To begin with a disclosure. I know these guys. Especially Dan Ross, who I went to university with in Melbourne,
and watched turn many a competent teacher into a quivering, stammering, self-contradictory mess.
It was clear even then that he would make some kind of strategic impact on the world, but we would
have to wait a decade until his various traits and talents congealed into something tangible. At that
time Dan appeared incredibly pedantic and perverse to some, whereas others considered him rigorous and
forthright. But one thing was for sure: if Mr. Ross was in the room, people were going to be enlightened
- whether they wanted to be or not - and feathers were going to be ruffled.
In the heady year of 2000, Dan and his good friend David Barison - a rather suave, and
linguistically-gifted accomplice - embarked on a conceptual adventure: buying a Sony mini-DV
camera and two return tickets to Europe. They arrived in London, bought a van, and headed across
to the Continent with a definite plan in mind.
Four years later, and I was sitting in a theatre at the Rotterdam Film Festival, nervously awaiting the premiere of The Ister, the ultimate result of that low-budget, high-brow road trip. I was nervous on behalf of my friends, who had been flown to Holland to attend and answer questions after the screening, since I was afraid that the movie would be a painfully pretentious and agonizingly dull endurance test. After all, it ran over three hours, and wasn't exactly the sexiest or raciest of genres: the philosophical-film essay. Still, I hoped that what it lacked in seductive starlets and CGI explosions, it would more than make up for in brain-food.
Five minutes into the screening, my apprehension turned into fascination, and a clammy sense of envy at what my friends had managed to achieve. (After all, I had gone the traditional route - publishing words which only a handful of people would read - whereas they had travelled the slow, scenic route, and produced something far more immediate, rewarding and accessible.) It was soon obvious that this was not going to be an earnestly tedious public TV documentary, but an intensely engaged and exquisitely crafted portrait of the Big Questions: Being, War, Ethics, Politics, Technology, and - yes - even The Meaning Of Life.
Before I get to the film itself, I should probably mention the H-word. The elephant in the room. Since this is the inspiration behind the whole project.
Heidegger. Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher with a penchant for lederhosen and circular sentences, who is now - three decades or so after his death - as revered as he is reviled in the intellectual world. A week or so before the premiere at Rotterdam, specialized pockets of the internet were buzzing with the heated debate surrounding this figure: a man who gained much by going with the Nazi flow in 1933, and yet managed to simultaneously build a body of work which has more than enough material to think through the evils of this period (which, in many stark and striking ways, continues into our own). In other words, Ross and Barison had woken up some barely slumbering dogs, which had been yapping at each others slobbering chops since the "Heidegger controversy" broke in 1989, when the extent of his National Socialist affiliations were brought under serious scrutiny throughout Europe.
Several other spirits haunt The Ister, and this inevitable haunting is one of the dominant themes in the film itself. Hölderlin, the late 18th and early 19th century poet whose composition of the same name inspired a lecture series by Heidegger, casts a luminous shadow over proceedings. The Ister, after all, is the name the Ancient Greeks gave to the Danube, and provides the key Hellenic-Germanic axis for the historical trajectory of not only the river itself, but the film's narrative. Indeed, if we were to list the phantom cast of the film, it would look something like this: Prometheus, Epimetheus, Hephaestus, Antigone, Agnes Bernauer ("the German Antigone"), Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, Hölderlin, Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, Agamben.
And Terrence Malick.
Malick, whose three films to date - Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), and The Thin Red Line (1998) - happen to be three of the best films ever made, was influenced in his own way by Heidegger, having translated The Essence of Reason. Malick then took an Easterly detour through Indian spirituality, before returning to Western-inflected obsessions with war, violence and sacrifice. Malick's films are not only about people and problems, but animals and other elements of life which are sidelined by humanist egocentrism. The Ister begins and ends with a similar "wide-angled" approach, in the metaphysical sense: with a close-up of a duck on the banks of the Danube, plus cutaways to dogs, slugs, and mating bugs. As one of the interviewees notes, in our time, Nature has become a phantasm.) This approach, whereby "culture" is the new nature, also shares the inclusive, contemplative spirit of films by Chris Marker, Errol Morris, and Patrick Keiller.
