SUNDAY OCTOBER 20, 2002

Lifestyle

Vision strays far from mainstream

Guest lecturer Dana Plays' goal is to elevate
her films to a higher form of visual art

Julianne Crane
Staff writer

Since the earliest days of moving pictures, filmmakers have been
experimenting with the form.

Still frame from Dana Plays' film Nuclear Family.

Today the genre of experimental film is more closely associated with the
visual arts than with movies at the multiplex.

"Experimental cinema is considered to be an avant-garde form of film
that operates in the antithesis to the Hollywood model," says Los
Angeles filmmaker Dana Plays. "Its very purpose is to critique film."

Plays, an associate professor of film at Occidental College, will be in
Spokane this week to kick off the 2002-2003 Visiting Artists Lecture
Series. "Artists and the Moving Image" is sponsored by the Northwest
Museum of Arts and Culture, Eastern Washington University and
Spokane Falls Community College.

"This year's series," says EWU art professor Lanny DeVuono, "is
examining the popularity of video as an art form and the intersections
between the 20th-century tradition of experimental film and the
contemporary artist's use of the moving image."

Plays will be followed in February by Canadian video artist Stan
Douglas and in the spring by New York documentary filmmaker and
sculptor Peter Wiehl.

"One of the things that distinguishes experimental film or avant-garde
film (from traditional cinema) is that many of the filmmakers work alone on
a shoestring, which feeds into the aesthetics of low-budget filmmaking,"
Plays said in a telephone interview from her campus office.

She knows the process well. Her body of work includes 18 short
experimental films, videos and interactive media pieces completed over
the past 20 years.

Her work has been screened at numerous festivals and avant-garde film
showcases, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Pacific Film
Archive, Montreal Nouveau Festival, Seattle International Film Festival
and Leipzig Documentary Film Festival.

As part of the Visiting Artist Lecture Series, Plays will talk about her work
and screen her award-winning film "Nuclear Family."

In this film Plays explores institutional and personal representations of
memory and behavior through a complex interweaving of scientific
documentation, animal behavior experiments and vintage preschool
footage.

The 22-minute production features a series of nonhuman 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.

"It creates a metaphor for the dark turbulence within the nuclear family
itself," says Plays. "The images reflect things that informed the notion of
the family -- reward and punishment systems, sibling rivalry, aggression
and love -- through the ways these animals are behaving with one
another. They take on a double meaning. The psychology experiments
were designed to understand human nature more through animal
behavior."

The process of making the film actually began in 1996 when Plays
salvaged outdated educational films from a Dumpster at Syracuse
University, where she was teaching.

"That's where I began selecting the specific science experiments for the
film," she says.

"Nuclear Family" is within the found-footage filmmaking genre that
essentially extracts and reworks existing footage into a new context that
takes on a new, contemporary meaning.

Plays spent endless hours alone in the dark, watching old, sometimes
grainy flickering images. She made thousands of decisions regarding
image selection, editing, sound, movement and sequence.

In 2001 she entered "Nuclear Family" into several independent film
festivals and garnered numerous awards, including the prestigious
Jurors' Choice Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival, and
Honorable Mention at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

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At a glance

Hear the filmmaker

Experimental filmmaker Dana Plays will
speak as part of the Visiting Artist Lecture
Series on Tuesday at noon in the Eastern
Washington University Art Building
auditorium, Seventh and I streets, Cheney;
Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Northwest Museum
of Arts and Culture auditorium, 2316 W.
First Ave.; and Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. in
the Spartan Theatre on the Spokane Falls
Community College campus, 3410 Fort
George Wright Dr. All events are free and
open to the public.
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The Inlander