"Unravelling a turbulent family history through photographs that reveal little of the bigamy, child abuse and mental illness that went on behind it. Reeves use multi-image techniques to confront this interior storehouse of pain, hoping that by naming the hurtful milestones on his own troubled journey, he'll find "the clear song of one whole life". Most powerfully however, he takes this inner accounting beyond the merely private realm to confront, through the over-laying of historical archive footage, the sufferings of so many, many children in the era of mechanised mass destruction."
JOHNSTON, Trevor, Time Out Magazine, London, (May 1995)
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Documentation
"In Obsessive Becoming, Reeves back-lights his family's peculiar and sometimes painful story with some of century's more grievous events: the Warsaw Ghetto, Hiroshima, the Vietnam War. Growing up under the stern hand of his ruffian father, Milton, was but a miniature of the high drama that pitted clan against clan, nation against nation. To feel compassion for Milton who, as it turns out, was also an abused child, is to triumph over the catastrophe of repetition. "What we have failed to look for in ourselves will come back again and again to sleep in the dreams of our children", Reeves exclaims. Obsessive Becoming is an attempt to acknowledge those failings and then, hope against hope, thwart the age-long cycle of cruelty."
SEID, Steve. "Obsessive Becoming: The Video Poetics of Daniel M. Reeves", Mill Valley Film Festival Souvenir Program, Mill Valley, (1996)
