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Displaced Person

Daniel Eisenberg

1981 00:10:15 United StatesEnglishB&WStereo4:316mm film
Tags:
Documentary, Found Footage, History, Jewish, War

Description

This film uses the ‘old fashioned’ conventions of documentary film practice to stand history on its head. There is a narration taken from a radio lecture by Claude Lévi-Strauss entitled, “The Meeting of Myth and Science,” images from the Deutsche Wochenshau of June 25, 1940 that recorded Hitler’s dawn visit to Paris, images from American newsreels, a movement from one of Beethoven’s Rasumovsky Quartets. The film could only succeed, in my mind, if the imprint of prior usage of all elements was clear. The film resides as a third-hand statement in a second-hand world, a world of received knowledge, encoded consciously and unconsciously by the spoken word, the framed image, and the interpreted musical phrase. History is received through others; this film was a method of unraveling the sources of that impossible condition, and of drawing attention to our passive complicity. Its precautionary warning is: keep thinking, even when you can’t understand.

-- Daniel Eisenberg, 1987

This title is only available on POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg.

About Daniel Eisenberg

Daniel Eisenberg has been making films for the past twenty-four years. His work has been shown throughout Europe and North America, with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York; De Unie, Rotterdam; and Kino Arsenal, Berlin; and at film festivals in Berlin, Sydney, London, and Jerusalem. Eisenberg has also edited numerous television documentaries, including Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, and Vietnam: A Television History.

Eisenberg has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. His films are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, and the Australian Film and Television School among others.

Daniel Eisenberg lives in Chicago and teaches in the Filmmaking Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently working on several new film and writing projects.