Daniel Eisenberg’s Persistence (1997, 86 min.), which premiered at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival, is the final film in a trilogy that includes Displaced Person (1981) and Cooperation of Parts (1987). Shot in Berlin during the German Unification (1991-92), Persistence documents the change in landscape that accompanies historical rupture, and the ways in which the past informs our construction of the future. Using filmic quotations from Rossellini’s Germany: Year Zero and archival materials from the US Department of Defense, Eisenberg weaves ideas through past and present, back and forth, questioning the ways we invest site, event, document, and testimony with the power to direct our lives. Dan Eisenberg was born in Israel in 1954 and emigrated to the United States in the late 1950s. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.