DISPLACED PERSON works with a carefully chosen set of particular elements in order to explore the larger questions within the historical field. Stately and sinuous passages from a Beethoven string quartet create a complex argumentation around images and text. This music, both sympathetic and distanced, establishes rhythm and breadth in relation to a radio interview with Claude Levi-Strauss, and archival footage obtained from rephotographing Marcel Ophul's The Sorrow and the Pity. These elements wheel through many revolutions of repetitions and combinations, forming multiple perspectives. Through recontextualization, meaning blossoms rationally and incongruously like the alleged blossoming of flowers that took place in the dead of winter in wartime Germany, brought on by the intense temperatures of exploding shells.
DISPLACED PERSON is a tether that entwines and unravels; by necessity and the nature of its subject it is inconclusive.
1981, 16mm, b&w/so, 11m, $35
The images for COOPERATION OF PARTS were shot in Europe in 1983. The film begins at a train station in Calais, France and ends on a street in Radom, Poland. In between are images of Paris, Munich, Dachau, Berlin, Warsaw and Auschwitz/Birkenau.
Unlike most films that deal with the Holocaust, COOPERATION OF PARTS takes place firmly in the present and does not attempt to recapitulate history. Using lists, descriptions of photographs, a catalog of proverbs, images of streets, trains, ruins and riots, the film explores the territory of the recent past with a second generation perspective, distanced through time and reflection. With the visual field as a touchstone for a complex set of narrative associations, the film spins a tight web of memory, history, and experience. It is within this web that the film finds its wider significance: as a model for how daily life, history, first hand and second hand experience bind, through purpose or chance, to form identity itself.
Award: Honorable Mention, New England Film Festival
1987, 16mm, color/so, 42m, $115
PERSISTENCE is a meditation on the reverberant time after a great historical rupture - about what is common to moments such as these - about the continuous and discontinuous threads of history ....
"Pulling in anchors of ephemerality, reconstruction, and salvage, and treating the present as the past and vice versa in a redemptive fashion, this hefty parcel from Daniel Eisenberg interrogates the soul of history. PERSISTENCE completes a trilogy of films that started with DISPLACED PERSON, and COOPERATION OF PARTS, through its counter-linear imperative seemingly aims at making such structures arbitrary. Footage of various sites around Germany being rearranged after the fall of the Berlin Wall enables Eisenberg to de- then recontextualize the flotsam and jetsam of a collective memorial record that is ever up for grabs. Eisenberg literally reaches into the dust-bin of neglected film (glowing, gorgeous color tracking shots of post-war German rubble taken by Army Signal Corps camera crews), architecture (museums, statues, the fractured, impermanent itself), and diaries (texts coded only by time), then strains what he has retrieved into this personalized artifact. ... PERSISTENCE reminds the viewer of the human element - erring memory - in the pose and posture of history." - The San Francisco Bay Guardian
Awards and Exhibition: Berlin Film Festival; Sydney Film Festival; Honorable Mention, film+arc.graz; Honorable Mention, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Vue sur les Docs Film Festival, Marseilles.
1997, 16mm, color/so, 86m, $225
VHS Sale: $80 Home; $350 Other