Transcript of Introduction to Amazing World of Ghosts 30/9/6

Good afternoon ladies and gentleman and welcome to the Australian premiere of Wheeler Dixon’s The Amazing World of Ghosts. It’s not everyday that a film has its Australian premiere twenty eight years after it was produced, but then, it’s not everyday that films like Amazing World of Ghosts are produced. For me, this is the most important screening in the whole cinematheque program as this is the rarest of all the films in the program and something of a scoop. Let me tell you the whole story. We have plenty of time today.

The film appears to belong to what is respectably known as the "speculative documentary" genre, a craze that reached its zenith in the post-hippie, new-age '70s with films like Chariots of the Gods, The Bermuda Triangle and The Mysterious Monsters. The Amazing World of Ghosts came at the tail end of the craze and was to me a kind of death knell for the whole genre. I say it appears to belong to the genre, as it also seems to fit into the smaller, but more interesting genre of hoax documentary, or as its come to be called these days, the mock-u-mentary. While it is an inept, repetitive and even infuriating film, it is also a significant work, not just for where it sits historically, but also for where it sits in the oeuvre of its director, Wheeler Dixon. More on him later.

The patron saint of the hoax documentary is Orson Welles, whose 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast virtually invented the genre, although it did have precedents in science and literature, for example the Piltdown Man, Mencken's Bathtub Hoax and some of Poe's work. Welles’ F is for Fake was also an important work in the genre - Is everything fake in that movie? The most famous mock-u-mentary, Spinal Tap, popularised the hoax documentary as a vehicle for comedy: Forgotten Silver, Fear of a Black Hat, Waiting for Guffman, The Making of .. And God Spoke, while the '90s saw a mini revival of the genre in the horror field, beginning with Man Bites Dog and culminating with the enormous success of The Blair Witch Project. On April Fools Day in 1977, the hoax documentary even turned up on British television in the form of the "documentary", Alternative 3, that proved so convincing the author, Leslie Watkins, began to think he had inadvertently stumbled upon some top secret conspiracy and fled to New Zealand to escape the controversy.

Outside of the mainstream, the hoax documentary has proven particularly fruitful for one filmmaker, San Francisco eccentric Craig Baldwin, whose Tribulation 99, added found-footage cut-up and aggressively self-conscious, crackpot conspiracy theories to the mix. I think Amazing World of Ghosts was a big influence on Baldwin. The use of a breathless, manic narrator is common to both films. Baldwin even uses some of the same music and footage used in Dixon's other hoax doco, UFO: Exclusive. Tribulation 99 in turn inspired other found-footage filmmakers, and Baldwin's Other Cinema DVD label has released many of his protoges.

To use a phrase found in the speculative documentary genre, Amazing World of Ghosts is a kind of "missing link" between the old UFO/bigfoot/bermuda triangle type hoax doco, where the filmmaker at least pretended to be sincere, and the post-modern, parodic form of the genre, best represented by Spinal Tap (in the mainstream) and Baldwin (on the margins) where both the filmmaker and the audience are (usually) in on the joke.

The transition between these two stages of the genre is evident in the structure of the film itself. In the beginning, one could be forgiven for believing the film is a sincere investigation of the paranormal. Apart from the brilliant and absurd opening sequence, where footage of a child wandering the streets at night (taken from an old educational film) is recontextualised using a spooky voice-over to set the scene, the film soon settles into the familiar form and structure of the speculative documentary as it was at the time. But, as the film grinds on, you begin to twig that something is amiss. As one reviewer on the IMDB puts it,

"About halfway through the film the absurdity of the project soon starts dawning on you. You realise, after narrator Syd intones his hundredth page of borderline nonsensical narration, that this film is a joke. From that point on, you just go for the ride."

Another IMDB review thought the, "director had bought a stack of reels from the local flea market, edited them together at random, slapped some old records onto the soundtrack, and added a ridiculous voice-over narration." A fair summation of the movie, but is there something more to it, some other intention of the director. Before I get to that, I want to tell you the story of how I came to acquire this print of the film.

About five years ago I bought a 16mm print of a film UFO Exclusive from the estate of the late Bob Johnson, the former owner of the Encore Cinema in Surry Hills. I expected it to be another run-of-the-mill, UFOs-are-real documentary. A friend Andrew watched it and claimed he'd never seen anything like it. The only thing he could compare it to was Tribulation 99. I ran it and within five minutes knew that this was something else again. The director was someone called Wheeler Dixon, a name I recognised but couldn’t quite place, and foolishly, didn’t follow it up at the time.

