Der Ister

It's about time. As you know, easy bootlegs of criminally over-priced DVD's are a horrible, horrible thing, and should never under any circumstances be spontaneously shared, and especially not with any members of well-deserving international group philosophy weblogs who just happen to reside in the United States.

THE ISTER, a multiple award-winning film focussing on Martin Heidegger's
1942 Hoelderlin lectures, is now available for purchase on DVD worldwide.

For more information see http://www.theister.com/
To purchase visit http://www.theister.com/dvd.html

In addition to the main feature, we have added a number of special features:

Werner Hamacher: On Heidegger's 1942 Hölderlin lectures
In this 25-minute special feature, leading scholar Werner Hamacher engages
explicitly with Heidegger's text, focusing on the  themes of the foreign,
home and the uncanny. Accompanied by images from the original feature,
this short feature invites the  viewer to rethink The Ister in light of
Professor Hamacher's candid discussion.

Jean-Luc Nancy: On a drawing
A painting on the wall of his apartment, composed of text by himself and
Jacques Derrida, prompts an informal explanation  from Professor Nancy.

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg: On Myth Today
A short discussion on the place of myth on contemporary politics and culture.

Bernard Stiegler: Adopting Elsa
Further to his argument about the nature of adoption in The Ister, Bernard
Stiegler speaks about baptising his daughter.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: The Ski Lift at Todtnauberg
The sound of lawnmowers causes Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe to recall his own
visit to the site of Martin Heidegger's famous  cabin in Todtnauberg.

The film is in PAL format, on a dual-layer DVD, and will play in all zones
in which it is sold. Chapter and scene access  menus allow you to navigate
through the film.

For those of of you who are not aware, THE ISTER won two festival prizes
last year: The * Prix GNCR (Groupement National des  Cinémas de Recherche)
* at the Marseille International Documentary Film Festival and  the *
Quebec Film Critics Award * at  the Montreal Festival of Nouveau Cinema.
The film continues to screen at campuses around the world, and some more
theatrical dates will be announced soon.

AVAILABILTY: Please note the DVD are in production and will arrive in our
offices in 2-3 weeks. Delivery to your address will  take 4-5 weeks from
now.

PRICING
Individuals in Australia $54.45 AUD inc GST plus postage and insurance
Individuals Outside Australia $49.95 AUD  plus postage and insurance
Institutional prices: please see http://www.theister.com/dvd.html

We have included a recent review of the film in this email for your
information.

Finally, we'd like to apologise to those of you who have been waiting for
a long time for this release. We took time to get it right, and new
projects have kept us busy as well. So thanks for your patience and enjoy
the film. And Do pass on this email to anyone you think would be
interested.

Best regards
David Barison and Daniel Ross,
Directors+producers, THE ISTER
www.theister.com

To purchase THE ISTER ON DVD visit http://www.theister.com/dvd.html

Notice regarding DVD in USA and Canada

First / Run Icarus films are exclusive distributors of The Ister in the
USA and Canada. In those territories you can only  purchase the film from
them.

They are not planning a retail DVD in the short term. However, DVD and VHS
for public screenings and libraries are available  for rental and
purchase. Prices are geared for institutions, so you may want to petition
your local library, university, or  cinematheque to screen the film or
acquire it on your behalf.

Please visit First / Run Icarus films' website: http://www.frif.com.

The New York Sun
'Incisions on the Rock'
By Adam Kirsch
15 August 2005

Copyright 2005 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC. All rights reserved.

In the beginning, Western philosophy was profoundly mistrustful of the
written word. Socrates was the first thinker to move  beyond poetry and
sophistry to what we now consider philosophy, yet his teaching was purely
oral. To think with Socrates  meant having dinner with him, walking home
from a festival with him, or collaring him in the marketplace; he made
philosophy  an encounter and an experience, but not a text. That was left
for Plato, his disciple, who used writing to preserve Socratic  dialogues
for future generations. Yet Plato himself feared that, by transforming
philosophy into what it remains to this day  - a matter of writing and
reading, not hearing and talking - he was betraying its essence.

