The rotational speed and strobe rate of the bloom are synchronized so that one flash occurs every time the bloom turns 137.5º (the angular version of phi).* Each bloom’s particular form and behavior is determined by a unique parametric seed I call a phi-nome (/fī nōm/).’ — John Edmark

 

Gregory Barsamian

‘A dream world often remains left to the realm of the unconscious, a separate world of its own. But Gregory Barsamian’s animated zoetrope sculptures bring this dream world into our waking perceptions. Rationality is left behind and we descend into a world of uncertainty. We enter the shadows, perceiving the fine line between real and imaginary. This dream world of Barsamian finds its inspiration from theories of the unconscious and its outlet in kinetic sculpture.’ — Kinetic Art Fair

 

Ernest Zacharevic

Ernest Zacharevic: For me animation as well as kinetic art is a media, which is capable of evoking the dialogue and interaction with its viewer and environment. The art of motion allows me to explore the shifting correlation of time and space. I try to redefine the boundaries between still and motion in my work. I intend to take animation out of its traditional dimensions and bring into confrontation with our everyday experience. The agency of my work comes from the combination of post-socialist upbringing in Lithuania and orthodox use of media mixed with ironic interpretations of the ongoing conflict between an individual and society. I never intend to represent the reality in my work; instead I attempt to absorb the surrounding I am living in and to express my personal relationship in the images I create.

 

Elliot Schultz

‘Inspired by the work of Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, I aimed to guide my production process indirectly through the limitations afforded by alternative media. Their invention, the pin screen, was used as the sole medium in the production of six short films, and shaped the outcome of their work. In response, I have designed and embroidered animated sequences onto discs, similar to the Phenakistokope, Zoopraxiscope and Stamfer Disc layouts. This repurposing of media introduced strict parameters, namely spatial, tonal and temporal, and has greatly informed all stages of my process.’ — Elliot Schultz

 

Dan Hayhurst

‘Dan Hayhurst plays digital media devices, reel to reel tape recorder, sampler, effectron and walkman. Reuben Sutherland plays video zoetrope record deck. Psychophonotropic picture discs printed with intricate visual patterns animate when videoed, beaming looping fragments of surreal, luridly coloured imagery into eyeballs and brains at 25 frames per second – Victorian mechanical imaging technology combined with digital video.’ — tape box.co.uk

 

ACMI

‘ACMI’s zoetrope, tucked away in Screen World’s ‘Sensation’ area, is deceptively dull when it is still. It looks like a bizarre wedding cake, with hundreds of creatures and objects suspended on a circular, tiered structure. But when the music kicks in, the carousel starts to revolve and the strobe lights flash furiously. The magic begins! In a spectacular 3D optical illusion, the characters appear to come alive.’ — acme

 

Woohun Lee, Jinha Seong

‘The authors have turned the Zoetrope, initially an optical toy from the pre-cinema era, into a three-dimensional (3D) animation display. “Crystal Zoetrope” is a new visual medium involving a glass disc with numerous engraved objects that displays a sophisticated 3D animation. It can be built in small sizes and even be embedded in everyday objects or environments. Using this new visual medium, the authors produced the 3D animation “Sea of Stars” that portrays the life cycle of planets in the universe.’ — Leonardo Journal

 

Alexandre Dubosc

‘French animator Alexandre Dubosc specializes in ‘caketropes’ or 3D zoetropes, spinning animation machines, that look like chocolate cakes. Freequences, his July 2019 creation, explores the repetition of sound waves, vibrations, patterns, and musical instruments.’ — The Kid Should See This

 

Eric Dyer

‘Eric Dyer is an artist, experimental animator, and educator whose work has shown at such events as the Sundance Film Festival, exhibited at the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art and the Venice Biennale. He currently uses spinning sculptures to create films and installations. He’s had music videos play on MTV, MTV Europe, The Box, and B.E.T. and animations aired on PBS, the Discovery Channel, and Fox International. “Copenhagen Cycles” is a fantastical, collaged bicycle tour through a zoetropic rendition of Denmarks capital. He uses sculptures, paper cut outs, and live footage to animate the hypnotizing ride.”‘ — barrabinfc

 

Fallon

‘Advertising agency Fallon built an enormous zoetrope in Venaria, a town near Turin in northern Italy. The zoetrope presents a series of still images of the footballer Kaká, which when rotated (at speeds up to 50km per hour) and viewed through small slits on the outside of the zoetrope, give the illusion of being animated. The purpose of the Bravia-drome is to show off Sony’s new Motionflow technology. MotionFlow allows BRAVIA televisions to insert transitional images into action sequences in order to increase smoothness at 240Hz that might otherwise be choppy.’ — Creative Review

 

Ghibli/Pixar

‘In 2005-ish Pixar created their own Toy Story-themed version of the famous Studio Ghibli Zoetrope in in the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo. It toured many science museums and galleries around the world.’ — Zoetrope Development