The format loosely fits the "road movie" category, since the film follows the Danube "backwards"
from its mouth at the Black Sea, through Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Austria, and finally to its
(disputed) source in Germany. There are a couple of detours, most notably, Strasbourg; the home of both
the brilliant philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, and the new experiment in post-nationalist justice, the European
Court. The Germans in fact have a useful word for this burgeoning genre: wasserstrasse, or "water-road,"
and other extraordinary movies have been metaphysical journeys along rivers. (Herzog's Aguirre Wrath of God
(1972)and Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) being the most celebrated; both taking their cues from
Conrad's novel, The Heart of Darkness.) The Ister, for its part, seeks Germany as both
the heart of darkness (in terms of the Holocaust), and the heart of lightness (in terms of a Greek-guided
Enlightenment). Of course, the two are utterly implicated in the other, and the film goes a long way to
avoid default readings of these events as "black and white" (or indeed, making trite conclusions like
this one, that such events are simply "two sides of the same coin.")
During this journey, the filmmakers made their own luck. Or rather, in keeping with Heidegger's
vocabulary, their own "destiny.") Simply by embarking on this task, they both created and stumbled
upon the kind of serendipitous encounters which make this film all the richer. For instance, it is
mostly luck that they arrived in Romania the day that this struggling country was inducted into NATO,
and visited by George W. Bush.
It was also luck that they arrived on Bernard Stiegler's doorstep on his
48th birthday, allowing some poignant pictures to accompany this philosopher's thoughts on mortality
and indeterminate time.
And luck again when they encountered a botanist in a cemetery garden, who could
give them some extra-human perspective on the river, on a larger, geophysical time-scale. So when this
kind of luck is combined with good research and intelligence - for instance, spending May Day in
"Stalintown," the Danube festival in Regensburg, and "Peace-Train Day" between Zagreb and Vukovar -
you have a very special palette to work with.
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The pace is languid and leisurely, yet the film covers an amazing amount of ground/water in
200 minutes. (Each stated location is measured in kilometres from the Danube's official source in
Donauschingen.) Some scenes encourage the viewer to lapse into a meditative trance; watching the river
from the back of a boat, dissolving into a spectacular sun-set. Others involve a more straight-forward
interview style, with the four main subjects: Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe,
and Hans Jurgen Syberberg. Only those with an interest in continental philosophy will have heard of these
people, but The Ister assumes no prior knowledge to the issues and debates, and these thinkers turn out
to be more charismatic and illuminating than you might expect from old-school deconstructionists.
Of course, each man has his own style. Stiegler is gregarious and effusive, bringing mythology and
philosophy to life for a lay audience. Indeed, his performance is all the more fascinating if you know
the back-story (not told in the film), that he in fact spent several years in jail for a series of armed
bank robberies. (A "career" he pursued after becoming disillusioned with the post-1968 capitulation, but
one now left behind, after becoming a public intellectual and director of major media institutions in
France.) Nancy is stylish and eloquent, dressed all in black, yet having visible difficulty swallowing,
due to health complications. Lacoue-Labarthe is the most tortured of the interviewees, visibly struggling
with the scandalous paradoxes of Heidegger, as well as with his addiction to nicotine. Indeed,
Lacoue-Labarthe's fondness for cigarettes forms an interesting supplement to his theory that - post-1945 -
humanity is "out of breath." This section of the film also caused a controversy recently in France when
some audience members thought that zooming in on Lacoue-Labarthe's ash-tray was a sick joke played on the
victims of the gas-chambers. Despite the controversy, or perhaps even because of it, The Ister won the prestigious "Prix du Groupement National des Cinémas de Recherche" at the Marseille International Documentary Festival, 2004.
