December 15, Thursday, 7:30PM, 2005
Filmic Essays: Daniel Eisenberg

Born in Israel in 1954, Daniel Eisenberg studied film at the State University of New York at Binghamton with Ernie Gehr, Larry Gottheim, Klaus Wyborny, Saul Levine and Ken Jacobs. For three decades, Daniel has been making nonfiction independent and avant-garde work, "interrogating "official" histories and investigating personal stories within the context of major social and political events." He lived and worked in Boston for 14 years but now resides in Chicago where he is the Chair of the Department of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Exhibition/Screenings: Museum of Modern Art, NY; University of Amsterdam; Goldsmiths College, University of London; Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Bangkok Experimental Film Festival; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Musee du Cinema, Brussels; Filmmuseum, Munich. Collections: Centre Georges Pompidou; Museum of Modern Art; Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek; Nederlands Film Museum. Awards: Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; DAAD Berlin Fellowship. http://www.danieleisenberg.com

Displaced Person (11min, 16mm, 1981)

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. - Canyon Cinema

DE:"I work slowly and quietly. It's important for me. There's a time to talk about your work and a time not to, and I feel that the balance for me personally is that there's a huge amount of timenot to be public with the work, and the public part of it, whether it's in discussion or showing is a smaller part of that process. You know in the seventies there were many experimental filmmakers who did a lot of substantial work, and much of their work is really wonderful and important, but I also rejected it for myself, in the sense that I never felt comfortable taking on the mantle of the "structural" approach. It always seemed that I could come up with any number of structural or formal experiments in film and yet they would have nothing of me in them, and that was very disturbing. So I had to figure out a way out of that. One of those ways was with camera movement, and not in the sense that it had anything to do with Brakhage's idea of camera movement, which, as I read it, is in some ways an extension of his eye and his life. I was thinking about it much the way Pollock was trying to move away from easel painting. I was trying to use the camera to register formally, emotionally, and physically an image with velocity, with gravity, and with meaning, all at once. Not an easy task and I'm not so sure it works in every case but it was at least a way out.

As far as the work with found footage, I was interested in simultaneity, with the possibilities of what could happen at the same time in sound and image, and also because I work very often in the documentary film world I was trying to challenge some of the conventions there as well. So a film like "Displaced Person" somehow finds itself in the middle of those concerns as well. I saw what the problems were with the documentaryfilm, how it was always forcibly hammered into shape, and how judgments were being made before anyone really had the right to make them. I wanted to make a work that had a structure that was open enough for multiple readings, for readings that were contrary to each other, for dead ends, for finding oneself in a situation where there were too many choices sometimes. So it was a wonderful thing to create a film that invited the viewer to be as active as the maker. And I think these solutions arose out of thinking very precisely about issues that interested me, and which were really outside of the mainstream of the film discussions that were taking place at the time." - from an interview with Alf Bold, september 1991
http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ27/ABoldDEisenb.html

Cooperation of Parts (42min, 16mm, 1987)

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. - Canyon Cinema