FILM (dzama): 2001, 23m, 16mm, d deco dawson. (Short Takes).

If you thought Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould was an inventive portrait of the artist as a strange man, wait until you see this murky, messy marvel about renowned Winnipeg visual artist, Marcel Dzama. Winner of the NFB Best Short Film Award at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival, FILM (dzama) weaves its Bunuel-meets-Dali-meets-Man Ray silent era avant-garde dramatic pastiche around a young boy looking through a keyhole into the warped studio of an artist who labours over a high, distorted desk. Integrating Dzama's drawings into the feverish, downright horny dream-states of the fictional artist and his art, dawson's carnival of scratchy black-and-white mise-en-scene is ruptured when the drawings occasionally come to life in living, if rather pale, colour. While the comparisons with Guy Maddin are both unavoidable and appropriate (dawson has worked with Maddin, on the award-winning short The Heart of The World), FILM (dzama) finds its particular voice in its assimilation of Dzama's aesthetic into its own shabby and dignified cinematic palette. With such talents as dawson and Jeffrey Erbach, the post-Paizs-Maddin era of independent film in Winnipeg looks as disturbing and twisted as it does bright.

Tom McSorley is the head of the Canadian Film Institute and a contributing editor to Take One.