From the issue dated June 10, 2005
Time and the River (and Heidegger)
2 Australian filmmakers tour the Danube to unlock the
mysteries of one of the 20th century's most
influential thinkers
By PETER MONAGHAN
Melbourne, Australia
What are viewers to make of a three-hour film about
the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
and the legacies of human development along the Danube
River, technology, and violent ruptures in recent
European history from the Holocaust to the collapse of
communism to the breakup of Yugoslavia?
David Barison and Daniel Ross are finding that their
189-minute opus, The Ister (First Run/Icarus Films),
has been winning rave reviews and awards in several
countries since its debut last year -- including the
French Association of Research Cinemas Prize and the
Quebec Film Critics' Association Prize. Through its
showings at film festivals and conferences, the
ambitious project about what the Australian filmmakers
describe as "the history of philosophy itself, as it
struggles to conceptualize the ideas of existence,
lineage, and progress that underpin European
civilization's image of itself -- often at the cost of
brutal, bloody exclusions" is reinvigorating a
conversation among philosophers and historians of
ideas as well.
The Ister takes its name from an 1803 poem by Johann
Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), about which
Heidegger gave a series of lectures in 1942. The poem
is among the "hymns" written by Hölderlin to glorify
the philosophical legacy of ancient Greece through a
mystical meditation on the Danube. (Istros was the
river's Greco-Roman name.) In "The Ister," Hölderlin
locates sources of natural divinity and community --
as well as the haunting presence of the gods of
antiquity -- in the Danube.
Heidegger's lectures were less a direct commentary on
"The Ister" than a set of reflections occasioned by
it. Heidegger surveyed a number of philosophical
issues, including what constitutes the notions of
place and home, the rise and terrible costs of
technology, humanity's relationship to nature, and the
remnants of tribal wars. In their film, Mr. Barison
and Mr. Ross not only examine those key aspects of
Heidegger's quicksilver thought, but also revisit his
complicated association with Nazism -- a connection
that has dogged both his reputation and his legacy.
The film uses interviews with contemporary
philosophers to ponder those subjects as it follows
the Danube's course upstream from Romania through
Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, and Austria to its disputed
source in Germany.
By using the river as a theme, says Charles R.
Bambach, a professor of arts and humanities at the
University of Texas at Dallas, who is writing a book
on the philosophical relationship between Heidegger
and Hölderlin, The Ister creates "a visual palimpsest,
a kind of cinematic hypertext" to the questions raised
by river, poem, and philosophers.
By demonstrating the historical context and
metaphysical subtlety of the philosopher's thought,
the film also makes a substantial contribution to
Heidegger studies, says Iain Thomson, an associate
professor of philosophy at the University of New
Mexico, who wrote the chapter on Heidegger and
National Socialism for Blackwell's new A Companion to
Heidegger (2005, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark
A. Wrathall). The Ister, he says, helps "remind us
that we are still far from successfully working
through Heidegger's traumatic legacy for philosophy:
How could perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th
century support its most despicable political regime?"
Cafe Cinéastes
Mr. Barison and Mr. Ross hashed out much of the
concept for The Ister in Mario's, a cafe in
Melbourne's Fitzroy neighborhood.
Today the two young scholars cum filmmakers sit with a
reporter in the same cafe to talk about Heidegger and
their film. Heidegger's masterwork, Being and Time
(1927), laid the groundwork for philosophy's retrieval
of the "question of being" -- that is, what
constitutes "being" -- for humans, ideas, nature,
everything. Plato had addressed such fundamental
questions in his day, but the issue had been largely
ignored or taken for granted by subsequent
philosophers.
"There is something clearly resistant to film in
Heidegger," observes Mr. Barison. "He doesn't discuss
it, not in the way other thinkers of the time engage
with cinema."
Mr. Ross rushes to the defense: "But it's a caricature
of Heidegger that he was antimodern. He often talks
about Van Gogh, or Celan, who is the opposite of an
old-style writer. Or Cézanne. And he did do a TV
interview. That was a big decision."
Mr. Ross and Mr. Barison share an interest in how film
can, in Mr. Ross's words, convey the way that
philosophical thought "exists within a world of time
and place." Mr. Ross wrote his dissertation, at the
University of Melbourne, on Heidegger, and last
September published Violent Democracy (Cambridge
University Press), in which he argues that violence
has underpinned the democratic form of government
since its inception, and still does, lately in
response to threats of terrorism.
Mr. Barison, a political-science graduate of the
University of Melbourne, studied film briefly before
working with Mr. Ross, for five years, to make The
Ister. They were slowed, they admit, by endless
disagreements at Mario's. And not just about
Heidegger's thought. "We argued constantly about the
style and format we would adopt," says Mr. Ross.
Headed Upriver
One of the big questions for the filmmakers was
structure. In his poem "The Ister," Hölderlin wrote,
"Yet almost this river seems to go backwards and I
think it must come from the East." Mr. Barison and Mr.
