Daniel Eisenberg

Daniel Eisenberg’s THE UNSTABLE OBJECT juxtaposes the production of luxury automobiles in Dresden, clocks in Chicago and cymbals in a town outside of Istanbul. These detailed observations of modern factories reveal the distance between the creation and consumption of objects within our globalized economy. This results in a rich visual experience made all the more ironic by the fact that the workers in Chicago assembling the clocks are blind (and therefore never experience the scenes which the filmmaker presents). Although clearly referencing early industrial films, Eisenberg cleverly and attentively recorded all the sound entirely on location, creating a heightened esthetic universe all his own.Read More »

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Daniel Eisenberg’s quiet, voyeuristic portrait of Chicago shrouded in darkness draws us back to the beginning of cinema: to the Lumieres and Albert Kahn’s “Archives of the Planet” to long takes by a fixed-camera with a fixed-lens to images that unfold in durational time. Confronting one-hundred years worth of cinematic conditioning, accomplished through montage and editing that has accelerated the way we experience time, Eisenberg meticulously edited his footage to avoid the chronological thrust of a narrative while evoking the rhythms of a city at night, long a fascination of filmmakers. Eschewing the conventions of fiction and non-fiction, SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT embodies the heightened sensual experience of place, time and memory.Read More »

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). The film was shot through the period of unification in 1991-92 and edited together with films by U.S. Army cameramen (1945-46) obtained from the Department of Defense archives. Read More »