By selecting these interviewees, the filmmakers unpack the significance of the fact that it is still anathema to mention Heidegger in Germany, and yet his legacy has been taken up nearby, especially in France. As Australians (an exceedingly fraught category, informed in its own way by European hubris) Ross and Barison add their voices to the contemporary chorus on the origin of nationalism, and the rather arbitrary historical lines we draw between the familiar and the foreign.
When I first started telling people about The Ister, the reaction was usually very suspicious. After all, a couple of Australians trying to locate the philosophical source of modernity in Germany sounds just about as kosher and commendable as those god-awful European anthropologists who go to Australia in order to make a film about the Aboriginal Dreamtime. "It sounds so terribly cheesy," said one eminent critical theorist; while another stated: "Just what we need. Aussie cheerleaders for a Euro wankfest over the legacy of a Nazi."
Harsh words, but ones worth considering as a general counter-weight to the tendency of hardcore
Heideggereans to disappear up the anus of their own "patient harkening to the voice of Being." Indeed, I remember reading somewhere that Heidegger is guaranteed to cause constipation in his readers. (Whereas Benjamin serves as a sure-fire laxative.) These attacks, however, are usually made on the very notion of the project, without seeing the film itself; which - I would argue - carries its own checks and balances against simply yelling out: "Gimme an H. Gimme an E." And so on.
Perhaps the key word when it comes to circling the whole Ister concept is "pretension." For me,
pretension is something which should only be measured by the distance between an effect an artist seeks
to create, and the failure to reach that effect. If somebody wants to do something that initially sounds
pretentious because of its grandiose ambitions, and yet succeeds in creating something very special, then
that piece of work is not pretentious. Radiohead and Björk are not pretentious, because they manage to put
their talent where their mouth is. Even if it doesn't happen to be your cup of tea. They follow their
convictions and go all the way, creating an "invisible remainder" all the while. In contrast, Placebo and
Muse are pretentious, because they aim for something far higher than they can possibly achieve. In any
case, you get my point. If something doesn't make you cringe and wince, then it isn't really pretentious.
In fact, that term is used all too often in order to escape art which make a serious demand of you, the
audience. How much more comfortable it would be to check your brain at the door and watch Spiderman 2 or
Dodgeball. (Not that I have any problem with mindless fare either, so long as it's funny. After all,
I'd rank the Farelly brothers' Kingpin higher than Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris.)
And while we are on the subject, The Ister is by no stretch of the imagination, funny.
(With the notable exception of Stiegler's eccentric-professor antics, a quick reference to a canine
imposter, and some dry humour just at the end, concerning the debated source of the Danube . . .
a nice wink from the film-makers for sticking with them the entire journey.) Even with an intermission,
there was noticeable bum-shifting in the audience by the time we approached the tiny Black Forest hut in
which Heidegger wrote Being and Time.
Three hours in, and some people looked as weary as Syberberg,
discussing the melancholy loss of poetry, rivers, and - specifically - poetic rivers. This film asks a
lot, in terms of attention and concentration. But it rewards that attention with ideas and images which
will stick with you, and make you see things in a different, more expansive, light.
For instance? Well, despite looking rather tired, Syberberg makes some interesting points about "the spirit of machines," and Heidegger's realization that simply considering oneself as "anti-technology" (as many movements do today) misses the essential question concerning our complex relationship with machines. There is indeed a spirit of machines, says Syberberg, but this "is not the camera in the watercloset . . . watching what the woman does there . . . in the watercloset."
Well put.
The Ister is, overall, a triumph of editing. The film has a fugue-like quality and structure, where images repeat, and yet suddenly have a completely different meaning, due to the shift in context. Buildings which seem to be innocuous enough on first viewing, turn out to be the Mauthausen concentration camp. A young boy smiling, shy-yet-proud, creates one impression during a discussion about patriotism, and quite a different impression when the theme is Oedipal tragedies. And this is most explicit when two montages are juxtaposed: one entitled The Necessity of Remembering, the other entitled The Necessity of Forgetting. Both, in fact, are almost the same montage (with one significan difference), and yet they create diametrically opposed emotions in each case.
