Wheeler Winston Dixon: From Ancient History to A Hundred Years from Today
Transactional Reality (2019)
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Wheeler Winston Dixon: From Ancient History to A Hundred Years from Today
Sunday, June 23, 2019, 7:30 pm
At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028
Wheeler Winston Dixon in person!
All LA premieres! Nine World Premieres and Two U.S. Premieres!
Filmforum hosts filmmaker, cultural theorist, and film and digital historian Wheeler Winston Dixon for his first-ever screening in Los Angeles! Based in Nebraska, and most known as a writer, Dixon has been producing eye-opening films and videos since the late 1960s. The program will include a pair of his earlier films, Serial Metaphysics, “an examination of the American lifestyle recut entirely from existing television advertisements” (Joshua Siegel) and Stargrove, a dense collage work. We’ll be featuring a wide array of his digital work of the past four years, a remarkable array of digital manipulations of appropriated footage to produce works of social and aesthetic reflection, using technological means to critique the technological and consumerist obsessions of today.
"There are already enough images in the world. In my videos, I prefer to use existing imagery, playing with it to the point of abstraction to create an other-worldly experience. Although the original images are rooted in the real world, the final product exists in a phantom zone, existing only as long as the image is projected on the screen. At the same time, I hope to seduce the viewer into believing that however unreal these images are, they still have some sort of temporal reality. It is this gap between the actual and the imagined that informs all of my work." - Wheeler Winston Dixon
Tickets: $10 general; $6 students (with ID)/seniors; free for Filmforum Members. Available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at https://wwdixon.bpt.me or at the door.
For more information: www.lafilmforum.org or 323-377-7238.
About the Filmmaker:
The James Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Wheeler Winston Dixon is a teacher, filmmaker, the author of more than thirty books, and over a hundred articles. From 1999 to 2014, he was the co-editor in chief (with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster) of the journal Quarterly Review of Film and Video.
Dixon's films have been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives, Filmhuis Cavia (Amsterdam), Studio 44 (Stockholm), La lumière collective (Montréal), The BWA Katowice Museum (Poland), The Microscope Gallery, The National Film Theatre (UK), The Jewish Museum, The Millennium Film Workshop, The San Francisco Cinématheque, The Collective for Living Cinema, The Oberhausen Film Festival, and elsewhere.
Among his books on film are The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema (State University of New York Press, 1997); Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader, edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Routledge Press, 2002); Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access (University Press of Kentucky, 2013); Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood (Rutgers University Press, 2012); A Short History of Film, Third Edition (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster) (Rutgers University Press, 2018).
Dixon's complete film work from 1966 to 2003 is archived in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Dixon's contemporary video work is collected in the UCLA Film & Television Archive. http://www.wheelerwinstondixon.com
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Los Angeles Filmforum screenings are supported by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2019 is our 44th year.
Memberships available, $70 single, $115 dual, or $50 single student
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Ancient History
Ancient History
2019, Color and B&W, Sound, 1:59 min.
World Premiere!
For Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.” – Victor Hugo
Serial Metaphysics
Serial Metaphysics
1972, Color and B&W, Sound, 13:17 min. Los Angeles Premiere!
"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, Former Associate Curator of Film, Whitney Museum of American Art
Stargrove
Stargrove
1974, Color, Sound, 1:47 min. Los Angeles Premiere!
"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." - Wheeler Winston Dixon
Fountain [for Andy Warhol]
Fountain [for Andy Warhol]
2016, Color, 1:51 min. World Premiere!
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol
Bulletin
Bulletin
2018, B&W, Sound, 2:15 min. World Premiere!
"I guess it could be said that the inspiration for [my writing] is watching the American dream not only destroy so many lives in the U.S., but infect the rest of the world with its obsession with getting more, ignoring the deadly effect that has on the planet." - Hubert Selby, Jr.
Statistics
Statistics
2017, Color, Sound, 3:01 min. World Premiere!
"The mathematics of nuclear winter." - Wheeler Winston Dixon
Yellow Catastrophe
Yellow Catastrophe
2018, Color, Sound, 1:15 min. U.S. Premiere!
“History is a race between education and catastrophe.” - H. G. Wells
Look
Look
2017, B&W, Sound, 3:27 min. Los Angeles Premiere!
“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.” - Henry David Thoreau
Lost II
Lost II
2016, Color and B&W, Sound, 3:07 min. Los Angeles Premiere!
"When I had journeyed half of our life's way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray." - Dante Alighieri
Burn Area
Burn Area
2016, Color, Sound, 2:55 min. Los Angeles Premiere!
"The hardest thing in life to learn is which bridge to cross and which to burn." - David Russell
En Route
En Route
2019, Color, Sound, 2:20 min. World Premiere!
“One of the characteristics of a dream is that nothing surprises us in it. “ – Jean Cocteau
Human Scale
Human Scale
2016, Color, Sound, 4:21 min. Los Angeles Premiere!
"Civilization is crushing us; you can see it in the scale of the buildings, the elaborate outdoor malls where no one ever goes, the walkways that carry us from one building to another without ever touching the Earth - and yet we keep endlessly walking, intent on whatever errands we think are important." - Wheeler Winston Dixon
"One thing is sure. The earth is now more cultivated and developed than ever before. There is more farming with pure force, swamps are drying up, and cities are springing up on unprecedented scale. We’ve become a burden to our planet. Resources are becoming scarce, and soon nature will no longer be able to satisfy our needs.” - Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus, Roman theologian, 200 AD
L.A.
L.A.
2017, Color, Sound, 1:55 min. Los Angeles Premiere!
"L.A. is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star
Weeks turn into years. How quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas" - Hal David & Burt Bacharach
Sisyphus
Sisyphus
2019, Color and B/W, Sound, 2:30 min. World Premiere!
“It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule – of life of that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis, negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is my light.” – Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
The Beautiful People
The Beautiful People
2016, Color, Sound, 1:13 min. Los Angeles Premiere!
"Fantasy love is much better than reality love. I love Los Angeles, and I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic. I think it would be terrific if everybody was alike." - Andy Warhol
A Hundred Years from Today
A Hundred Years from Today
2019, B/W, Sound, 2:46 min. World Premiere!
"Why crave a penthouse that's fit for a queen
You're nearer heaven on Mother Earth's green
If you had millions what would they all mean
A hundred years from today
The moon is shining, and that's a good sign
Cling to me closer and say you'll be mine
Remember, darling, we won't see it shine
A hundred years from today." - Victor Young, Ned Washington, Joe Young
Prison State
Prison State
2017, Color and B&W, Sound, 2:47 min. U.S Premiere!
“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
Transactional Reality
Transactional Reality
2019, Color and B&W, Sound, 2:20 min. World Premiere!
“Transactional reality” [réalité de transaction]: neither existing things nor illusions, errors or ideologies. They are something that did not exist and that is part of reality, [that is] the effect of a regime of truth that separates truth from falsity.” – Michel Foucault
Instant Replay
Instant Replay
2015, B&W, Sound, 4:27 min. World Premiere!
"One image repeats and repeats at various speeds, but always with the same outcome - just as school and workplace shootings repeat and repeat at various intervals, in various locations, but always with the same outcome." - Wheeler Winston Dixon
Neon Flag
Neon Flag
2018, Color, Sound, 2:32 min. Los Angeles Premiere!
“What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the side streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!” – Allen Ginsberg