Dana Plays




  across

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


bio

carriage 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)

  Dana Plays' films have exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Cinematheque at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; the Pacific Film Archive at the University Art Museum; Filmforum at Lace and the Egyptian Theater; Millennium Film Workshop; Seattle International Film Festival; Montreal Nouveau Film Festival; Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, and more. Her films have garnered numerous film festival awards including Juror's Choice Award at the Black Maria Film Festival, for Nuclear Family; Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the Ann Arbor Film Festival for Zero Hour; Best Documentary at the New Orleans Film Festival for Love Stories My Grandmother Tells; and Best Experimental Film at the Huston International Film Festival for Across the Border, among others.

Dana Plays specializes in non-linear editing for film, video and interactive technologies, including DVD and the web, and provides consultation in digital media for education out of her Los Angeles based studio. She resides in Pasadena, California. Dana Plays has taught film and new media production and theory since 1990, at Syracuse University and at Occidental College, in Los Angeles, California.


filmography

NUCLEAR FAMILY, 2001, 16mm, 22 minutes

monkey with rat “An arresting, deconstructed, yet nostalgic work that resonates with optically reprinted images from the 1950s. Vintage government films in which mannequins record the effects of nuclear blast experiments, science films depicting animal experiments, and home movies are interwoven so as to comment upon and recollect the notion of family during the era which gave birth to the nuclear age.” -John Columbus, Director, Black Maria Film Festival

“A haunting, emotional exploration of human isolation drawn from observational films – scientific films, documentation of animal-behavior experiments, and early preschool footage.”  -Kathy Geritz, Curator Pacific Film Archive

First Prize, Jurors’ Choice Award, Black Maria Film and Video Festival
Honorable Mention, Ann Arbor Film and Video Festival
First Prize Experimental Film Award, Empire State Film Festival
Pacific Film Archive
San Francisco Cinematheque
Athens International Film Festival
Women in the Director’s Chair Film Festival
Big Muddy Film Festival
Deep Ellum Film Festival
Savannah Film and Video Festival
Euro Underground Film Festival


LOVE STORIES MY GRANDMOTHER TELLS, 1994, 16mm, 30 min

“The diaries and memories of her 90-year-old grandmother Peggy Regler create a complex portrait
  of one woman’s intimate experiences, and of a life spanning the twentieth century. Her autobiography emerges through formal references to early cinema, a historical moment which changed our conception of subjectivity.” – Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive
Peggy on Phone with Jack  
Director’s Choice, Black Maria Film Festival
16 Best Documentary, New Orleans Film Festival
Third Place Documentary, Big Muddy Film Festival
Pacific Film Archive
Montreal International Film Festival
Madrid Experimental Week
New York Underground Film Festival
Seattle International Film Festival
Dutch National Television VPRO Broadcasting, Holland
Onion City Festival
Dresden Film Festival
Interfilm Festival, Berlin, Germany
Leipzig Documentary Festival, Germany
St. John’s  International Film Festival
Viper International Film Festival                                                                         


ZERO HOUR, 1992, 16mm, 30 minutes

boy with shoe “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

Tom Berman Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival
Director's Citation, Black Maria Film Festival
Cash Award Sinking Creek Film Celebration
San Francisco  Cinematheque
Millennium
Filmforum
Film Conference, University of Boulder







RIVER MADNESS, 18 minutes, 2000, Digital Video

Berlin/ Los Angeles Film Festival of Architecture and Urbanism,
CBS Studio CenterLee Marvin in LA River

A project of Re-envisioning the Los Angeles River, and Friends of the Los Angeles River, Plays uses point of view construction and match action to situate the viewer in the cement encased riverbed, its surrounding overpasses, bridges and rail yards, by cross cutting between scenes from various Hollywood movies shot on location in the Los Angeles River. We find ourselves in the company of Lee Marvin, Jack Nicholson, Emilio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton, Bernadette Peters and others, traveling through time and space between genre movies from crime to disaster. The River is transformed to the ultimate urban location, a place to find refuge, retribution and revenge; a place of death, violence and danger, a place for love, and for familia.



NUCLEAR FAMILY, Streaming Video Website 1998

Streaming video of found footage of science experiments, animal behavioral studies. The digitized found footage with sound include clips from Survival City Utah, of Nuclear testing over a city constructed for destruction, with child and adult mannequins in the 1950s, and BF Skinner Behavior animal studies with scenes such as pigeons collecting rewards for winning at Ping-Pong.


