Caine, Michael Wheeler Winston Dixon May 2022 Great Actors b. March, 18, 1933, London “I'll always be around because I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.” – Michael Caine Sir Michael Caine, one of the most durable act...
Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949): The Insanity of Romantic Desire Wheeler Winston Dixon May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film “There is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” – Douglas Sirk Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949) has always be...
Fritz Lang in America: While the City Sleeps (1956) Wheeler Winston Dixon May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Fritz Lang’s penultimate American film, While the City Sleeps (1956), is a serial killer drama, much like Lang’s classic film M (1931). Robert Manners (John Drew Barrymore), a young man on the prowl, terrorizes...
An Interview with the late Monte Hellman (1929-2021) Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2021 Interviews One of the legendary figures of the American cinema, the late Monte Hellman (1929 – 2021) is best known for directing Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), considered by many to be the definitive “road movie,” but Hellman’...
Grandeur and Decadence: Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) Wheeler Winston Dixon April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Luchino Visconti’s La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969) is such an outrageously excessive and daring film that one wonders, in retrospect, how Visconti got away with it. Even the film’s trailer is over the t...
When Everything Seemed Possible: London’s Arts Labs and the 60s Avant-Garde by David Curtis Wheeler Winston Dixon January 2021 Book Reviews In the 1960s, the experimental cinema scene was exploding on a world wide basis. In the era before digital technology, cellphones and email, film was seen as the most immediate and accessible art form, one that...
Ecstatic Moments Out of Time Wheeler Winston Dixon October 2020 Pop Music in Film There are so many moments in the cinema when pop music takes over the image on the screen that I can’t possibly confine myself to one, so here are just a few instances that linger in my memory. There’s Bruce Co...
“An Artist Always Paints His Own Portrait”: Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1960) Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1959, just four years before his death from a heart attack, Jean Cocteau knew that his time was running out after years of ill health, opium addiction, and a vagabond life that depended on the kindness of st...
Ghost Town Anthology: An Interview with Denis Côté Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2020 Interviews The prolific Canadian director Denis Côté has a new film out, entitled (in English; see below for more on this) Ghost Town Anthology (2019), which has been shown on the festival circuit around the world, and is...
Film in Lockdown Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID It’s been an interesting experience, to say the least. I’ve spent most of my time making movies, rather than watching them, as you can see here, and participating in online film festivals, Zoom sessions and the...
The 21st century plague: Cinema in the age of COVID-19 Wheeler Winston Dixon April 2020 Feature Articles We’ve seen this scenario before, but only in the cinema: a mysterious plague, for which there is no cure, suddenly appears out of nowhere and ravages the globe. In everything from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh S...
Into the Web: The Spider’s Stratagem (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) Wheeler Winston Dixon January 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film There’s an overwhelming sense of stasis in the images of Strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, 1970), as the film effortlessly embraces both nature (the beauty of the Italian countryside; the summer tree...