DANA PLAYS selected
filmography • experimental films • documentaries • digital installations
THE SAUGAGE KING'S DAUGHTER
(60:00, HD, 2013)
DEMISE OF SUGAR
(30:00 Documentary, 2013)
Documentary explores the history of sugar plantations conversion to tourism in the West Indies as told by native Antiguan, Ambassador and historian, Sir Keithlyn Smith.
URBAN ESTUARY
(30:00min. Documentary, 2013)
Environmental advocacy documentary on the watersheds of Tampa Bay Region, and environmental activist achievements 2006-present.
LES GRANDES ORGUES / THE PIPE ORGAN: AN ESSAY
(2012, 60min, HD)
French with English Subtitles) Musicology documentary on making and workings of a pipe organ featuring concert organist Haig Mardirosian and designer Lynn Dobson.
EXQUISIT CORPSES
(10min, 2011, Digital Film)
This is a digital film re-edited with sound and a multi-generation of images to allude to the decay of cinema and the advancing of digital film.
Atlantic Pacific Prize, Ybor Film Festival 2010
Athens International Film and Video Festival, Ohio, Ruth Bradley Festival Director
Two Screen Installation, with sound). This is a series that continues the archival extract series (2008) material, re-edited with sound and a multi-generation of images to allude to the decay of cinema and the advancing of digital film.
•Exhibited at Skolska 28 Communication space and a shorter version presented at my master class at FAMUFest, Praha, Czech Republic.
ARRIVAL/DEPARTURE
Installation Digital Loop (2010) Dana Plays Filmed at the train station at Villefranche-sur-Mer, France, with the DSLR Canon Mark 5 D2 Camera Looped for exhibition on DVD.
RUE DE L'HERMITAGE
(30:00min, 2010)
L'HERMITAGE
(2010, HD, 4:23)
silent two-channel Installation, pictures and text) Historical photographs dissolving with crawl text on left screen with journal text on the right screen in block. Exhibited at Skolska 28 Communication space and a shorter version presented at my master class at FAMUFest, Praha, Czech Republic.
ARCHIVAL EXTRACTS INSTALLATION
(2008) LCD Installation HD Loop). Two Channel Digital Installation with Vertical three Frame and horizontal monitors.
•Exhibited: C. Emerson Fine Arts, July 17-August 18, 2008. Exhibited at C. Emerson Fine Arts Gallery, St. Petersburg, Florida.
Funded by David Delo Research Fellowship, 2007-2008 by The University of Tampa, Tampa, Florida.
Archival Extract series (2008) LCD HD Installation Vertical Frames Series.
Cinema Triptych (2008) HD 2 min. (vertical screen composite)
Villefranche Sur-Mer (2008) HD 1:50 min
Exquisite Corpse (2008) HD 2:23 min
softlanding (2008) HD 34 sec
Surface Tension (2008) HD 47 sec
THE STORY OF OTTILIE MOORE MONTAGE SEGMENTS
(2008)
21 minutes HD Digital Film
Produced, directed, shot, edited by Dana Plays.
•Screened at Cannes International Film Festival and Market, May 6-21, 2009, Cannes, France.
•Screened at Cannes Film Festival, Shorts Corner, Cannes Film Festival, France, 2008; Nova 525, July 21, 2008, curated by Lori Johns of the C. Emerson Fine Arts Gallery, Tampa, Florida. Funded by Dana Summer Faculty Research Grants, The University of Tampa.
.
RHIZOME
(2006) DV, 14 minutes
Director’s Citation, Black Maria Film Festival, 2007.
Rhizome (2006), 14 minute digital loop, 2006. Installed Digitally at Electronics Alive, Scarfone/Hartley Gallery, Tampa, Florida.
SALVAGE PARADIGM
(2005)
28:26 minutes, silent DVD Installation.
Evidence Is Everywhere [between gallery and cinema space] Playspace Gallery, San Francisco, California, September-October 2005.
Curated by Tanya Zimbardo, Media Curator for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Post Industrial Carnival, curated by Rosolinda
Guest Curator Tanya Zimbardo, of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Salvage Paradigm 1 (2005), 10 minutes, silent
Screened, First Person Cinema, Boulder Colorado, October 2005.
THE SAUGAGE KING'S DAUGHTER
(60:00, HD, 2013)
A post-modernist
experimental documentary about the filmmaker’s great aunt, Ottilie Moore,
who provided safe-haven for more than 300 Jewish children at villa
L'Hermitage, including the artist Charlotte Salomon, during WWII in
Villefranche sur-Mer, France. In-progress. (Material for the documentary
has been presented as a two screen installation, entitled Rue de L’Hermitage,
at Skolska Gallery in Prague, and at the Cannes Short Film corner, at
the Cannes Film Festival in France, as a 30 minute short The Story of
Ottilie Moore, Montage Segments).
DEMISE OF SUGAR
(30:00 Documentary, 2013)
Documentary explores the history of sugar plantations conversion to tourism in the West Indies as told by native Antiguan, Ambassador and historian, Sir Keithlyn Smith.
URBAN ESTUARY
(30:00min. Documentary, 2013)
Environmental advocacy documentary on the watersheds of Tampa Bay Region, and environmental activist achievements 2006-present.
