DANA PLAYS - COMMENTS BY CURATORS OF NUCLEAR FAMILY

NUCLEAR FAMILY - Related Notes

Pacific Film Archive
“With the series Retrieved Images, we continue to explore the recent work of contemporary artists who reclaim, recycle, and sometimes rescue archival and historical images, which they excavate in diverse ways. Some respond to the films’ material quality, others to their content; all share a concern with retrieving these images from obscurity and exploring their histories. Some rework the images, some integrate them into larger pieces, which include their own new footage, others allow the material to stand untouched. “Found footage” is rarely just found.

Dana Plays’ Nuclear Family (201, 22mins. Color, 16mm) is 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

San Francisco Cinematheque
“Dana Plays will present a selection of films that she has made over the past fourteen years, including her recent award-winning Nuclear Family uses found footage to create a dark portrait of the violence and turbulences underlying seemingly ordinary family life.”
-Steve Anker, Curator San Francisco Cinematheque


Black Maria Film Festival –Maryland Film Festival May 2, 2002
NUCLEAR FAMILY (dir. Dana Plays, LA, CA) 22 minutes, 16mm
“An arresting, deconstructed, yet nostalgic work that resonates with optically reprinted images from the 1950's. 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

Women in the Director’s Chair Film Festival
Nuclear Family Dana Plays 22min Beta “Compelling us to consider the family as a recollected remnant of the nuclear age, this absorbing experimental film interweaves optically printed footage of 1950s nuclear blasts, animal behavior experiments and pre-school scenes.”