Photograph from the Carnegie Museum of Art, Film and Video Department archive (source: www.cmoa.org)
“What was finally so beautiful about the conversation was the demonstration of truly successful dialogue - that is two minds / hearts coming together for the purpose of arriving at an undefined third place / solution - and getting there! Really independently - dependent, (your mind - my mind).”
Her STORY
Experimental film — non-narrative, non-commercial films by individual artists for poetic self-expression — is now an established discipline, with a place in the art world and an influence on mainstream culture. It has given rise to music videos and video art. It has profoundly informed Hollywood cinematography, visual effects, editing, title design, and advertising. And it has given viewers experiences of great joy, beauty, and meaning.
Not so fifty years ago. Sally Dixon played an enormous role in making it happen.
Dixon was born in Seattle in 1932. After growing up in Pittsburgh, she studied art at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), Bennington College, and Chatham College (now Chatham University).
In the 1960s, Dixon received a hand-held Super 8 movie camera as a gift. She grew fascinated by the power and possibilities of film, and began creating what she called “film poems.”
After reading Jonas Mekas’s writing in The Village Voice and seeing films by Stan Brakhage, Dixon became enchanted by avant-garde film. She began to follow her true calling: creating space for these filmmakers to develop their work, and for the public to experience it.
Her privileged, traditional background differed from theirs. But her own experiments with her camera, along with her revolutionary spirit, allowed her to relate to them on their own terms. And she harnessed her knowledge of and connections in the Pittsburgh establishment to advance film as art.
“She understood it very early and she promoted it, bringing attention to different poetic, non-narrative forms of cinema.”
her Impact
In 1970 Dixon created the Film Section at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art (CMoA). It had two purposes: to enable filmmakers to screen and discuss their work, and to give the public a “greater understanding and appreciation of film as an art form and the filmmaker as an artist.” It was one of the first museum film programs in the US.
She began a long friendship and collaboration with Brakhage, which would become one of her most consequential contributions to experimental film. She was pivotal to the creation of Brakhage’s Pittsburgh Trilogy: eyes (1971), Deus Ex (1971), and The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971). During the production of these films, which consist of footage shot at various Pittsburgh civic institutions, Brakhage stayed at Dixon’s home, and she was his artistic sounding board. She helped get permission for Brakhage to shoot Pittsburgh Police Department officers, and physicians inside the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
This mix of artistic and practical support epitomizes Dixon’s ability and willingness to help great artists realize their vision, whatever the challenge, and without ego.
“She could get a cameraman into the autopsy room, for God’s sake.”
Jane Wodening, author and artist
In 1973 Dixon started the Film and Video Makers Travel Sheet, a monthly circular that CMoA distributed to alternative cinemas, museums, media centers, and universities across the country. In this pre-Internet time, it listed contact information and dates and locations of screenings and lectures, enabling filmmakers to book additional screenings and in-person presentations. These became crucial sources of income, exposure, and dialogue for filmmakers at a time when new media was just beginning to be embraced by academic and art institutions.
Making films was prohibitively expensive, and exhibiting them was just as hard. Dixon’s commitment to increasing access, decades before digital video obliterated these barriers, shows that Dixon was a leader ahead of her time.
In late 1973 Dixon presented Brakhage’s Pittsburgh Trilogy around Europe as part of a United States Information Agency tour showcasing American art.
The Film Section featured several monthly series, including the History of Film Series and the Director’s Series, both of which helped introduce the medium to the general public. Realizing that these “movies” didn’t look like commercial movies, she prefaced screenings with remarks that respected both the audience and the art:
“If you could just hang free on it, and not expect meaning to come out in order, or in sequence. Much in the way you listen to a piece of music, just let it happen … and the meaning emerge(s) when it’s ready.”
her community
Dixon collaborated with Mekas, regarded as the godfather of American avant-garde cinema, and other leading film artists including Bruce Baillie; Hollis Frampton; Gunvor Nelson; Robert Breer; Willard Maas and Marie Menken; James Broughton; Joel Singer; Ken Jacobs; Peter Kubelka; Paul Sharits; George Kuchar; Mike Kuchar; Roger Jacoby; Storm de Hirsch; and Joyce Weiland.
Some of these artists made films exploring the human body, with nude actors touching. Supporting them was risky in the museum’s conservative climate. Dixon didn’t care. James Broughton made Erogeny on her dining room table. When a museum projectionist refused to screen a Carolee Schneemann film because he deemed it pornographic, Dixon made sure the screening proceeded.
That was sex as in eros. Another challenge was sex as in gender. Dixon’s championing of Schneemann and other women filmmakers was particularly brave and impactful — ”Before Sally, you had to go through this wall of men,” Schneemann recalls in the film. That Dixon herself was a young woman in a man’s art world makes this all the more remarkable.
In 1975 she co-founded the Filmmakers Preview Network and served on the board of Pittsburgh Filmmakers, both direct outgrowths of the CMoA Film Section. Later that year Dixon left the Carnegie Museum of Art, leaving the Film Section in the hands of William Judson, a film professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who succeeded her as curator.
Dixon moved to Boulder, Colorado — down the road from her close friend Brakhage — and became a professor at the University of Colorado.
In 1978 Dixon moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to become interim director of Film in the Cities, a Minneapolis media arts center that screened independent films and trained young artists and filmmakers. While there she created Filmmakers Filming, a screening and workshop series co-presented by Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center and accompanied by the Film in the Cities booklets.
In 1980 Dixon became the first director of the Bush Artist Fellowships at the Bush Foundation, through which she supported artists in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. She continued in this role until 1996. She was also a consultant to the Pew Charitable Trusts, The MacArthur Foundation, the Herb Foundation, and the Leeway Foundation.
Her Legacy
Sally Dixon died in 2019, in St. Paul. Even as she battled Alzheimer’s, she reflected on her life in interviews for this film. The film beautifully interweaves these with interviews of her family and friends, Sally’s first images on Super 8, and archival footage of her collaborations with artists in Pittsburgh and St. Paul.
The result is an hour-long portrait of a woman who loved the rich experience and possibilities of film, and shared it with the world by supporting some of its greatest artists. In doing this, she expanded how we see film, and how we see. The film doubles as a fresh look at these filmmakers themselves, in a perfect illustration of how Dixon highlighted them and their work, not herself.
Viewers will be left with a powerful example of how accepting and drawing the best out of others can conquer obstacles and accomplish worthy goals. And how art, especially film art, can be collaborative. As Dixon’s son Zander, says, “It takes many people to make beautiful things happen.”