James Strangroom

The red curtains pull open over a black screen. The word “film” appears in small-capped typeface, flickering, chipped and battered. Darkness again as the first notes of a modern classical piece cue in the background. Then a house — solitary and still against the backdrop of a plain — framed in a black iris, Vaseline smeared around the edge of the circle. It's claustrophobic and uncomfortable to look at, immediately recalling the craggy silhouettes and deep shadows of early 20th century expressionists like Robert Weine. It ends, suitably, with “end” in the same block letters as before. The projector beeps loudly.

It wasn't silent movie night at the cinematheque. It was the first in a series of 10 shorts by Deco Dawson, a 29-year-old surrealist filmmaker from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Visiting Calgary as the CSIF film maker in residence, Dawson screened a large portion of his catalogue at the Plaza last Thursday. A quasi-protege of Guy Maddin, Dawson made his first films while studying theatre in university — often shooting them entirely against a garbage-bag-covered wall in his mother's basement. Though promise is apparent even in Dawson's earliest work, as his catalog of films expands, that promise is evolving into something resembling genius.

“I've always felt you can do anything in short filmmaking — your audience will find you,” he says. “I think each film is a stepping stone. The first (film), you were supposed to be able to follow as well as the fourth or fifth, but I was just so limited in terms of my abilities that the best I could do was assemble this string of static images. So when I got to the second one, I was like ‘Now I've got my story. Can I pull this off a little bit better, technically?’ By the time we get to the third one, it's very clear.”

Esthetically, Dawson's early films fit comfortably within ’20s-esque silent film pastiche, naturally garnering their own unique audience — and unique detractors. Like composer Philip Glass’s approach to music — one of Dawson's biggest inspirations — repeating a melody, subtly embellishing it in each verse, slowly building it up to completion, Dawson's early films utilize the repetition of static images and fast editing to roll the film into a kind of narrative snowball. An artistic method to be sure, but not necessarily the most accessible one.

“Whether (the films are) accessible or not really just has to do with my competence as a storyteller,” says Dawson. “I might have always had those ideas about the story or narrative that I wanted to put forward, but I just wasn't talented enough to do it. So I get that kind of criticism — people who have no idea, they feel very vulnerable or insecure, out of their element, and they don't want to criticize because they're afraid they don't understand it. Then there's the people who resent the fact that it's not narrative or it's a little bit more contrived in some ways. They always say it's repetitious and hard to follow — but those are all integral to the piece. That's like looking at Picasso during his blue period and being like ‘it's all blue.’ It's obviously not an accident.”

Indeed, Dawson's most recent film, The Last Moment, does away with the iris, the Vaseline and even the Super 8 camera. Shot in glorious colour on 16 mm, it is a depiction of one man's last living moments; the relationship that ended his life decompressing in his brain in a series of atemporal narrative segments. The style of each flows from the heavy contrast of ’40s noir to the pastel palate of ’60s-era Hitchcock, to the stale saturation of Dogme, to Quentin Tarantino's bombastic violence and rapier dialogue. Though the stylistic disparity between each scene is reminiscent of the images in his early shorts, the piece has a perfect overall cohesiveness that's been visibly developing in Dawson's work from the word go.

“It's based on experience,” Dawson says of the film. “In many ways, the larger metaphor for The Last Moment is the relationship. It is a relationship. Things don't make sense all the time. You've had good times, you've had bad times. Especially if you've broken up with someone — you've reinterpreted everything that was good into either extremely flattering or disastrously remorseful. The girl's a bitch, she's stealing your money, she comes in wanting action all the time. And then that's played against the polar opposite: We had a good time. Sitting around in a tuxedo or a dress, sitting on the bed and kissing like 'adults.'”

With a full-length narrative feature forthcoming, as well as directing the concert video that accompanied rockers Metric's latest tour, Dawson is poised for commercial success to match his numerous artistic homeruns. As an artist who refuses to stop cultivating his already abundant talent, the next Dawson screening should appeal equally to moviegoers and “FILM” aficionados alike.