Dawson's opaque and deliberately dated style, which borrows its darkness and silence from cinema past (as well as from his mentor Guy Maddin), shows us that filmmaking that moves against the tide of technology offers its own gloss on what it is that film does. By abandoning clarity, the option of having light define shapes rather than darkness, Dawson opts rather theatrically for obscurity and artifice. He has no interest in film that pretends to be a window on the world. The title of each work is FILM; in some cases, the letters barely manage to pull themselves out of the pervasive inky background.
FILM(dzama) participates in all of these tropes, yet moves forward from them. The repetitive action here is drawing, and the person forced to draw (at an enchanting high desk, as exaggerated as a fairy tale) is the artist Marcel Dzama as an old man, played by the artist's father. (Dawson and Dzama are both from Winnipeg, this year's unlikely front-runner as new cultural capital of the world.) Dzama's drawings themselves have the violent surrealism of Prozac dreams: man/animal hybrids engaged in pointless interaction, naked ladies emerging from television sets, criminals who sport Burberry plaid ski masks.
In Dawson's vision, the artist--who returns time and again to an old steamer trunk for inspiring objects--is haunted by visions of his drawings as real-time scenarios; as a consequence he tends to ball them up and throw them away. But when he finds himself at a cocktail party populated by creatures of his own imagining, they are obviously, inescapably real. The threat here, which in Dawson's cosmology may also be read as a fantasy, is the merging of the real world and the artificial one; the caution is against not taking the artificial world seriously enough.