In his "Phaedrus," Plato records the myth of Theuth, or Thoth, the god
whom the Egyptians credited with the invention of  writing. Theuth urged
Thamus, the king of Egypt, to teach his people how to write, claiming:
"Here is an accomplishment, my  lord the king, which will improve both the
wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians." But Thamus turned this boast on
its head:  "You who are the father of writing," he insisted, "have out of
fondness for your offspring attributed to it quite the  opposite of its
real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory
and become forgetful. ... And as for  wisdom, your pupils will have the
reputation for it without the reality; they will receive a quantity of
information without  proper instruction, and in consequence be thought
very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant."

Today, for the first time since Plato, we are entering an era when writing
may once again lose its place at the center of  intellectual life. But we
are not going back to the world of Socrates, where genuine thinking and
teaching flourished in  face-to-face encounters. In the age of television
and the Internet, we are not returning to the preliterate, but descending
into the postliterate. Writing may have been merely a trace of the genuine
experience of philosophy, but what will happen  when even the trace
disappears, leaving nothing but images - the images that, to Plato, were
the most transitory and  untrustworthy of all things in this world of
change? Can thinking take place in a visual medium?

That is the question posed, quite self-consciously, by "The Ister," a
fascinating new documentary that made its debut in 2004  and has been
slowly making the rounds of film festivals, art-house cinemas, and
academic conferences. (Though it is available  on DVD in England and
Australia, screenings in the United States must be arranged through
Brooklyn-based First Run Films.)  "The Ister," shot on digital video by a
pair of Australian graduate students, Daniel Ross and David Barison, is a
nonfiction  film but not a documentary, at least not in the usual sense:
For while it does document many things, places, and people, its  central
purpose is not to record an event but to provide an experience - "not
merely to illustrate but to provoke thought,"  in Mr. Ross's words. This
high ambition makes "The Ister," which runs for three hours and took some
five years to produce, an  important test of whether the philosophical
impulse can survive in the new world of images.

Plato's myth of Theuth offers a perfect route into the questions raised by
"The Ister." For the major subject of the film is  the power and danger of
technology, of which Theuth, like the Greek Hermes, was the patron deity.
And the filmmakers' major  interlocutor, the philosopher around whom the
film cautiously circles, is Martin Heidegger, whose suspicion of
technology  went hand in hand with a powerful challenge to conventional
ways of writing and talking about ideas.

The film takes its name from a poem by Friedrich Holderlin, the
late-18thcentury German Romantic, whose hymn to the Danube  River called
it by its ancient Greek name, "the Ister." More specifically, the film is
inspired by a lecture course on "The  Ister" that Heidegger gave in
1942,one of many he devoted to Holderlin's poetry. The formal structure of
the film is simple  but fertile: Camera in hand, Messrs. Ross and Barison
(who never appear onscreen) follow the course of the Danube, from its
mouth on the Black Sea back to its source in Germany.

Their travelogue pays careful atten tion to the bridges and ships and
cities they discover along the way, thus providing an  illustration of
Heidegger's major theme - man's imposition on Nature, in all its
destructive necessity. Messrs. Ross and  Barison produce several lovely
tableaux - of rivers, mountains, forests - but the visual strength of the
film lies not in  beauty but in clever juxtaposition.

In Romania the filmmakers visit the ruins of the bridge across which
Trajan's armies marched into Dacia; in Yugoslavia they  show the bridge at
Novi Sad, destroyed by the NATO bombing campaign in 1999; in Hungary, they
find a bridge at Dunafoldvar  which was attacked by the invading Soviets
in 1956. Over the course of the film, and with very little nudging by the
filmmakers, the figure of the bridge comes to bear the full weight of
Heidegger's critique of technology: As a human  intervention into Nature,
it is both essential to life and bound up with violence and death.

