The Persistence of the Archive: The Documentary Fictions of Daniel Eisenberg

Scott Durham analyzes the themes of documentation, fiction and the archive in Daniel Eisenberg’s postwar trilogy.  This is done by examining Eisenberg’s Persistence, in which he films the offices of the Stasi headquarters in former East Berlin which housed a reportedly 200 km long row of surveillance files documenting the comings and goings of East German citizens.  In this building documentation was used to produce an archival fiction, just as, for Eisenberg, documentary filmmaking abstracts everyday experience.