Ross chose to go with that poetic flow, following the
Danube upstream from the Black Sea to the Black
Forest.
As they journey westward and northward, the filmmakers
use images of land, architecture, communal
celebrations, water, and animals (including lots of
ducks and snails) as a visual counterpoint to lengthy
interviews with leading European intellectual
successors of Heidegger -- Bernard Stiegler, Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy -- and with the
German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.
Armed with only a handheld video camera and no outside
financing, the pair drove a 1982 Bedford van to
Compiègne, north of Paris, to approach Mr. Stiegler
directly. A few days later, he granted them a long
interview that is one of the pivots of the film.
Mr. Stiegler's account of humanity as a technological
being, from myth, to prehistory, to current times,
serves as a preamble to the film. Nattily dressed and
urbane, he retains much of the dash and charisma that
apparently served him in a former life -- as a serial
bank robber who spent 1978 to 1983 in prison for his
crimes. His unusual route to academic life -- he
studied philosophy in prison -- is to be the subject
of the next Barison/Ross film, and the pair are also
preparing translations of two of Mr. Stiegler's books.
With Mr. Stiegler on board, Mr. Nancy and Mr.
Lacoue-Labarthe, both close associates of the late
Jacques Derrida, agreed to take part. "They seemed to
find it so bizarre that a couple of guys from
Australia had turned up at their door to interview
them about an obscure Heidegger lecture course that
they found it difficult to refuse," Mr. Ross wrote in
an essay published in the Australian magazine Inside
Film.
Later came thousands of hours of editing. "We tried to
punctuate the film so that if there are difficult
sections, there are enough visual pleasures and
stimulations that you can drift across," says Mr.
Barison.
The filmmakers also interrupt the dialogue to show the
viewer sites of key significance to Heidegger's
controversial notion of humans as beings compromised
by technology who manipulate, alter, and scar the
natural world. Their camera takes in the ruins of a
Greek colony in Romania; the blasted bridges of Novi
Sad, which were destroyed in the 1999 NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia; the "Statue Park" of discarded Communist
monuments in Hungary; King Ludwig I of Bavaria's
Walhalla temple, built to mark the kinship of Germany
and ancient Greece; and the Mauthausen concentration
camp.
The Dark Past
That visual relief, and the slow pace of the film, are
necessary if viewers are to fully understand its
examination of Heidegger's work, even with the
extensive commentary from Mr. Stiegler, Mr. Nancy, and
Mr. Lacoue-Labarthe. In fact, the three French
philosophers grapple with Heidegger's thought as much
as they explicate it, adding further layers of
complexity.
Yet the pauses also serve to add depth to the film.
For instance, the references to Mauthausen and to Mr.
Syberberg's confrontational 1978 film, Our Hitler: A
Film From Germany, bring the most controversial aspect
of Heidegger's career -- his association with National
Socialism -- into the current of The Ister.
In 1933, elated by the National Socialists' seizure of
power, Heidegger ended his inaugural address as rector
of the University of Freiburg with a spirited "Heil,
Hitler." He remained a party member until after World
War II. That link between Heidegger and the Nazis
remained a difficult point for scholars through
subsequent years and sparked what is known as the
Heidegger Controversy -- a fierce debate in the late
1980s over renewed and more-damaging attention to
Heidegger's "political mistakes." It was a polemic
that called into question, for some, the feasibility
of embracing not only Heidegger's thinking but any
philosophical movement influenced by it.
The Ister plays a valuable role, observers say, in
retrieving the Heidegger debates from biographical
attacks and putting them back on a more reasoned and
nuanced philosophical plane.
Most dramatic, certainly, is the contribution of Mr.
Lacoue-Labarthe, who has collaborated with Mr. Nancy
and like him is a key figure in Heidegger studies.
That his thoughts on Heidegger's politics remain in
flux is clear in The Ister. Summarizing theses he
developed in his 1987 book, translated in 1990 as
Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the
Political (Blackwell), Mr. Lacoue-Labarthe grapples
with Heidegger's most infamous, 1949 statement:
"Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the
same thing in its essence as the production of corpses
in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the
same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries
to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of
hydrogen bombs."
Mr. Lacoue-Labarthe explicates how Heidegger's comment
may have derived logically from contemporary events
and his notion that technologies of industry,
agriculture, and war had distorted humankind. But Mr.
Lacoue-Labarthe's discomfort is obvious in the film.
Worrying an unlit cigarette, and seeming to search for
words, he finally acknowledges that the statement
remains morally reprehensible. "The scandal leaps out
at you," he says.
Still, says Mr. Thomson, of New Mexico, Mr.
Lacoue-Labarthe does demonstrate in the film, as he
did in his book, that "Heidegger's supposedly damning
'silence' on the Holocaust or Shoah is in fact a
myth." He does this, says Mr. Thomson, by describing
Heidegger's belief that "he had articulated the
philosophical perspective necessary for comprehending
the death camps: The death camps represented an
extreme and thus revealing expression of the
technological understanding of being."