 

Jackson Holmes

‘Jet Engine/Zoetrope by Jackson Holmes. University of Brighton, 66-68 Grand Parade, Brighton, BN2 0JY. SHOW DATES: Friday 3rd June – Private View (tickets only), Saturday 4th June – 12 noon – 8pm, Sunday 5th June – 12 noon – 6pm, Monday 6th to Wednesday 8th June – 10am – 8pm, Thursday 9th June – 10am – 4pm’ — jacksonholmes.tumblr

 

Troika

‘DIGITAL ZOETROPE is an installation which Troika created for onedotzero when commissioned to design a custom installation and visual identity around the theme of the festival ‘Citystates’. Opting to make an installation and identity that integrate into each other, Troika created a modern DIGITAL ZOETROPE as the cornerstone of the identity, which celebrates both the heritage of motion arts as well as its digital present.’ — troikalondon

 

Tee Ken Ng

‘Starting with a fascination for effects and optical illusions, artist and animator Tee Ken Ng combines stop motion with the zoetrope technique of yesteryear to create these incredible animations. Using simple illustrations and acetate discs, he brings these videos to life.’ — Domestika

 

Akinori Goto

‘In 2015, a young media artist named Akinori Goto created a fascinating device called toki, meaning “time” in Japanese. Goto explained that it was “a media installation born from a combination of modern technologies:” the age-old zoetrope meets 3D printing technology. Goto captured the movement of a person walking and translated it into a data series, which was then turned into a repeating loop. The result was then fed into a 3D printer. That object was then placed on a rotating turntable and a light was projected onto it to isolate the different movements and….you know what, better to just watch the videos.’ — Spoon & Tamago

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*

p.s. Hey. Tomorrow morning I have to get up early and go to the prefecture to get my French residency visa — or I certainly hope it’s that simple. Since I have no clue how long that will take, I’m going to give the blog a little vacation tomorrow, but both it and I will be back as per regular on Friday. ** Dominik, Hi!!! You made it inside again! Hopefully the spell is broken. I think/hope the script will be finished at last this week. Yeah, the rest of this month is pretty packed with screenings — Brussels, Berlin, Palermo (although I’m not 100% sure if we’ll go for that one), and Amsterdam. How are you? What were you doing with reality during the blog blackout? Love doubling down on your hope with all his mighty might too, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, The Scottish team is called Hearts? How loveable. If an ignoramus’s hopes will contribute to their victory, consider me a good neighbor. ** Ewan Morrison, Hi, Ewan. Very good to make your acquaintance. My pleasure on the WWD front. I think I used to know about the strong experimental film scene in Glasgow, or I mean I remember reading about that. Is it possible for you to get some likeminded chums together and start organising some screenings? I was lucky to grow up in LA where there’s always been an experimental film scene and contingent, even back when I was a young teenager, and that basically helped make me as an artist and person. Your project of contributing new sound/music to Peter Tscherkassky’s films is very interesting indeed. Yes, I’d be very curious and interested to see what you’ve made, if you feel like sharing. The would be a boon. Thanks a lot for thinking of me re: that work. Is sound manipulation a main focus of your work/interest in general? It’s a pleasure to get to talk with you. ** Carsten, Hey. The shooting script of ‘RT’, which of course got consolidated during the shooting and editing, is/was 22,440 words/90 pages. The shoot was a month (27 days). Your film idea sounds of course quite interesting. Seems like it would be a lot easier to make than ‘RT’ was. Because of my upcoming traveling and the traveling of another club member, the next Zoom meeting won’t be for a few weeks. I’m picking the film for that meeting, and I haven’t decided what it will be yet. ** Hugo, Yeah, it’s going to be a flash of a Brussels visit, but oh well. You’re making Tomodachi Life sound a whole lot more interesting than I had imagined. My clone has a lot broader romantic tastes than I do, that’s for sure. Um, hm, put GG Allin in the game and see what happens? ** Adem Berbic, I haven’t watched ‘Skin’ yet, but I will watch/report. It might be interesting for you to see what you look like externally when you freak out assuming your freak out reads believably. Well, ‘Trash Humpers’. ** Steeqhen, I would definitely not recommend psychedelics if you’re feeling even slightly fragile. I only did them when I felt solid as a rock. So sorry about the bad doc. But you sound like you found a proper antidote. I don’t know that French killer. I think I’d stopped researching those guys pretty much by the 80s. Huh. ** HaRpEr //, Dixon had very interesting film tastes in addition to his filmmaking prowess, yes. ‘The Masturbator’s Heart’, yes, really good. Seeing that is what made us cast Ange in ‘RT’ even though his performance in ‘RT’ couldn’t be more completely different. I hope that some venue in somewhere in London will eventually want ‘RT’ because that just seems logical, but nothing yet. So strange. A film series in Leeds wants it, so it might show there first. I like Claire Rousay’s work too. She knows and likes my work? Wow, that’s wild. Knowing something like that is so mind-blowing. Thanks! ** voskat, Hi. Indeed. Okay, thanks for the heads up about Laura’s thwarted comment. I will go read it, of course. Anarcho-futurist era: that’s kind of music to my ears at least if I don’t think too thoroughly about it. Take care yourself, and thank you again. ** Okay. Your optional assignment for today and tomorrow is to think about the zoetrope if you feel so inclined. See you on Friday.

