Dana Plays

Visually arresting, deconstructionist piece examining pre-WWII newsreel war footage propaganda. The visual treatment of this piece, involving optical printing, abstract composting, and time manipulation, mirrors the historical permutations, and re-setting of meaning, this propaganda film segment endured through censorship, duplication, and film extraction.

Stark, high-contrast shimmering circles of confusion emanating from streams in wet sand, and sand crabs scooting over their discarded exoskeletons in pools during low tide.

Underwater study in light and motion of the aquifer erupting at Crystal Springs in Zephyrhills, Florida.

This found-footage digital optical printer piece alludes to the decay of cinema and the advancing of digital film through a series of devolving images from the history of photography and early motion picture technology.

Rich, pristine black-and-white digital visual overlays of the train arriving and departing the station at Villefranche-sur-Mer, France.

A continuation of Dana Plays’ SALVAGE PARADIGM series compounding detritus of history and memory derived from found-footage salvaged from 1,600 educational films, thrown into a dumpster by Syracuse University after its downsizing effort closed the S.U. Educational Film Library. Plays optically re-photographs archival footage segments that she extracts with a focus on war documentation, science experiments, motion picture and optical inventions and other subjects throughout the history of the twentieth century.

The film explores institutional and personal representations of memory and behavior through a complex interweaving of scientific documentation, animal behavior experiments and vintage pre-school footage. The approach is formalistic and optically printed material is used throughout. The drama of the nuclear family is played by a series of non-human subjects - ranging from mannequins used in 1950s nuclear blast experiments, to doves playing ping-pong. The notion of family is experienced as iconic, nostalgic and a recollected remnant of the nuclear age.

Dana 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. 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. A project of Re-envisioning the Los Angeles River, and Friends of the Los Angeles River.

A portrait of Dana Plays' 90 year old paternal grandmother, Peggy Regler, reminiscing about her love affairs and significant relationships. Regler tells about her failed first marriage, the agreement she had to stay until the children were grown (but to see other lovers) which resulted in the true love she found with her second husband and renowned writer Gustav Regler, who later died a tragic death in India. The love affairs are historically rooted in the political and technological developments 20th century, and are narratively based in a complex sound/image structure. Interludes (silent optically printed film passages narrated with inter-titles excerpted from her diaries, and early childhood memories) formalistically refer to early cinema. The footage in these passages is re-contextualized and interwoven metaphorically throughout the text.

The transgression and confrontation is re-enacted in this brilliant fugue-like 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 homogeneous than in or communal incubation and guilt.

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 [Dana] 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

Lightly processed field recordings fuse disparate strips of saturated 16mm film into an observational diary. The silhouette of a lizard crawling, a sugarcane harvest, American Indian gatherings, a fatherly barbecue and other outdoor scenes draw unexpected corollaries, limning film's possibilities as a momentary medium not bound to a monolithic narrative.

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.

Part dramatic narrative, part improvisation, DON'T MEANS DO explores the personalities of two young 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.

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.

ACROSS THE BORDER is a collage of found footage and documentary images, radio Spanish/English tracks and commentary by Philippe Bourgois, a Stanford Anthropologist trapped in an offensive by the United States-backed Salvadoran Military forces. The film’s position against U.S. intervention in the third world is stated in graphic visuals that employ techniques of optical printing and animation.

ACROSS THE BORDER is a collage of found footage and documentary images, radio Spanish/English tracks and commentary by Philippe Bourgois, a Stanford Anthropologist trapped in an offensive by the United States-backed Salvadoran Military forces. The film’s position against U.S. intervention in the third world is stated in graphic visuals that employ techniques of optical printing and animation.

Dana Plays leverages inversion techniques and optically printed compositing to recast footage of children playing into an ominous siren song of impending doom. A characteristically prominent soundtrack of reversed chatter and focused tableaus of metal keys and chains creates an incantatory air and pushes SILVERFISH into psychedelic territory. - Jackson Scarlett

Filmed on the Crow Indian reservation at Crow Agency, Montana, ARROW CREEK poetically interweaves elements that creates metaphors on cultural themes through sound/image juxtaposition (such as bull riding and the sound of a mass).

In Filmmakers' Monthly, Edgar Daniels described GRAIN GRAPHICS as a structural film "which begins with two frames of a film strip, one 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.”