Daniel Eisenberg
2021The Unstable Object
Daniel Eisenberg
What do a luxury automobile, a cymbal, and a wall clock all have in common? What are the diverse attachments and experiences produced by those who make these things and those who consume them? What exchanges take place through the object itself—sensually, esthetically, abstractly? We often forget that most of the things we use are made by the labor of others, often in distant places, living dramatically different, diverse lives. What do these objects mean to them? How does their labor, their aspirations, their sense of alienation or satisfaction connect to ours?
The Unstable Object
Persistence
Daniel Eisenberg
The third of Daniel Eisenberg’s thematically connected film essays about postwar Europe, PERSISTENCE, an award-winning feature-length experimental documentary in gorgeous color, once again explores the relationships between past, present and future in a complex portrait of the city of Berlin (divided from 1961 to 1989 by the grandiose Berlin Wall).
Persistence
Cooperation of Parts
Daniel Eisenberg
“Cooperation Of Parts is not a literal documentary or narrative but a complex poetic text that constructs a dialogue with history through written and spoken statements and an inquiring camera. The film looks at the past through historical monuments and juxtaposes these shots with scenes of daily life in the cities of Eastern Europe. It fuses the personal diary tradition with the formal concerns of conceptual cinema to vividly present the towns in Poland that Eisenberg visited, towns that offer mute testimony of the concentration camps where his family was destroyed. This is a moving and compelling self-portrait created through the vision of the present and the memory of the culture, places, and people of the past.”— John Hanhardt, Whitney Biennial Catalogue, 1989
Cooperation of Parts
Displaced Person
Daniel Eisenberg
Daniel Eisenberg's film (or "memory essay," as theorist Nora Alter referred to DISPLACED PERSON) is a challenge to a conventional view of history, a provocation using traditional documentary forms: found footage, newsreels, a radio lecture of French anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss and Ludwig van Beethoven's "Razumovsky" quartets.
Displaced Person
