The Ister
The Ister (2004) is
a film of tangents, both intellectual and literal: the filmmakers, David
Barison and Daniel Ross, use a trip down the Danube to loosely structure a
series of reflections on Martin Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin’s poem ‘The
Ister’. As befits a film whose central philosophical notion is that experience
is about becoming, not being, there is a constant expansion of the parameters
of debate. And so, alongside charting the vagaries of Heidegger’s thought
through interviews with contemporary French philosophers, The Ister encompasses a history of Western philosophy, European
politics, the geographical formation of land and Greek myth.