 

‘Wheeler Winston Dixon is a masterful film editor. His sensitivity to the movement within the frame and of the camera itself allows for fluidity in his editing that is exuberant and refreshing. He is skillful not only in manipulating the flow of images but the flow of ideas as well. He has assembled his images and juxtaposed them in such a way that their very ordinary nature suddenly becomes extraordinary. It is as though his films tap into our collective unconscious by exploring the surface realities that permeate our lives. Magical realms, pubescent fantasies, dreams of wish fulfillment, all assume strangely mythic proportions through Wheeler’s editing, so even the mundane world we accept so readily begins to look somehow dreamlike and unreal.’ — Bruce Rubin, Associate Curator of Film, Whitney Museum of American Art

“Though he’s best known today as a scholar (his 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 DC 5 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

‘Wheeler Winston Dixon, the prolific author of books on François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, American experimental cinema, and film theory, has also been making experimental films of his own for the past three decades. Dixon’s career stretches from the late 1960s to the current day, including early works like 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. Other notable early films include Serial Metaphysics (1972), an examination of the American lifestyle recut entirely from existing television advertisements, and What Can I Do? (1993), a rigorous, tender portrait of an elderly woman who holds dinner-party guests in thrall to her difficult family life.’ — Joshua Siegel, The Museum of Modern Art

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Wheeler Winston Dixon Official Website
WWD @ IMDb
WWD @ Vimeo
Wheeler Winston Dixon’s books
WWD @ Senses of Cinema
WWD @ Experimental Cinema
Wheeler Winston Dixon Tolls the Death of the Moguls
WHEELER WINSTON DIXON ON THE LOST ART OF BLACK & WHITE
Crowhurst and Bonemagic – Dedicated To Wheeler Winston Dixon
Audio: WHEELER WINSTON DIXON: THE FILMS OF TERENCE FISHER
SOME NOTES ON STREAMING, BY WHEELER WINSTON DIXON
Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema
Audio: The Spy Whom We Loved: The Enduring Appeal of James Bond

 

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Extras

Frame By Frame: Movie Trailers

Frame By Frame: Film Criticism

Frame By Frame: Camera Moves

Frame by Frame: Minorities in American Cinema

 

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Critic

There can be no doubt that the digitisation of the moving image has radically and irrevocably altered the phenomenon which we call the cinema, and that the characteristics of this transformation leave open an entirely new field of visual figuration. For those who live and work in the post-filmic era – i.e., those who have come to consciousness in the past twenty years – the digital world is not only an accomplished fact, but also the dominant medium of visual discourse. Many of my students remark that the liberation of the moving image from the tyranny of the “imperfect” medium of film is a technical shift that is not only inevitable, but also desirable.

For younger viewers, the scratch-free, grain-free, glossily perfect contours of the digital image hold a pristine allure that the relative roughness of the filmic image lacks. Indeed, by doing away with film, many of my students persuasively argue that we are witnessing the next step in what will be a continual evolution of moving image recording, which, in turn, will be followed by newer mediums of image capture now unknown to us. For others, those of my age, the filmic medium is a separate and sacrosanct domain, and the “coldness” of the digital image, stripped of any of the inherent qualities of light, plastics and coloured dyes, betrays a lack of emotion, a disconnect from the real in the classical Bazinian sense. DVDs are easy to use and cheap to produce, but can’t afford the visual depth and resonance of a projected 35mm filmic image. And, it seems to me, both arguments have valid points and are equally worthy of serious consideration. (cont.)

 

Four Nights of a Dreamer is, for me, one of the most sublime films by Robert Bresson, along with his much-maligned French Resistance drama Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, with a script by Bresson from Denis Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste and incomparably witty dialogue by Jean Cocteau. But while Les Dames is readily available on DVD, Four Nights is not. I saw it when it first opened in New York at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on a gorgeous 35mm print, and was stunned by the film’s sensuous beauty, and its rendition of Paris at night as a city of romance and artistic endeavor, in which the young – giving their lives to love and art – were the film’s undoubted protagonists. (cont.)

 

For most of his long career, Éric Rohmer created a series of ‘moral investigations’ that were resolutely spare and enigmatic in their construction, dealing with matters of the heart, personal intrigues and disappointments, and the vicissitudes of human existence. He began his career shooting on 16mm film, and then as his commercial clout increased, switched to 35mm (with exceptions such as his gorgeous and mostly improvised 1986 feature The Green Ray, shot on 16mm film to keep costs down), but no matter what format Rohmer used, his films remain rooted in the real world, devoid of both spectacle and special effects.

