| |
|
|
Screening: Friday, September 24, 2004 MadCat Women’s International Film Festival Artists' Television Access 992 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 (415) 824-3890 ata@atasite.org |
articles and reviews Spokesman Review | The Inlander | Spartan Screening | LA Weekly | Curator's Comments BIBLIOGRAPHY PUBLISHED REVIEWS OF PROFESSIONAL WORK Holly Willis, The Los Angeles Weekly, “Filmforum,” April 4-10, 2002. Julianne Crane, The Spokesman-Review, In Life, “Vision Strays far from Mainstream,” F3, Sunday October 20, 2002. Marty Demerest, The Pacific Northwest Inlander, Arts and Culture, “Filmmaker Dana Plays,” p. 27, October 17-23, 2002. Eric Ernest, “Celebrities Give Insight on L.A. River,” Our Times (local supplement of LA Times in Studio City), April 13, 2000. Carol Schmuckler, Syracuse University Magazine, “Faculty Research: Dana Plays,” Spring 1996. David Baron, "The Best of Cinema 16, Baron's Cinema 16 Picks, New Orleans Film and Video Festival." The Times-Picayune , New Orleans Thursday, October 6, 1994: E-3 Russ Tarby, "Times Table Picks" Syracuse New Times, July 20-27, 1994:26, 30. Joan Vadaboncouer, "Emerging Filmmaker Series offered at Manlius Cinema," The Post-Standard, July 11, 1994:C5 Barbara Hammer, "Filmmakers" Yesterday and Tomorrow: California Women Artists, Ed. Sylvia Moore, Midmarch Press, 1989. Calvin Ahlgren, "Eight New Works Make a Splash in 'Local Color'" Pink Pages, San Francisco Chronicle, 10 Dec., 1989. Stuart Cudlitz, "Cinematheque to Show New Works by Bay Area Filmmakers" Film/Tape World, December, 1989. Deborah Martin, "Alternative, Experimental films offered at Gallery" Accent, El Paso Herald-Post, 5 May, 1989. "Films Should Change Rather than Entertain," El Tiempo, El Paso TImes, 5 May, 1989. Lynne Sachs, "What Do You Have To Say: Women Film and Politics", program for Pushing the Margins: Women in Experimental Film, a selection of National and International Films by Women, University of Utah, May 1988. Ian Bell, "Films: Fuller hits Raw Nerve," The Scotsman, Edinburgh, Scotland, 26 August , 1983. Edgar Daniels, "Ann Arbor Film Festival," Festivals in Review, Filmmakers Monthly, June 1979. contact Dana Plays Contact Dana Plays at <danaplays@yahoo.com> distribution from Dana Plays or Canyon Cinema 145 Ninth Street, Suite 260 San Francisco, CA 94103 www.canyoncinema.com phone/fax: 415-626-2255 email: films@canyoncinema.com Monday-Friday, 8:30am-4:30pm Film-Maker's Cooperative c/o The Clocktower Gallery 108 Leonard Street, 13 Floor New York, NY 10013 USA www.film-makerscoop.com/ phone: 212-267-5665 fax: 212 267 5666 e-mail: film6000@aol.com Or, contact Dana Plays directly for all titles. |
Dana Plays subverts “informational
films into a celluloid mirror of transgression as a larger
cultural pathology” constructing a “haunting, emotional exploration
of human isolation.” Narrativity emerges through "formal references
to early cinema" that weave autobiography with the "historical
moment which changed our conception of subjectivity.” (from
notes by Kathy Geritz and William Tester)
“The transgression and confrontation
is re-enacted in this brilliant fuguelike film by Dana
Plays constructed of found footage, and concerning both American
involvement in oversees conflict and the resultant unseen plight
of the child refugee. Subverting state-sponsored informational
films on such issues as war bonds and highway safety, Plays transforms
these agit-prop rhetorics into a celluloid mirror of transgression
as a larger cultural pathology. In Zero Hour, the results – the products
of war return to the initial cite of production: an assumed audience
of Americans, middle–class citizens of an ideal suburban dream
who have somehow foregone the immediate experiences and repercussion
of mass destruction and displacement. The gaze rests on us. We are
the sugar-stated, hyper and unaware violator, an audience whose relationship
to world events is nowhere more homogenous than in or communal incubation
and guilt.” - William Tester
“In Across the Border, filmmaker
Dana Plays expresses her lifelong commitment to the
culture of Latin America. More specifically, her film offers
the viewer an unusual insight into the complex relationship between
the people of El Salvador and the United States government. Completed
in 1982, during a period in which many American artists were trying
to convey their anger with their own country’s politics. Across
the Border transcends the conventions of social documentary
as we have come to know it through public television. Instead,
Plays manipulates visual elements that compose the image through
coloring and fragmentation. She uses this process of deconstruction
to lead to a greater understanding of those “man-made” constructs
that are responsible for the oppression she has witnessed. But
Plays’ message is hardly dogmatic. The subtlety of her collage-like
style suggests a very open message, giving the viewer the opportunity
to enter the work as a thinking human being rather than a receptacle
of one person’s point of view. Dana Plays’ personal involvement
with the people of El Salvador follows in the tradition of a cross
cultural awareness expressed by other women filmmakers such as
Maya Deren (Haiti), Margaret Meed (Bali, New Guinea) and Chick
Strand (Mexico).” – Lynne Sachs
“A diaristic view of parts
of Paris, Belgium and Amsterdam. The Turkish family
on their stoop, the woman on the train with her two pit bulls
and an admirer, interiors, exteriors, the views from the train
and the canals of the flat lands. Laid over are sound recorded
at the same locations, providing correlating fragments of conversations,
that Plays says are on “sidewalk life in Belgium and narratives
of a beating heart, of a fish whose eggs are poisonous to both the
rich and poor.” Here the recording properties of the camera and the microphone
are the thing; people alternatively appear to react to and ignore the
camera. There are objects, events and locations – it is left to the
viewer’s intuition to secure the story.” - Stuart Cutlitz – Film Tape
World
"Via Rio is an ode to
our human desire for relationship. The film tumbles through
a series of relationships woven around one woman's narration
of her parents' marriage. This woman (played by Lilian Mafra)
is a fresh and fecund personality who relates the story of her
mother's infidelities while sitting naked and pregnant in a garden.
Interspersed around this narrative are a number of other scenes
which feeds the complex nature of human interaction. Interaction
that is sometimes comic, sometimes lonely, but as the very pregnant
Mafra indicates-inevitably part of life.” -Frances DeVuono