The bridges on the Danube are products of what Heidegger, in his essay
"The Question Concerning Technology," called  "enframing" - a way of
thinking that makes Nature subordinate to human ends. In that essay,
Heidegger showed how his thought  about technology relates to his thought
about poetry, and specifically the poetry of Holderlin. Taking up another
one of the  poet's river-odes, "The Rhine," Heidegger contrasts "'The
Rhine,' as dammed up into the power works, and 'The Rhine,' as  uttered by
the artwork, in the Holderlin's hymn of that name." The contrast speaks
volumes about Heidegger's sense of the  betrayal of Nature - its reticence
and mystery, the essential Being that Holderlin invokes - by technology,
which turns it  into merely an exploitable resource.

To the great credit of Messrs. Ross and Barison, however, they do not stop
at simply illustrating Heidegger's thought; they  allow it to be
challenged, trusting the viewer to take part in a series of complex
philosophical debates. These are expounded  in the interviews that make up
the intellectual pith of "The Ister," a series of talks with three French
philosophers -  Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe. (There is also an interview, much less compelling, with
the  pompous filmmaker Hans-Jurgen Syberberg.) Editing their questions out
almost completely, Messrs. Ross and Barison allow these  thinkers to
elaborate on their own disagreements with Heidegger's views on technology
- disagreements that spring from a  fundamental indebtedness and respect.
Thanks to the informality of the settings - we see Mr. Stiegler quieting
his dog and  blowing out candles at his birthday party - the men become
more than talking heads; we take in some of their eccentricities  along
with their ideas.

As the filmmakers' itinerary reaches Germany, "The Ister" turns to
confront another, more controversial aspect of Heidegger:  his embrace of
Nazism, and his seeming refusal, even after the war, to acknowledge the
magnitude of its evil. His lecture on  the Holderlin poem, after all, took
place at the height of the Nazi period and contained admiring references
to "National  Socialism and its historical uniqueness." Mr.
Lacoue-Labarthe devotes most of his screen time to explaining Heidegger's
infamous equation of the concentration camps with "motorized agriculture,"
and elaborates a powerful critique of Heidegger's  view of history. And
Mr. Stiegler, the most charismatic figure in the film, convincingly
challenges Heidegger's bleak view of  technology, arguing that were it not
for technology - above all, that of writing - we could not live
historically at all.

This lesson, too, is implicit in Holderlin's poetry; as he writes in "The
Ister":

But the rock needs incisions
And the earth needs furrows,
Would be desolate else, unabiding.

"The Ister," then, not only contains a humanistic defense of technology;
it is itself part of that defense, using one of the  newest media to
address some of the most ancient questions. The film cannot by itself
serve as an introduction to Heidegger's  thought, and much is inevitably
simplified and taken for granted. To fully appreciate what Messrs. Ross
and Barison are up  to, it is helpful to have already spent some time with
Heidegger's work. But the fact that it could be made, and even
distributed, is heartening testimony to the potential of a usually barren
medium.

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Film-Philosophy Email Discussion Salon.

Comments

[Jacob]

I may "know someone" with a copy of this, and willing to share with you fine folks. You do accept "review copies" of things around here, do you not?

[Rik]

Would be interested in a copy.

[David]

...will
> open theatrically in New York on February 10th for a one-week limited
> run at the Anthology Film Archive, 32 Second Avenue. Following this
> engagement, THE ISTER will then open theatrically in other cities
> throughout the U.S.

...

> We hope that you will be interested in writing a review of THE ISTER,
> or using it as the basis for a longer 'think piece' article (no pun
> intended). You will find more detailed information on the film on our
> website at http://www.frif.com/new2005/ist.html. You may download a
> press kit and high-resolution images from our website at
> http://www.frif.com/presskit/presskit.html (Login is frifuser and the
> password is pr355kit). Preview DVDs or VHS videotapes of THE ISTER are
> available on request. The filmmakers are available for interviews.
> Gary Crowdus
> Director of Marketing and Publicity
> First Run/Icarus Films
> 32 Court Street
> 21st Floor
> Brooklyn, NY 11201
> Phone (718) 488-8900
> Fax (718) 488-8642
> http://www.frif.com
>
>
>
>

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Film-Philosophy Email Discussion Salon.

[RdAL]

Any info about this movie in other countries, say Mexico, for example......