The Lady and The Duke, however, represents a dual departure in both style and structure from Rohmer’s previous work. For the first time, “aside from La Cambrure, a 17-minute film presented at Cannes in 1999”, Rohmer used digital cameras rather traditional 35mm film to capture his chosen images. In addition, Rohmer made extensive use of ‘blue screen’ technology to create non-existent sets through the use of digital backdrops that are, by design, completely stylised and artificial. As Frédéric Bonnaud noted shortly after the film’s release in 2001, “the results are spectacular, recalling early cinema projection techniques and 19th-century magic lantern presentations, as well as the panoramic views of Venetian painting, the canvases of painters like Hubert Robert, and children’s slide shows and shadow play, with vague silhouettes seemingly floating against exterior backdrops.” (cont.)

 

Many years ago, in 1969, when I was working as a writer for Life magazine under editor Thomas Thompson, one of the highlights of my working week came on Monday, when the screening schedule of newly released films would be distributed throughout the office, and we’d all post the list on our respective bulletin boards. In that resolutely pre-digital era, every new release was screened in its original 35mm format at one of the many excellent facilities that existed in Manhattan at the time, and being absolutely omnivorous about film, I would make it a point to attend every single screening, every single day, of absolutely every film that was being released.

And thus it was one day that I found myself in a screening room at Preview Theater, located at 1600 Broadway, sitting in a screening room watching Alain Robbe-Grillet’s debut feature, L’Immortelle. The film absolutely stunned me with its originality and brilliance in every aspect, from its enigmatic screenplay, to the dreamy mise-en-scène. But unlike the much better known Last Year at Marienbad, which Robbe-Grillet scripted but did not direct — Alain Resnais did the honors on that one — for some reason, L’Immortelle never caught on in the states, even on the art house circuit. (cont.)

 

The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is a film almost unlike any other. Starring classical harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt as Bach, the film tracks the composer through his everyday life as a church organist and composer for hire, and is composed of only about 80 shots for the entire film. Filmed on many of the actual locations of Bach’s life, using period musical instruments, real musicians rather than actors pretending to be musicians, and photographed in 35mm using direct sync-sound recording, the film is truly a one of a kind project. Though Straub is often credited as the sole director of the film, it’s clear to me that it was co-directed by both Straub and Huillet, as a documentary on the making of the film demonstrates. (cont.)

 

When the cinema was first invented, women were responsible for some of the major breakthroughs in the medium, and often advanced to the director’s chair. Such early figures as Alice Guy, Ida May Park, Cleo Madison, and Lois Weber all made films during the silent era, and the impact of their work was considerable. Alice Guy directed what is often considered the first film with a plot, La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Patch Fairy) in 1896, and then went on to direct nearly 1,000 films, of which some 350 survive, as well as developing an early sync-sound process, an equally pioneering color process, and directing some of the first multi-reel films. Lois Weber was one of the most successful and highly paid directors working at Universal during the teens and early 1920s, with such controversial films as Hypocrites (1915), Where Are My Children? (1916) and The Blot (1920).

It was during this period that Dorothy Arzner broke into the film industry, starting out as a stenographer in 1919 at Paramount Studios, rapidly moving up as a screenwriter, and later as a film editor on Fred Niblo’s 1922 version of Blood and Sand, starring Rudolph Valentino. As an editor, screenwriter and script doctor, Arzner was much in demand, but Paramount refused to give her the chance to direct a feature film. Incensed, Arzner finally threatened to move to Columbia Pictures, where Columbia’s studio head, Harry Cohn, was actively courting her as a director and scenarist. Dismayed at the prospect of losing her services altogether, Paramount relented. Arzner soon became one of the studio’s most prolific directors, directing such box office hits as Fashions for Women (1927), Ten Modern Commandments (1927), Get Your Man (1927) and The Wild Party (1929), her first sound film, starring the “It” girl, Clara Bow. (cont.)

Many more of Wheeler Winston Dion’s essays and reviews here

 

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Interview
from Senses of Cinema

Gwendolyn Foster: Let’s start with your obsession with movies. When did you first realize that you were interested in movies and the moving picture art form?

Wheeler Winston Dixon: I was born March 12, 1950 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I first realized that I wanted to make movies when I was about four years old. I recall sitting in a crib and looking out the window at a church in the distance. There was a cross on top of the cathedral, and I wanted to capture that image and keep it with me always. That was the first image that I remember, and I guess that was when I decided that I wanted to be a filmmaker.

GF: Did your mom let you play with a still camera? Did you start playing with an 8mm movie camera?

