Two women hug inside a fluorescent-lit currency exchange. Two men at a construction site work their way across wet cement, smoothing the surface with trowels. Seen through a window, a giddy couple in a gym spar with rapid martial arts moves. A sleeping boy snores in his bed.
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These and 71 other disconnected scenes make up Something More Than Night, a film directed by Daniel Eisenberg (who also recorded sound) and shot by cinematographer Ingo Kratisch over two years in Chicago between nine at night and four in the morning. The 77-minute work, distilled from more than nine hours of 16-millimeter footage, is an observant nocturne reminiscent of the paintings of Edward Hopper. But it also evokes the early days of cinema, when the Lumiere brothers trained their cameras on the streets of Paris in 1895 to record minute-long “actualities.”
Eisenberg, chair of the School of the Art Institute’s department of film, video, and new media, has worked as an editor on traditional film projects such as the civil rights documentary series Eyes On the Prize, but his own work is more experimental. Persistence, a meditative study of Berlin shot during a 1991-’92 residency with Berliner Kunstlerprogramm, blends Eisenberg’s shots of the contemporary urban landscape with U.S. Air Force footage of Berlin in June 1945 and clips from Germany Year Zero, Roberto Rossellini’s 1947 drama set in the ruined postwar city. The sound track is filled with narration and music; the film’s 22 sections are defined by fussy titles decked out with Roman numerals, parentheses, colons, and ellipses.
