The Ister

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The Ister is a 2004 film directed by David Barison and Daniel Ross.

1 Source
2 Interviewees
3 Locations
4 Premiere and awards
5 Reviews
6 External links

[edit] Source

The Ister was inspired by a 1942 lecture course delivered by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, published as Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister". Heidegger's lecture course concerns a poem by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin about the Danube River. The film is also concerned with the following themes: time, poetry, technology, home, National Socialism, the ancient Greek polis, Sophocles, Antigone, Agnes Bernauer, the 1991 battle of Vukovar, and the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

[edit] Interviewees

The Ister features extensive interviews with the philosophers Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, as well as the film director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. It also features interviews with a bridge engineer (Nemanja Calic), an amateur botanist (Tobias Maier), and a Romanian archaeologist (Alexandru Suceveanu). The version of the DVD available outside North America also contains an extended interview with philosopher Werner Hamacher.

[edit] Locations

The film travels upriver: from the Danube Delta, opening onto the Black Sea in Romania, to the source of the river in the Black Forest of southern Germany, moving along the way through the Histria (Sinoe) archaeological site, through Novi Sad in Serbia, Vukovar in Croatia, Budapest, Dunaföldvár, and Dunaújváros in Hungary, and Vienna and the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria. Also featured are the Walhalla temple near Regensburg, the Befreiungshalle at Kelheim, the tomb of Agnes Bernauer, Heidegger's birthplace in Meßkirch, his hut at Todtnauberg, and the lecture theatre at Freiburg University where he delivered his infamous rectorate address.