WWD: She gave me a small still camera and I took pictures of my classmates in kindergarten in black and white; this was about 1956. About that same time, when I was about six years old, I got a standard 8mm camera, and started making home movies in earnest, particularly of our cross country trip in 1960, when I shot about three hours of 8mm film, all lost now, and some animated cartoons.

GF: I remember seeing some of your early animation that you made when you were a little kid. Want to talk about them a little bit?

WWD: I first started making animated cartoons in 1956 or ’57, but then I found I couldn’t draw. So that was pretty much the end of the animated cartoons. But I made a bunch of them. One was called Skate Crazy, which was made in 1958. I drew them a frame at a time with crayons and photographed them with this camera that was set up with a homemade animation stand that was built out of a Dewar’s whiskey box. Really a pretty primitive affair. I’d get a friend over to help me color the drawings, because there really were thousands of them to do for a very simple four minute cartoon. People thought that they were more or less like the Tex Avery cartoons from MGM in the 1940s, which I was heavily influenced by. Television started in New York in the early fifties, and I began watching television voraciously; the first thing they ran were old cartoons, and old British movies, because the Hollywood studios were scared of TV at that point, and didn’t want to sell them any movies. So I grew up on Ealing comedies and British “quota quickies,” plus Monogram, PRC, and Republic films, which were sold to TV early on. When I was about 10, somebody gave me a 16mm print of Strange Illusion (1945) a really interesting Edgar G. Ulmer film, and I learned how to thread it in a 16mm projector that someone loaned me for a weekend. I watched the film that one weekend something like 20 times. I just memorized it. Later, I was involved in film societies, and began traveling into New York City to see films, and meet some experimental filmmakers.

GF: Tell me a bit more about these film societies; who was there, what you saw, and the like. With videocassettes, they’re pretty much defunct. But this was all 16mm film projection.

WWD: In New Brunswick, at the Public Library, they screened classic films in 16mm format every Saturday or Friday night, for free. That was when I first saw Len Lye’s films, the Marx Brothers, Maya Deren, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, René Clair. I saw right away that there were two models. There was the Hollywood model, and there was the independent model. The independent model attracted me more, because you didn’t have to deal with all of the sets and the casts and the crew and the money and the overhead. And independent cinema at that time was very cheap to make, so it was a possible alternative. That’s when I got involved in the Co-op, when it was still a pretty fluid scene. When I was about 14, I bought my first Bolex 16mm camera, and from that point on, I began to make 16mm films with optical sound tracks and never looked back.

GF: Did you have any friends that you would show these films and maybe make films too?

WWD: My friends at this point, even when I was 14, were mostly graduate students at Rutgers University. Robert Atwan, Donald McQuade, Mark Gibbons, Dick Arthur, Robert Pingree; these were all people who were passionate about film, and supported my work. These were people who were basically involved in creating stuff, creating art, creating literature. So by the time I was 14, I was already involved with the graduate program at Rutgers University, hanging around a group of graduate students, going to their parties, and dividing my time between that and New York City. When I found the people at Rutgers University, I just walked in on the film screening one day. It was open to the public. I started talking to the projectionist. I said to myself, “This is it. These are the people. I’m talking to them. We’re on the same level here.” And the next thing you know, they drew me into their circle really fast.

GF: Let’s talk about some of the stuff you were interested in at the time.

WWD: Well, I was obsessed with comic books, pop culture, television shows like The Untouchables. American International films like I was a Teenage Werewolf (Gene Fowler Jr, 1957) and Invasion of the Saucer Men (Edward L. Cahn, 1957). I also really liked a show called Open End, hosted by David Susskind. And at that point, it really was open-ended! It would start at about 10 o’clock at night and run until everyone was exhausted, depending on the topic.

New York television in the ’50s and ’60s was sort of an extension of your living room. It was another living room somewhere, with a camera televising the discussion. Soupy Sales did a live hour-long show every day, which I adored. There were no glitzy sets, no replay graphics, just some people in a room. It was very amateurish, very “from our home to your home.” It was mostly live. Now, in 2003, we’re going back to live TV, but it’s live TV intercut with video clips and other image sources, and it loses its liveness and its immediacy. The interesting thing about ’50s live television was that it was raw. When videotape first came in, you couldn’t edit it, it had to be a straight run; we’re talking the very early ’50s here. So, it was all live and uninterrupted.

So I saw a lot of films, and knew it was my life. From the time I was four or five, I was covering my walls with stills from movies. I knew a lot about movies. I could rattle off statistics. There was no “standard” film history out there. There were no film historians, there were no cult movies. It was really something I was doing on my own.

GF: A lot of these films are really short. How would you describe them? Were they assemblage type of films? Did you use appropriated images or shoot them yourself? Were they structuralist? What kind of films were they?