A REBELLIOUS GIRL, 1998, BetacamSP Video, 30 minutes

Part two of the Love Stories My Grandmother Tells trilogy the video interweaves conversations in the internal setting of Peggy Regler’s apartment with the external daily walks to the corner market, as a metaphor for the conflict between the aging body and internal identity, as she reminisces about her childhood, rejection of her Orthodox Presbyterian upbringing, move towards philosophy and Buddhism, boarding school, first loves and the world of growing up as a debutante.





ACROSS THE BORDER, 1982, 8 minutes


Eagles eating birds “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

Whitney Museum of American Art
First Prize Experimental Santa Fe Winter Film Expo
Bronze Award, Houston International Film Festival,
First Prize Experimental Universiade International Film Festival
Cash Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival
Cash Award, San Francisco Art Institute Film Festival
Edinburgh International Film Festival
Women in the Director's Chair Festival
WTTW Chicago
Baltimore International Film Festival
Anti-WW III Festival
SF Bay Area Showcase, SF International Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive KQED
San Francisco Cinematheque
East Meets West
University of Southern Florida
A.T.A., Other Cinema
Humboldt State University
Women's Film Festival
Pushing the Margins, Women in Experimental Film, Salt Lake City Utah Women of the Americas Film Video Festival, U.C Theatre, Festival of International and Progressive Film and Video


RECOLLECTION, 1991, 16mm, 7 minutes

Millennium, NYC


KONGOSTRAAT, 1989, 16mm, 12 minutes


 family on stoop “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

San Francisco Cinematheque
Millennium



SHARDS, 1988, 16mm, 5 minutes
Joey BullTail


Shards parallels fragmentation and fragility through explorations that question ideas of wholeness in the film form.


San Francisco Art Institute Film Festival
San Francisco Cinematheque
San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery
Peralta College Television
Exploratorium







VIA RIO, 1986, 16mm, 6 minutes

Corbin and Dave Chess   "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

Cash Award, Tour, Ann Arbor Film Festival
San Francisco Cinematheque
New Films '85, Koukosai Theatre
Humboldt State , Women's Film Festival  
No Nothing Cinema and Pagoda Palace



DON’T MEANS DO, 1983, 16mm, 9 minutes

“Part dramatic narrative, part improvisation, Don’t Means Do, explores the personalities of two youngNiessa and Britannia with Naz girls, and someone they meet while out walking. It is a simple and genuine encounter, in the light of a  gentle afternoon between the moods of child and adult.” – David Heintz

Cash Award San Francisco Art Institute Film Festival
Humboldt State University, Women’s Film Festival
Ann Arbor Film Festival
San Francisco Cinematheque
KQED
No Nothing Cinema
Mills College
S.F. State University






SIBLING ARRIVAL, 1984, 16mm, B & W, sound, 3 minutes

A coarse but intimate documentary of birth. The eight year old sibling is heard but not seen as she watches and reacts to her brother being born.

No Nothing Cinema
S.F. State University


NICARAGUA TAPES, 1984, 3/4' video   four channel video

A multi-channel video piece utilizing footage from Nicaragua.

California College of the Arts
San Francisco State University
No Nothing Cinema
La Pena Cultural Center


SILVERFISH, 1981, 16mm, color, sound, 4 minutes

Opticallly printed passages refer to analogies between memory and film.


Director's Choice, Sinking Creek Film Celebration
Cash Award
Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour
Exploratorium,
No Nothing,
CCAC,
Mills College
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco State University





GRAIN GRAPHICS, 1978, 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes

“Another entirely structural film is Grain Graphics, which begins with two frames of a film strip, on above the other, occupying the middle of the screen, flanked by two vertical filmstrips with smaller frames. In grainy negative, a small number of figures interact in various ways in each of the frames. Gradually, as if the camera were drawing away, this pattern grows smaller and its units increase correspondingly in number, until at the end there appear to be hundreds of rectangles, all with figures busy in motion.” – Edgar Daniels, Filmmakers Monthly

First Prize San Francisco Art Institute Film Festival
First Prize Poetry Film Festival
Cash Award, Sinking Creek Film Celebration
University Film Association National Conference, Austin Texas
NYU Experimental Film Workshop
KQED
Eye Gallery
Mills College
Philadelphia College of Art
 

ARROW CREEK, 1978, 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes
At the races


Filmed at Crow Agency, Montana.

Honorable Mention, San Francisco Art Institute Film Festival
Capp Street Project, Souvenir Highway
Ann Arbor Film Festival
American Indian Film Festival
San Francisco Cinematheque
Exploratorium
New York University
















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
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New York, NY 10013
USA
www.film-makerscoop.com/
phone: 212-267-5665
fax: 212 267 5666
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Or, contact Dana Plays directly for all titles.