About four years later, I was trawling ebay late one night, looking for 16mm prints to add to my collection, when I saw a listing for a film called World of Ghosts. Note that world was spelt w-r-o-l-d (only on ebay). I did a quick search on imdb.com and reading the user comments I thought to myself, "this sounds just like UFO Exclusive", and sure enough, I checked the director and yes, it was the same Wheeler Dixon character that made UFO Exclusive. So I googled Wheeler Dixon and came up with a number of references to Winston Wheeler Dixon, the Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, a prolific author of over forty film books and a former avant-garde filmmaker. Surely this couldn’t be the same guy, I thought at first. It was not on his resume published on the web. Then I remembered I had read and loved one of Mr. Winston Wheeler Dixon's books, It Looks at You: The Returned Gaze of Cinema and I thought, "maybe this is the same guy." So I google image searched Wheeler Dixon and found this picture:



That's when I realised it must be the same guy. It was the 16mm projector that gave it away. Next, I found a marvellous review of AWOG by David Deal, the author of the EuroSpy Guide, on http://www.theunexplained.net/rt_10_21_05.htm, that confirmed my suspicions. Needless to say, Deal’s review of the film got me very excited. To quote the opening paragraph of the review:

“What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is the holy grail of speculative documentaries. There was no film footage shot specifically for this project nor do we have those sometimes annoying interviews with “experts” or eyewitnesses. The film is made up entirely of nonsensical narration over stock footage, photographs, animation, and even old silent films; 90-plus minutes of the most insincere and thoroughly enjoyable baloney you are likely to see.”

The price was right and it was closing overnight, so I put a bid on, and went to bed. I lay in bed for an hour, not sleeping, thinking, "God I hope no one outbids me." I was feeling that addictive ebay buzz.


The next day I woke up, raced to the computer, and was very happy to see my bid was the only one. I sent off the money for the film and waited anxiously.

My happiness was short-lived. When the parcel arrived I discovered that the first reel was missing. I emailed the seller, thanking him for sending the film, but pointing out that one of the reels was missing and could he please have a look around at home for the missing reel. I received a rather terse reply, "Sorry, but the film was sold as is. That’s how I bought it.” Keeping calm, I replied back. "Well, yes, ok, I accept that, but could you have a look around home anyway, and if you could contact the guy you bought it from and ask him to have a look around too, that would be great. A few weeks went by, without reply so I decided to step things up. “Look, I will give you a hundred US dollars, three times what I paid for the film if you can find the missing reel.”

Anyway, a few more weeks past, and the possibility of curating this cinematheque program came up. I really wanted to show the film, so I wrote to the seller, "Dude, you’ve got to fucking find that reel. This is a really important film, perhaps lost, I’ve never heard of another copy out there. I really want to show it at the Cinematheque here in Sydney.” It seemed to work for a couple of days later I received an email saying, “I found it. It was in a tin marked ‘Halloween’. Don’t worry about the money, it’s my fault. I will send it to you.” Needless to say, my heart sang with this news.


Now I had the print, the next thing to do was ask Mr. Dixon for his permission to screen it. I found his email address and wondered, if he disowns the film, how am I going to broach the subject. So I carefully carefully composed an email that was all in the negative. I thought being an avant-gardist, Dixon might appreciate the tone.

Dear Mr Dixon,

My name is not Brett Garten and I am not the curator of the Chauvel Cinematheque in Sydney. I recently did not discover a 16mm print of the film, The Amazing World of Ghosts. I realise you didn’t make this film, but what I was wondering was, why didn’t you make this film?


Yours sincerely,
Brett Garten
Curator, Chauvel Cinematheque

Not surprisingly, he never replied.


So last night I tried directory and got the number for the University of Nebraska and rang there but it was Friday afternoon over there, and all I got was Mr. Dixon's recorded message, on which I left a similar, cryptic message.

So I think Mr Dixon would rather forget about this little film and his short career as a documentary filmmaker, which to me is a shame, because I think the Amazing World of Ghosts and his other film, UFO Exclusive (a third film UFO: Top Secret exists in this series which I have yet to see), are both terrific, and represent, not only an important landmark in avant-garde hoax documentary, but also illustrate Dixon's own philosophy on film, represented in the title of the book I referred to earlier, It Looks at You. Rather than tarnish his reputation, I believe it would do the opposite, and cement his position, not just as an avant garde filmmaker, but as a film theorist as well.


Briefly, and without the luxury of rereading the book, Dixon's thesis is that the viewer has become the viewed, and that this "returned gaze of the cinema" possesses its own totalitarian ideology. Dixon illustrates his point with references to the widespread use of home video footage in the news, surveillance cameras and their subsequent use in reality TV, before looking to Warhol, Brakhage and others who suvert this returned gaze. By recontextualising found footage from educational films and documentaries, The Amazing World of Ghosts also subverts this ideological gaze in its own hokey way.


More importantly, to me at least, and the reason I wanted to play this film so badly, is Dixon's recurring exortation that the canon of American film classics is a bloated corpse and that in the post-modern world the margins become the centre. His call to investigate other cinemas: B-movies, industrial, scientific and educational films, third world cinema, is something I hope to do with this cinematheque, starting here, with the truly Amazing World of Ghosts.

Enjoy the movie.