WWD: Well, Gee Whiz (1966) was shot in color in 8mm, intercut with shots of planes blowing up and Michael Landon turning into a werewolf in I Was A Teenage Werewolf. Then I blew it up to 16mm and released it, without a track. The second silent film, 60 Seconds of the City (1966), was basically just a sort of Bridges-Go-Round (based on Shirley Clarke’s 1958 film of that title) approach to New York City; footage of New York at the time.

Jon (1966) was a 45-minute film starring a guy named Chris Saia, and that was made in 1966. I shot that in Regular 8mm sound, with a Fairchild 8mm sound camera. This was sync sound, the standard 8mm Fairchild camera, and was then considered the technological marvel of the age. It had a magnetic stripe on the side of the film, and took 100′ loads of 8mm film. The sound quality was terrible, but the camera was lightweight, and completely portable. The film was about a 16-year-old kid and his problems in high school; highly autobiographical.

GF: It strikes me that it wasn’t hard to get in on a scene. Was that partially because you were handy with technical equipment, or was it just a really open scene?

WWD: It was an open scene. You could walk in the door, and if you were perceived as being useful, you were allowed to stay. That’s basically it.

GF: Who were some of the other filmmakers hanging around at this time?

WWD: Shirley Clarke; I remember her being very kind to me. Gerard Malanga and I fell in very rapidly. Bob Cowan. Warren Sonbert. Jerry Hiler. Nick Dorsky. Jud Yalkut. John Dowd, a very fine collage artist in the school of Ray Johnson, was working at the Cooperative. Gordon Ball, also a filmmaker, was working at the Co-op, as well. Marie Menken worked at the Time/Life Building. When I was working at the Time/Life Building, Marie Menken would come up and we would sit and talk. Ernie Gehr was working at the Cooperative. He began making films in Super-8. I later met Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton and Joyce Wieland.

I remember running some early reels for my film The Visionaries (1969) at Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow’s loft in New York. Filmmakers would get together and have chamber screenings and run each other’s movies. I mean, basically you had a projector, and you had a wall. We’d all sit around and run each other’s films.

GF: Experimental film now seems so incredibly competitive and so hierarchical. I can never put my finger on what kind of a scene it really was then. Did you all seem like kids running your films, having a good time? Or was it already becoming hierarchical?

WWD: The film scene, when I became aware of it in New York, was very non-hierarchical. Jonas Mekas was publishing his column in The Village Voice called “Movie Journal” saying, in essence, that film should be open to all. There was a long period of the 60s, from ’60 through ’68, where valuations were not made; everyone was considered to be a creative artist with something to say. All styles and methodologies were encouraged; nothing was censored, and there were no ‘schools’ of thought or practice.

One of the things that I’ve done in my book The Exploding Eye is to talk about the people who have been dropped by the wayside, people who were superb filmmakers but have somehow dropped off the radar. Rudy Albers, Rudy Burckhardt, Norman Berg, a lot of great people, some of whom have resurfaced. Yayoi Kusama, who came back after years and years of wandering in the wilderness. Valie Export. Carolee Schneeman. She was pretty notorious during that time. Charlotte Moorman, Steve Anson, Takahiko Iimura, people like that.

But then in 1967, Michael Snow made Wavelength. People were deeply impressed by the film, and saw it as the first film which really played with the structural qualities of the motion picture image. It’s a very sophisticated and accomplished work. There’s no getting around it. But Wavelength suddenly became a model for all other filmmaking. Structuralism took over as a school and dominated independent production for all of the 1970s. Unfortunately, that’s what really killed the ’60s film scene more than anything else.

The critical establishment embraced formalism with a frenzy, and all other styles of filmmaking were thrown out. This marginalized a number of enormously valuable filmmakers, many of whom simply left the scene. Jerome Hiler, for example, never even exhibited his films; he had his first exhibition in 1995. He was making films from 1964 on, but he never screened them, or made prints of them. So, until 1968 it was an open scene. Suddenly it became a very closed scene. The minute the Filmmakers Cinematheque in New York City closed down, that was the end of it. It turned into Anthology Film Archives, at the Public Shakespeare Theatre, running a closed set of films called “The Essential Cinema,” and suddenly, except for a few places like UP Screen, Millennium, and The Collective for Living Cinema, there was no place to show your films. So that put a real stop to the whole ’60s film scene in Manhattan.

In the sixties we made films about people, about their lives, their concerns, their loves and passions. The seventies were very sleek and empty, more concerned with structure, form, and a certain kind of ascetic rigorousness. I didn’t really care for it; I’m a romantic. It was also the height of disco, which was omnipresent in New York City in the early ’70s, and which, of course, was absolutely brain dead. WKTU, “Disco 92,” played disco around the clock; it was awful. Most people just followed the crowd to Studio 54, but that struck me as really dull and elitist. Everything I was against. But then CBGB’s started putting on The Ramones, Blondie, Television, a lot of interesting New Wave bands, and that was something of a haven. But there was definitely a sense of paradise lost; it was just too good to last.

