Persistence (1997)

• 85%
• 1997
• Documentary
• 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). 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. To this added are filmic quotes from Roberto Rossellini's GERMANY YEAR ZERO and texts drawn from the notebooks of Max Frisch, Stig Dagerman and Janet Flanner along with Eisenberg's own journals from Berlin. Interrogating history and challenging erring memory in his idiosyncratic way (and full of lucid connections), Eisenberg's PERSISTENCE became a unique document of the city in transformation, offering a new, remodeled, refashioned narrative for generations to come and watch.