LES GRANDES ORGUES / THE PIPE ORGAN: AN ESSAY
(2012, 60min, HD)
French with English Subtitles) Musicology documentary on making and workings of a pipe organ featuring concert organist Haig Mardirosian and designer Lynn Dobson.
EXQUISIT CORPSES
(10min, 2011, Digital Film)
This is a digital film re-edited with sound and a multi-generation of images to allude to the decay of cinema and the advancing of digital film.
Atlantic Pacific Prize, Ybor Film Festival 2010
Athens International Film and Video Festival, Ohio, Ruth Bradley Festival Director
Two Screen Installation, with sound). This is a series that continues the archival extract series (2008) material, re-edited with sound and a multi-generation of images to allude to the decay of cinema and the advancing of digital film.
•Exhibited at Skolska 28 Communication space and a shorter version presented at my master class at FAMUFest, Praha, Czech Republic.
ARRIVAL/DEPARTURE
Installation Digital Loop (2010) Dana Plays Filmed at the train station at Villefranche-sur-Mer, France, with the DSLR Canon Mark 5 D2 Camera Looped for exhibition on DVD.
Arriving /
Departing pays homage to the first films created by the Lumière
Brothers -- L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895) and
Dziga Vertov’s train sequences in Man with a Movie Camera. In a recent
trip to the Cannes Film Festival, I set out on the train to Villefranche
sur-Mer (as Woman with a Movie Camera) with my camera and tripod to
capture images of locations for The Sausage King’s Daughter (my feature
film work in- progress about my great a Ottilie Moore, who sponsored
the artist Charlotte Salomon, and others during WWII in the South of
France). The visual aesthetics of these pictures explore both the magic
of capturing a moving image on film (in this case digital) of train
arriving and departing the train station, and secondly exploring the
visual dynamics of overlay montage rich with potential visual metaphor.
RUE DE L'HERMITAGE
(30:00min, 2010)
Two Screen
Installation with sound. New material shot at Rue De L’Hermitage,
the site of the demolished Villa L’Hermitage, Villefranche sur Mer,
and presented for the first time, was combined with a two screen segment
series of photographs and text, and combined with images from Story
of Ottilie Moore Montage Segments (2008), re-edited and occupied one
of the screens in the second half of the installation.
• Exhibited at Skolska 28 Gallery, and re-edited as a shorter version for masterclass at FAMUFest, Praha, Czech Republic, and Joods/Jewish Museum, Amsterdam, Holland.
• Exhibited at Skolska 28 Gallery, and re-edited as a shorter version for masterclass at FAMUFest, Praha, Czech Republic, and Joods/Jewish Museum, Amsterdam, Holland.
L'HERMITAGE
(2010, HD, 4:23)
silent two-channel Installation, pictures and text) Historical photographs dissolving with crawl text on left screen with journal text on the right screen in block. Exhibited at Skolska 28 Communication space and a shorter version presented at my master class at FAMUFest, Praha, Czech Republic.
ARCHIVAL EXTRACTS INSTALLATION
(2008) LCD Installation HD Loop). Two Channel Digital Installation with Vertical three Frame and horizontal monitors.
•Exhibited: C. Emerson Fine Arts, July 17-August 18, 2008. Exhibited at C. Emerson Fine Arts Gallery, St. Petersburg, Florida.
Funded by David Delo Research Fellowship, 2007-2008 by The University of Tampa, Tampa, Florida.
Archival Extract series (2008) LCD HD Installation Vertical Frames Series.
Cinema Triptych (2008) HD 2 min. (vertical screen composite)
Villefranche Sur-Mer (2008) HD 1:50 min
Exquisite Corpse (2008) HD 2:23 min
softlanding (2008) HD 34 sec
Surface Tension (2008) HD 47 sec
THE STORY OF OTTILIE MOORE MONTAGE SEGMENTS
(2008)
21 minutes HD Digital Film
Produced, directed, shot, edited by Dana Plays.
•Screened at Cannes International Film Festival and Market, May 6-21, 2009, Cannes, France.
•Screened at Cannes Film Festival, Shorts Corner, Cannes Film Festival, France, 2008; Nova 525, July 21, 2008, curated by Lori Johns of the C. Emerson Fine Arts Gallery, Tampa, Florida. Funded by Dana Summer Faculty Research Grants, The University of Tampa.
.
RHIZOME
(2006) DV, 14 minutes
Director’s Citation, Black Maria Film Festival, 2007.
Rhizome (2006), 14 minute digital loop, 2006. Installed Digitally at Electronics Alive, Scarfone/Hartley Gallery, Tampa, Florida.
SALVAGE PARADIGM
(2005)
28:26 minutes, silent DVD Installation.
Evidence Is Everywhere [between gallery and cinema space] Playspace Gallery, San Francisco, California, September-October 2005.
Curated by Tanya Zimbardo, Media Curator for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Post Industrial Carnival, curated by Rosolinda
Guest Curator Tanya Zimbardo, of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Salvage Paradigm 1 (2005), 10 minutes, silent
Screened, First Person Cinema, Boulder Colorado, October 2005.
“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
“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
“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
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)