The Dew Before Dawn

A photographer struggles to find the direction or the meaning behind her art.

From writer/director, Alexis Scholtz, The Dew Before Dawn is a short arthouse piece musing upon the relationship between the artist and their art. At only six-and-a-half minutes long and shot entirely in black-and-white, it is pulling no punches in settling itself firmly within the arthouse genre. Minimal dialogue and an elusive message also feed into this categorisation of the film, as we ponder over the images presented to us and try to decipher their meaning.

A young black photographer tries to capture the feeling and mood of her subject, an older white woman, as she rests within the spaces of her palatial home. A striking main foyer surrounded by a circular mezzanine is used as the main location for the photoshoot, and the photographer grapples with the idea of shooting her subject within different aspects of this space, from different angles, while getting her to play different roles. We see the older woman move into and between these spaces, and also feel her personality shift as she does so.

There is a tension between the artist and the subject, with the photographer feeling that she is not quite capturing the authentic nature of what is in front of her camera, while her subject becomes involved and somewhat overbearing in her direction of what she thinks the photoshoot should produce. This smacks loudly of the entire history of patronage within art, where the artist must bow down and concede in certain areas to the perhaps uneducated, uncreative, and philistine nature of the person providing the money. We see this all the time in big-budget creations in film, where producers and studios ruin the director’s vision simply for the reason of appeasing censors, raising the bottom line, or the stroking of their own ego.

Here, the photographer is more than ready to stand up for herself, and berates her subject for getting in the way. While there may be some kind of mentorship or expertise on offer, this is dismissed by the artist, and she is left to find her own path through the mire of finding meaning within her art. Director and cinematographer, Alexis Scholtz highlights the themes of light and dark within the photography, expressed also by the decision to shoot in black-and-white, while expanding this idea into the ‘rights and wrongs’ of artistic expression as the photographer tries to find her way. When, eventually, she begins to cut up the photographs and piece them back together with different halves, she perhaps finds the missing piece of her expression that she could not find in the initial frames, allowing her to see more than what was there in the first place.

With each section of the film and transference into a new frame or idea punctuated by the ringing of a Tibetan singing bowl, and the main subject of the film moving around, changing colour of dress, and changing her personality, we are invited to make what we can of the themes and images that we are exposed to as a viewer. These ephemeral aspects are left to float in the air as spectres of something real yet untouchable, and we must give of ourselves to feel what must be felt by the characters and scenario we are witness to.

There is plenty to hold onto in The Dew Before Dawn, if not enough for a structured narrative, and as an art piece for the artists it works very well in presenting what it wants to achieve. There is a lot to think about and discuss from what we see, and the images are beautiful and striking enough to keep us captured in the frame with them.