The Ister: a cinematic essay on Heidegger by Alejandro A. Vallega
(Director of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum 2004; Author of Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking on Exilic Grounds)

  The Ister is a cinematic essay that by rereading Heidegger´s famous lecture on Hölderlin’s poem Der Ister engages the philosopher’s thought in some of its most controversial as well as provoking aspects. The work moves through Heidegger´s lecture while, at the same time, following the trajectory of the Ister (the Danube) from Rumania to the black forest in Germany. The work’s path is configured by a rich weaving of images of the Danube, its cultures and memories, of citations from Heidegger’s lecture, and of discussions of Heidegger´s thought by Philippe Lacoue-Labarth, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, and finally the filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.

  The film explicitly addresses Heidegger through the issue of our technological existence, the possibility and responsibility of the thought of being after the Holocaust, the sense of language in a time when myth telling no longer occurs as its foundation, and, finally, the impossibility of recovering Heidegger´s thought in light of the way these issues situate us today. As Syberberg makes clear in the last section of the film, ultimately, it is impossible for us to claim fully Heidegger´s sense of the Ister. In retrospect, it is this awareness of such impossibility that gives the work its intensity as well as its thoughtful openness; the last section leads one to the reinterpretation and questioning of the first three parts, and their attempts to engage Heidegger, in light of this impossibility. The awareness of a certain loss in the attempt to engage Heidegger´s thinking also shows the filmmakers’ attentiveness to Heidegger’s understanding of thinking in its finitude as an experience that takes place as a presencing and loss. It is also a sense of the finitude and irrecoverable character of the experience of thought that implicitly frames the film, as in traveling along the river’s path the concrete sense of thinking is becomes more and more apparent.

  The trajectory of the film, from Rumania to the various points in Germany where the Danube finds its sources, implicitly situates the issues discussed in the film in an exilic space, i.e., in a space for reflection in which any claim to the identity and determinate cultural origins of ideas have to be reconfigured in light of insurmountable differences - the lives and the cultures that gather and spring along its course, and which underlie the river’s single presence. With this subtle staging of Heidegger’s thought in a mise en scène of differences, The Ister exposes some of the most powerful transformative currents and possibilities at play in the philosopher’s reading of the Western tradition through Hölderlin. As the film carries us along the Danube, the river’s images recall the differences in which articulations of identity arise and come to pass.

  The Ister’s thoughtfulness lies in its encounter of Heidegger’s thought in awareness of the impossibility, the loss, and the concrete differences in which philosophical thinking finds its configurations. In following Heidegger’s path and bringing it to the river, The Ister opens its audience to the complexities and necessities afforded philosophy by Heidegger´s thought today. With their visually articulate commentary, Barison and Ross have made a unique contribution to the critical articulation of Heidegger’s thinking, this in a time when images seldom engage thought and words often seem insufficient in their articulation of thought’s movement in its loss and difference.

September 2004