Something More Than Night

Director: Daniel Eisenberg    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Dan Eisenberg was born in Israel in 1954 and emigrated to the United States with his family in the late 1950s. He studied film at the State University of New York at Binghamton with Ernie Gehr, Larry Gottheim, Klaus Wyborny, Saul Levine and Ken Jacobs. Dan Eisenberg has been making films since 1975. In 1991/92 he stayed in Berlin as guest of the DAAD (Berliner Künstlerprogramm). Dan Eisenberg teaches at the The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Country: USA

Year: 2003

Synopsis: A film that examines the urban environment under the cloak of darkness must presume to reveal a reality that we don’t know, and tries to dispel projections and fears that are for the most part located in the imagination, in a memory of film, television, or the novel. It’s under this general principle that my work brought me to consider the urban landscape and contemporary urban conditions. Because I construct images and sounds I mean this less sociologically than I do sensually. The film work tries to make clear how the urban environment conditions and reveals social space primarily through its reception by the senses. Something More Than Night is primarily shot in public spaces: airports, train stations, malls, downtown offices, industrial zones, and the many ethnic neighborhoods that make Chicago an exemplary city of migration at the beginning of the 21st Century. In using images of the city at night as a fulcrum to re-conceptualize both elapsed and historical time, it becomes a composite portrait of both the contemporary international city and our present time of manifold dislocations. In contrast to the city-symphony films of the 1920’s, whose utopian vision of the industrial age was a composition made from harmonies of light, this film describes the city with our own familiar senses of the night; informed by labor, boredom, fear, fatigue, and anticipation. Something More Than Night recalls the special relation cinema has to daily life. Daniel Eisenberg

Forum participation year: 2003

Forum catalogue PDF: Download

Tags: Experimental film