Indeed, it is the editing which lends a kind of hyper-significance to the images, along with the
voice-overs by the interviewees. Jet trails, fallen trees, and waddling ducks all suddenly acquire a
new resonance when viewed through the optic of techno-ontology. A section concerning the co-habitation
of different epochs is nicely illustrated with a row-boat near a hydro-electric dam, and an oil-tanker.
The heavily slowed-down sequence of fairground rides creates a mesmerizing form of temporal vertigo,
underlining the fact that The Ister itself is an "untimely" film (while remaining a topical one). There
is even an almost subliminal Malick-inspired flashback to the ghosts of lovers past.
But if I were forced to make a criticism, it would be a very minor one: that the proliferation of busts from Germany's Hall of Liberation is a less than polished effect, which draws attention to the fact that this film is a DIY-job. Usually this doesn't matter, since the noises-off camera, and other unplanned elements, add an aura of authenticity to proceedings. They are the grain in the wood; the pulp in the juice. But in this case - as well as the camera work for some of the gravestones - comes across as a little amateur. However, this is a rather churlish gripe, given the painstaking attention given not only to the editing decisions, but the understated-yet-effective use of sound and music. (Note the use of shortwave radio signals during the section on Hermes the messenger.) A lot of thought also went into translating the French and German into English. I should also mention the inspired scene where Stiegler goes outside to shoosh his "chien," only to return twenty minutes later, to take up the thread of his monologue, without missing a beat.
This film proves its own argument (or at least Stiegler's argument), that technology in inextricable
from poetic expression and human truth-making (Dichtung - in Heidegger speak). Thanks to affordable
software and equipment, we now have the prosthetic means to bequeath our individual thoughts and memories to extra-genetic memory. That is, to the mediasphere. Or to the "world" (a simple notion with an astonishingly complex meaning).
The film's ultimate message, if I can be so vulgar, is that things are complicated. Heidegger talked of the "greatness" and "glory" of National Socialism, and yet he was romantically linked with Hannah Arendt, one of the most passionate and intelligent people to perform critical autopsies on its logic, methods and repercussions. He refused to apologize for his complicity with Hitler's program, and yet he has thought more deeply than almost anybody else about the implications of modernity and massacre, and the ways in which those who simply condemn Nazism - without thinking further on the insidious legacy of its techniques - are caught in the vortex of hypocrisy and willful blindness.
You won't see The Ister at your local multiplex, or even your local arts cinema, since it
has yet to secure distribution outside the festival circuit. Neither is it a great date movie, unless you
happen to be courting Susan Sontag. Then again, after the premiere in Rotterdam, our intrepid directors
were enjoying the company of not one, but two lovely Siberian girls. So perhaps it is a good date movie in the less superficial regions of the world; where topics such as mortality, truth and destiny can still hold the attention of a beautiful woman.
And so, in short, I would recommend The Ister to anybody interested in philosophy,
politics, history, geography, archaeology, mythology, technology, media, art, poetry, and even
structural engineering. It goes a long way in not only explaining, but also capturing (Eregnis?) what it means to live as part of a species-without-qualities, when "time is out of joint."
Indeed, I would be interested to see what other species would make of this film. And for this reason
I am considering lobbying NASA and the UN to include a copy with the next batch of human materials which
are carefully selected to be blasted in to space, as representative of the overlords of this small, blue
planet. Perhaps the aliens that find this probe, and happen to have the correct DVD region coding to watch
The Ister, will appreciate the irony of including a film which questions the techno-humanist logic which
launches such probes in the first place.
Ross's star will continue to rise with the publication of his first book, Violent Democracy, out through Cambridge University Press later in 2004. Barison, for his part, is measuring up options for either a second film, or a television series on similar themes.
No doubt more feathers are going to be ruffled.
Thankfully.
Dominic Pettman
The Official Ister website