 

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18 of Wheeler Winston Dixon’s 53 films

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Bits & Pieces (1969)
‘Late one night in the Time/Life Building in 1969, the television speaks.’ — WWD

 

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Children of Light (1969)
‘On The 4th of July in upstate New York, 1969, at a small farm I owned at the time, local children and their parents play with sparklers in the evening – a very simple film.’ — WWD

Excerpt

 

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Quick Constant and Solid Instant (1969)
‘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

 

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London Clouds (1970)
‘No matter where you arrive in legend, you find yourself at the point of initial departure.” — Wheeler Winston Dixon. ‘His loopy Americana remix Serial Metaphysics (1972) grooves to an increasingly trippy reverb and teen portrait The DC 5 Memorial Film (1969) prowls through Charles Ives, while the magnificent acid-structuralist London Clouds (1970) rocks to a Henri Pousseur electronic psych-out.’ — Ed Halter, The Village Voice

 

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Stargrove (1974)
‘A brief film from 1974 – really an experiment – which uses eight layers of superimposition to create a work of such density that no one image dominates for more than a few seconds.’ — WWD

 

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Gaze (1974)
‘In 1971, I drew a large mural on the wall of my studio – involving painting, tracing, and photo-silkscreens – which was located on the top floor of an abandoned building in New Brunswick, NJ. In 1974, the building was demolished. One morning, just before the demolition crew moved in, I set up my Bolex and shot 100′ of the mural before it was completely destroyed, and here it is. The film is silent; the light is all natural; the film is Ektachrome Reversal 7241, a really beautiful daylight film stock – 2.5 minutes of contemplation.’ — WWD

 

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Numen Lumen (1974)
‘Meditations on light and a window fan for Jerry Hiler and Nick Dorsky.’ — WWD

 

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Madagascar, or, Caroline Kennedy’s Sinful Life in London (1976)
‘This is a short film based on an incident I read in the National Enquirer, a really innocuous item about Caroline partying late at night with Erskine Guinness, the heir to the Guinness Brewery fortune. I imagined Caroline waking up the next morning, recovering from the excesses of the night before, and trying to mix some orange juice in a blender, but being so out of it that she used three cans of gin instead of water to make the concentrate into OJ. It’s an odd film.’ — WWD

 

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Distance (1987)
‘With Richard Lea, Jane Back-Patton. Memories of a long-ago summer, London 1968; morning tea and departures. Produced with the assistance of the New Arts Lab, London.’ — WWD

Excerpt

 

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Slap (2015)
‘Made entirely from found materials, this film documents the moment before impact, the slap itself, and then recapitulates the moment leading up to the slap – three times. This video was created using footage and soundtracks in the Public Domain, or released as CC0 Public Domain materials, and is made entirely from recycled, repurposed and refashioned images and sounds.’ — WWD

 

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A Typical Day (2016)
‘Observe yourself as you go through a typical day. Stuff happens to you. As it does, you immediately judge it and label it. Dozens of times. Hundreds of times. So often that you no longer recognize that you’re doing it.’ — Srikumar Rao

 

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The Ninth Circle (2017)
‘At the bottom of the well Dante finds himself on a huge frozen lake. This is Cocytus, the Ninth Circle, the fourth and the last great water of Hell. Here, frozen in the ice, are punished sinners guilty of treachery against those to whom they were bound by special ties. The ice is divided into four concentric rings marked only by different positions of the damned within the ice. This is Dante’s symbolic equivalent of the final guilt. The treacheries of these souls were denials of love and of all human warmth. Only the remorseless dead center of the ice will serve to express their natures . . . As they denied all human ties, so are they bound only by the unyielding ice.’ — John Ciardi

 

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Sleep (2017)
‘This video was created using footage and soundtracks in the Public Domain, or released as CC0 Public Domain materials, and is made entirely from recycled, repurposed and refashioned images and sounds.’ — WWD

 

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Catastrophe Series (2018)
‘Here’s a series of videos dealing with catastrophic events, stylized and accelerated to about 1 minute or so each. “The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event – not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics – then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.’ — Simon Winchester

 

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Access Granted / Access Denied (2018)
‘New technologies and approaches are merging the physical, digital, and biological worlds in ways that will fundamentally transform humankind. The extent to which that transformation is positive will depend on how we navigate the risks and opportunities that arise along the way.’ — Klaus Schwab

 

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Prison State (2018)
‘In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.’ -– Wikipedia

 

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Dig In (2024)
‘”Jack Kerouac, Jacques Derrida and Mexican food.” – WWD. This video was created using AI generated footage and soundtracks released as CC0 Public Domain materials.’ -– WWD

 

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The Thief of Dreams (2024)
‘“Fear is the thief of dreams.” ― Brian Krans. This video was created using AI generated footage and soundtracks released as CC0 Public Domain materials.’ — WWD

