| There’s something about metaphors that can make you giddy. For instance, when master surrealist David Lynch talks about his films, he typically avoids declamatory statements about his artistic intentions – it seems that he’s as perplexed by his work as anyone else.
Winnipeg’s deco dawson, on the other hand, is generally more forthcoming than Lynch seems to be, but he still gets oddly figurative when discussing the production of his most recent film.
"The way with film is that the day you finish, the day the work stops, that’s when you can actually feel that the work has paid off," says dawson, whose latest project took more than a year to complete. "Which is awful because for 14 months I had this dead turkey in my hands. It was just like, how could I bring it to life? Or how could I cook it? You know, what do you do with a dead turkey?"
The metaphorical fowl in this case is dawson’s latest work, FILM (dzama), a 22-minute short inspired by and incorporating the drawings of infamous Winnipeg artist Marcel Dzama. Granted, I’ve only seen the finished product, but let me assure you that this particular bird has been thoroughly stuffed, cooked and... brought back to life?
Well, with dawson at the helm, anything could happen. Call him the enfant possible of Canadian cinema – in addition to his collaborations with another notorious Winnipegger, Guy Maddin (dawson edited the brilliant short Heart of the World and co-directed the feature-length dance film Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary), the energetic twentysomething filmmaker has made five short films in four short years.
He first picked up a camera in 1998, when he directed FILM (emend), an experimental piece featuring actor Rylan Wilkie (recently in town for a role in Proof at Alberta Theatre Projects) as a man who obsessively polishes shoes. Since then, dawson has continued to develop his already sophisticated cinematic vocabulary, which harkens back to the golden age of silent cinema, incorporating elements of German expressionism, Hollywood melodrama, slapstick farce and Soviet constructivism.
His shorts are an incredible testament to the power of Super 8 filmmaking – at least when a visionary is behind the camera – but, oddly enough, dawson says that much of his inspiration comes from the theatre of the absurd, in which he was working for several years before he ever shot a single frame of film.
"I was working in a sort of Beckett vein," says dawson. "And essentially, I would create two tramp-like characters, where a lot of their qualities were interchangeable with each other, but they had these little mannerisms that separated them."
Dawson explains that he was trying to explore the idea of complete co-dependency with these plays, and that at times the characters might even seem like they were separate manifestations of the same individual suffering from some kind of identity crisis.
In his films, this duality is expressed in a number of curious ways. FILM (knout), for example, depicts what appears to be the same woman tied to either end of a rope – when one of the characters begins to whip the other, the film heads into psychologically disturbing territory that’s also funny.
Similarly, FILM (lode) tells an unusual story about two miners who are virtually identical, but who nevertheless try to physically overwhelm each other at every opportunity. The hand-to-hand (and thumb-to-thumb) combat scenes in (lode) are riveting, composed largely of close-ups cut together in fast-paced constructivist montages that highlight the absurdity of the battles.
Finally, in FILM (dzama), dawson draws a correlation between two characters – a physically domineering woodsman and a sexually obsessive artist. Given the history of comic pairings in both theatre and film, it’s no surprise that (dzama), like all of dawson’s shorts, is oddly humorous, even as it expresses uncomfortable truths about the routine obsessiveness of human, and artistic, endeavours.
After all, it took dawson 14 months to make FILM (dzama), and the film can be seen as a metaphor for his own painstaking artistic process.
"This process is basically what I’ve filled my life with – until I die, these repetitious tasks.... What I’ve focused on is really minute, mundane variations of the same thing – I think it might be giving it too much credit to call it an artistic process, but whatever art comes out of it... there’s no end to it."
Turkey or no turkey, it would seem dawson knows that one day his goose will ultimately be cooked.
"When you think of the bigger picture, you think, ‘What the hell are we doing this for?’ Our lives are as insignificant as sitting and tying ropes all day or knitting or polishing shoes. There’s no alleviation from our life.... It’s what we do until we die – whatever rewards we get out of it personally is a different story." |