Indeed, as Heidegger wrote the lectures on "The Ister"
in 1942, the Nazis were putting their "final solution"
into place, the United States was entering the war,
and Germany's invasion of Russia was stalled. Yet
Heidegger hailed "the stellar hour of our
commencement" in his lectures.
Mr. Bambach, of the University of Texas at Dallas,
says that Heidegger found a glimmer of glory in that
dark time because of Hölderlin's suggestion that "at
the very origin of being there is strife, conflict,
opposition that provides a hidden unity." Mr. Bambach
believes that Mr. Ross and Mr. Barison tried
valiantly, but not completely successfully, to capture
such elusive, mythopoeic concepts on film, including,
as he describes it, the delusion of "Heidegger's
political metaphysics of the homeland and its failed,
deadly ideology of autochthonic exclusion."
Other Heidegger experts are more generous. The film is
"vivid, nuanced, and properly balanced on the complex
questions of Heidegger's thought, his political
engagements, and the general spirit attaching to these
issues," says Lawrence J. Hatab, a professor of
philosophy at Old Dominion University.
As that response signals, not all Heidegger scholars
take Heidegger's alignment with Nazism as cause for
disqualification of his entire thought and
significance. They take account -- indulgently or
sensibly, depending on whom one asks -- of his times,
and his thought's transcendence of them.
The film "seems to approach the political in the most
useful way, in terms of what the context of the time
can tell us about Heidegger's work, and what
Heidegger's work can tell us about the context of the
time," says Stuart R. Elden, a lecturer in geography
at the University of Durham, in England. Mr. Elden's
latest book on Heidegger, Speaking Against Number:
Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation,
will be published by Edinburgh University Press later
this year.
Several Heidegger experts speak of the Barison-Ross
film as a kind of redress of the brutal treatment that
Heidegger's legacy received, deservedly or not, at the
time of the Heidegger Controversy. Says Alejandro A.
Vallega, a visiting lecturer in philosophy at
California State University at Stanislaus, and a
leading Heidegger authority: "The film does a great
service, since it does not fail to recognize the issue
of Heidegger's political involvement while not
obscuring or reducing the complexity and force of the
thought we find in Heidegger's work."
Bringing Being to Film
Addressing Heidegger's legacy in context is one thing.
But any film on philosophy has a better chance of
engaging its audience if its images are not just
compelling, but provide some weight and a grounding
for the discussion. In The Ister, the filmmakers use
images of Mauthausen, Walhalla, and the Danube's
ecology to give Heidegger's philosophy a visual shape
and urgency.
Mr. Thomson, for instance, says that "the film might
help show viewers that the questions at stake in
Heidegger's work are not incomprehensibly abstract but
rather real, immediate, and pressing: How is
technology shaping our sense of reality? How does our
relationship to the past shape our relationship to the
future? What role should philosophers play in the
culture? How could someone so philosophically
intelligent be so politically stupid? What is the
relationship between philosophy and politics?"
The film also embraces the metaphysical nature of
Heidegger's thought. In a review of The Ister, Mr.
Vallega wrote that the film impressively addresses
"the possibility and responsibility of the thought of
being after the Holocaust" and "the sense of language
in a time when myth telling no longer occurs as
[language's] foundation." And, he said, the filmmakers
had made this contribution "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."
There have been some quibbles and complaints about the
film, however. Several observers say that Mr.
Stiegler's reading of Heidegger, however charming, is
often superficial or confused. Other experts would
have liked Mr. Barison and Mr. Ross to include more
about Heidegger's themes of das Fremde, the foreign,
and das Eigene, that which is one's own. Heidegger
argued that one cannot know home without knowing the
foreign. As Jonathan L. Dronsfield, the director of
the Centre for Contemporary Art Research at the
University of Southampton, puts it, "Only after we
have experienced the possibility of not knowing
ourselves or being destroyed, to the point of
self-sacrifice, do we have a sense of ourselves."
Mr. Dronsfield particularly likes another irony in The
Ister: It is a film about a philosopher who, in his
"Ister" lectures, lamented that "Americanism" and
mechanization, particularly cinema, were coming to
negate "living experience" of art.
Near the film's end, Mr. Syberberg, the German film
director, suggests that Germany no longer has room for
a Heidegger, nor a Hölderlin. The filmmakers echo this
idea by refraining from using any image of Heidegger
almost until the film's closing frames. Then they
include a portrait that seems to be etched in fiery
granite. "This face," says Mr. Barison, "is not simply
an image of Heidegger, but an image in stone of
something that is lost."
Unfortunately, says Mr. Hatab, of Old Dominion
University, when it comes to public debates on
Heidegger, "blatantly biased attacks and apologies"
both make it "impossible to overcome the caricatures
and established convictions about Heidegger's politics
and its relation to his overall thought." He adds,
"There is much to learn from Heidegger and much to
challenge him on, but the public discourse is now a
hopeless farce."
He says he found Mr. Barison and Mr. Ross's film
anything but that: "I found it very moving."
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