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh my god, it worked. What the hell is up with this blog treating you so disrespectfully. I wonder what it is. I remember when your IP was mysteriously blocked and I had to undo that. Anyway, I hope the spell is broken. It’s so nice to see you, pal. I’ve been fine, the usual. I’m happy that love scored that luscious quote before the post was totally forgotten forever. Love causing Zara to go bankrupt just so he doesn’t have to see one everywhere he goes, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, The thing about Sarah Kane’s plays is that all you need is your eyes and imagination to stage them powerfully. I don’t think you need to actually step in a theater to see how someone else has staged them. For me, at least. But I’m not a big theater guy either. ** julian, Hi. As I was saying to Ben up above, I think with her plays you just need to read them and let your imagination do the staging work. Oh, huh, I read the opposite about Morrissey, but who knows. Either makes sense somehow. No, not like Sotos at all, and, yes, I think artists worrying their work is derivative is usually a total false flag. I see young writers being described as writing like me all the time, for instance, and I look at their work, and I can’t see how anyone would even say that. When someone’s writing is new and different, the inevitable tendency is for critics and others to try to graft that work onto something familiar, and it takes a while for them to see the total difference. Strange and annoying problem, but it largely exists only in the lazy minds of the beholder. Anyway, yeah, don’t worry about that. ** Carsten, No, we wanted it to be set somewhere that looked somewhat isolated, but you can’t predetermine those things exactly when the production itself is dependent one how much money you have to spend. Happy accident, yes. Thank you, sir. All the music and noise/sounds in the film are composed and performed by Puce Mary except for Andre’s song, which was written and musically performed by Chris Olsen who plays Paul the janitor. In the Zoom club, we trade off choosing the texts and films. Like I said, I thought ‘Sherman’s March’ was a slog, but everyone else in the club loved it, so who knows. ** adrian, Hey, adrian! You have to show me that tattoo. Yes, I’ll get to see you in such a relatively short time. Yay. I hope you’re doing great up there. ** Adem Berbic, I’ve never seen a production of her works either, and, like I said above, I’ve never felt any particular need to. Her writing and my brain seem like enough. That said I will go look at ‘Skin’ once I’m out of the p.s. Thanks! I don’t know it obviously. You freaking out is an intriguing idea. Most curious to partake. With dialogue maybe go for believability first and then bejewel its interior without betraying the predetermination as best you can? ** Gustavo, Hey. Yeah, the two most recent Sparks albums are very good. They’re on one of their rolls of late. I’m not sure if Gisele is into Kane’s work strangely. I’ll ask her. My guess is she must be at least familiar. Finding work that has what feels like a life changing effect is the best, and it doesn’t happen every day, obviously, so that’s exciting to hear. ** Hugo, Traditional theater doesn’t really interest me probably for the same reason that traditional novels and films don’t. La Cambre is bringing us to Brussels, and it’s a super quickie just for the screening and then a hotel sleep and leaving in the morning, so I don’t think we’ll be doing much of anything else. But we’ll see. ** Steeqhen, If believing in aliens gives you valuable stuff, that’s all that matters. And who knows the truth anyway. For me psychedelic drugs changed my perception of “reality” quite effectively, but that’s not a recommendation. Hoping the change in meds makes a significant difference. It takes a few days, no? ** tomk, Hey, Tom! Awesome to see you! No, I didn’t know Kane’s work until after I wrote ‘TAGP’, but that’s a really interesting observation. I’m good. So sucks about the irksome job hunt. What are you looking for? Seriously hoping you can get back to your novel without much delay. That’s exciting news that you’re that far along! ** Malik, Hey, M! I agree about the state of US theater. And the really interesting, American experimental theatre makers I can think of seem to end up having more productions of their work in Europe than in the homeland. There was that time back in the 80s and before when experimental theater had a kind of renaissance in the US — Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, John Jesurun, early Robert Wilson, and many others, but then the funding sources started drying up, and newer artists making that work had a hard time. Apparently there’s a really vital new scene of wild theatre happening in LA at the moment, and hopefully that’s a harbinger. I’ll put my mind to a post about interesting contemporary theatre. That’s actually a great idea. Thanks, pal. I hope all’s great w/ you. ** HaRpEr //, It’s an amazing read. Oh, interesting, I’ll definitely find that book. I love ‘This Night’, but I’m a Destroyer diehard. Even the most recent one is great, I think. He’s a master. ** kenley, Hey, hey! Hell -> big development! I’m all ears or I guess eyes when you’re ready to spill. Highly hoping the hell is twinkling in your rear view. Yes, let’s catch up when you’re squared away or, well, anytime. ** William Blake, Well, hello. Good question. There are nothing but better ways? ** Right. I’m suspecting that most of you don’t know the work of the terrific filmmaker and film critic/theorist Wheeler Winston Dixon, and he’s definitely a good one to know, so here’s a chance. See you tomorrow.