Advanced search
- TITLES
- NAMES
- COLLABORATIONS
Search filters
Enter full date
to
or just enter yyyy, or yyyy-mm below
to
to
to
Exclude
Only includes titles with the selected topics
to
In minutes
to
1-6 of 6
- A post-modernist documentary about the filmmaker's great aunt, Ottilie Moore, a widowed heiress from Brooklyn, New York, of German descent, who provided safe-haven for Jewish children at her Villa L'Ermitage, including the artist Charlotte Salomon, during World War II in Villefranche sur-Mer, France.
- 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 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.
- Exquisite Corpses is a formal study that 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. Director Dana Plays uses random chance operations of the exquisite corpse, by creating vertical triptychs, and mixed frame combinations, of stacked motion picture footage of Muybridge's horse in motion, Edison early toys with her own footage shot with a 16mm camera of the subway train arriving at the station, and animal locomotion study she shot in high speed digital cinematography. The exquisite corpse was a word and picture game used by the surrealists and later a child's game that evolved into a triptych of a drawing made with a paper folded in threes. Ultimately the film is a reflexive comment on narrativity as it interweaves image and text, of Plays' evolving historical project, the story of Ottilie Moore, her great aunt who provided safe haven for refuges, including the Jewish at Villa L'Hermitage, in Villefranche sur- Mer, in the late 30s and early 40s. Through complex structural and formal approaches, including vertical and horizontal structures, Plays visually explores the intersections between private and public histories, making metaphorical connections between location, setting and place, oral and written story telling and refers to the devolving process of history of motion picture film, from the silent era with use of inter-title text and image combinations. This piece was made by Plays using her digital JK Optical Printer optical printer to reprocess found footage she salvaged from dumpsters. The piece has evolved from a series of digital installations exhibited in Prague, Czech Republic, at the Skolska 28 Gallery, and an earlier permutation of this piece exhibited as part of the Film Lingual II exhibition, at C. Emerson Fine Arts Gallery in St. Petersburg Florida curated by Lori Johns.
- Wolfpack Squad is a short film that dissects various types of distracted driving and their consequences. The film, edited in montage style, shows documentary footage of the Tampa Wolfpack Squad in action, party scenes, texting while driving, news footage of accidents, and dramatizations of the incarceration of youth as a consequence.