Philosophy Department brings Heidegger film to campus

John Santos Guest Writer

This past week, Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan screened The Ister, a massive documentary that unfolds via Martin Heidegger’s study of Holderlin’s “The Ister.” The event has come and gone, but thanks to some enterprising Philosophy professors, Vassar is fortunate enough to own a copy of this movie on DVD, safely cached in the library.

Don’t worry, watching the movie on DVD instead of 35mm does not make for a lesser experience, for the movie itself is shot on digital, seemingly edited with iMovie although still more of an art than Jonathan Caouette's narcissistic Tarnation.

Although it runs for more than three hours, the movie goes fast because it is extremely engaging, partly due to the philosophic material, but mostly because the movie misses no chance to mine the heady issues that make Heidegger compelling. Much of the movie centers on Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis and the meditation on modernity that resulted from such “collaboration.”

Even if the talking-heads employed by the movie only make you confused of the convoluted subject matter, the visual counterpoint sufficiently acts to interpret the text into evocative images. For example, Heidegger’s ideas about the link between the advent of modernity and technology with the Holocaust may elicit very little reaction, but the image—with a mix of realistic documentation and expressionistic dissolves coupled with textual excerpts that the images are supposedly representing—burns into the spectator the gravity of the horror produced by emphasizing such historical continuities.

One could see this documentary as a continuation of Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard, that is, of the project of making the Holocaust not a product of its time, but an inevitable result of history’s drive towards mechanization, dehumanization, and destruction. However, while Resnais’ play with time emphasizes guard against history, The Ister is more a contemplation of history, questioning more intently the Marxist notion of historical progression.

Just like the Danube River, whose source the movie tries to discover, no one really knows the source of history. Indeed, the trajectory of history is as man makes it. The movie is fairly complacent about the future of the technology that it uses to represent its ideas—that is, the technology of cinema.

0What comments The Ister does make on technology are decidedly laissez-faire. Technology happens; let it be, and we’ll deal with it.