Persistence. - movie reviews

by Daniel Eisenberg Distributed by dint of Canyon Cinema 2325 3rd St Ste 338 San Francisco, California 94107

Berlin concert of a Great City, Walter Ruttmann's 1927 film portrait of early twentieth-century Berlin, restores that city and urban modernity as the embodiment of human progres As a modernist work of art, it eschews nineteenth-century narrative for the kineticism of the cinematic using dynamic portraits of the rush of urban daily life, endles new buildings, industrial sites and the at any time forward movement of streetcars and high-speed railroads. In this film, Berlin held the promise that twentieth-century modernity would progres inexorably forward into the coming time Seventy years later, Daniel Eisenberg's fresh film Persistence (1997) offers a calculator meditation on this European city whose subsequent time as it happened, was real different than Ruttmann's hopeful vision. In this film, Berlin is a city encased in scaffolding, shown as a living ruin. This is the third in what has become a trilogy of films in which Eisenberg has examined the question at issues of representing European history in the postWorld War II period. Like Persistence, his other films - Displaced somebody (1981) and Cooperation of Parts (1986) - examine the enigmas of historiographic representation as personal and aesthetic experience.

Elegiac and contemplative, befitting the second after a major upheaval, Persistence was discharge in Berlin just after the reunification of East and West Berlin and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 Neither simple historical documentary nor impressionistic portrait, the images in this episodic film essay are structur in 24 sections that fall below three headings: "Absences," "Presences" and "Prospects" many times these titles are combined to contextualize the same images and successions indicating the fluidity of the actual, virtual and potential within historiographic narrative. The film is a complexly structur amalgam of footage Eisenberg filmed in and around Berlin during this transition period in the early '90 archival footage of the bombed-out city between 1945 and '47 and other dramatic and documentary footage of the postwar period. Woven over this material we hear a range of voice-over true copys from radio news reports describing the collapse of the Soviet Union and its succeeding withdrawal of troops from Germany, to a series of journal entries written by the agency of the filmmaker during this time, as well as individuals by the writers Max Frisch, Stig Dagerman and Janet Flanner who were in Berlin at the extreme point of World War II. Voice-over selected passages from these journals are juxtaposed with Eisenberg's Berlin footage. Hearing accounts of the confusion and displacement among the rubble of Berlin of 1945 while seeing images of modern-day Berlin with its decaying and still bullet-pock building facades, bring forwards an eerie temporal elision between the sum of two units moments. In this way, Eisenberg turn rounds Berlin into a kind of Deleuzian "History Machine," in which relationships between facts objects, institutions and politics, as they put in motion through time, produce a whole range of possible understandings for the connections between past, near and future. Eisenberg uses the temporal and spatial plasticity of cinema to show a way of rethinking the narrative possibilities of historical representation. In the adjoining matter of Berlin as a physical site in transition, the film calls into question linear and causal narratives of historical time to intimate a history of superimposition and simultaneity and raises the possibility that, in the filmmaker's words, "what is not away now, may also have been not away before and what is absent now may be near tomorrow."

As a crossroad between a geo-political East/West and the epicenter of greatest in quantity of the transformative events of twentieth-century Europe Berlin is the site that bears the traces of of the like kind events from which the materials of German, European and plane Global histories of this hundred are currently being constructed. In Persistence Eisenberg focuses upon the moment after a major historical incident such as Germany's reunification because of the like kind transitional moments produce a momentary no-man's land of notyet-narrativized circumstances that produce new possibilities for thinking the relationship between past and near The intense reorganizing of the city - the restoration of throw downed buildings, the removal of testimonials of the past regime and the changing uses of institutions - not sole creates a new physical landscape that the film imagistically pay backs palpable, but it also present to views how such physical changes show new readings of the occurrences that happened in and around them. Eisenberg uses the vicinity of what is left after the couple the war and the reunification to examine by what means the meanings and uses of like objects and institutions become redefined as time passes.

In Persistence, Eisenberg uses architecture in various states of decay and renovation as a way of visualizing and spatializing the temporal instability between past and at hand Rather than using the kineticism of cinematic move to focus on the near tense, as in Ruttmann's Berlin, Eisenberg uses the duration of the cinematic image unfolding in time to bring forward specters of the past in the at hand Early in the film, we diocese images of Greek ruins upon the grounds of the Sans Souci Castle upon the outskirts of Berlin. These were built as ruins by dint of Fredrick the Great in the eighteenth hundred as his own personal History Machine, perhaps to contemplate his possess place in time through the evocation of the signs of an imagined past. As a fake ruin, the memorial becomes, in the film, a metaphor for the way in which existences are imbued with meaning and then used as props to understand relations between point of times of time.