The Ister
The Ister

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- 70/100 based on 216 votes

'The Ister' is a 3000km journey to the heart of Europe, from the mouth of the Danube river at the Black Sea, to its source in the German Black Forest. The film is based on the work of the most influential and controversial philosopher of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, who swore allegiance to the National Socialists in 1933. By marrying a vast philosophical narrative with a fascinating journey up Europe's greatest waterway, the film invites the viewer to unravel the extra... (Full plot summary below)

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Actors in The Ister:

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Jean-Luc Nancy
Bernard Stiegler
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

Full Plot Details

'The Ister' is a 3000km journey to the heart of Europe, from the mouth of the Danube river at the Black Sea, to its source in the German Black Forest. The film is based on the work of the most influential and controversial philosopher of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, who swore allegiance to the National Socialists in 1933. By marrying a vast philosophical narrative with a fascinating journey up Europe's greatest waterway, the film invites the viewer to unravel the extraordinary past and future of 'the West.

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Movie Reviews

New York Post - 8/10 by V.A. MusettoAt over three hours, The Ister is challenging -- and then some. But what's wrong with challenging?
BBC.com - 8/10 by Jamie RussellAn impressive philosophical exercise and a meditative work of cinematic beauty.
Laramie Movie Scope - 7/10 by Robert RotenA very ambitious film that journeys up the Danube from its mouth to it's source('s), noting the history of places, people and thought along its 3,000 kilometer length.
Village Voice - 6/10 by J. HobermanThe headiest, head-scratching-est, damnedest, most demanding movie opening this week in New York, The Ister could be simply described as a philosophical travelogue.
San Francisco Chronicle - 5/10 by John McMurtrieA film about profound ideas deserved more imagination.
User Review - 10/10 by Luciene CSeguindo o Danúbio atà (C) sua nascente, em companhia do Martin H.
User Review - 10/10 by Bayard BThe film is structured as a journey from the mouth of the Danube back to its source, offsetting occasional material that is the serendipitous product of travel against three long conversations with philosophers and a rather shorter exchange with the German artistic Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. The philosophers, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Bernard Stiegler are three prominent French students of Martin Heidegger, whose involvement with National Socialism is the film's point of departure. These three philosophers came out of a tradition of reading Heidegger that was long aware of his involvement with Nazism yet does not discount him as a thinker on account of this political commitment. The film attempts to understand at once why Heidegger remains an important and influential thinker, in part because of a political involvement that was at once deeply naïve, disturbingly calculated, and profoundly convinced . Heidegger never appears to have fully parted ways with his beliefs of that time and instead, after following from grace within the Nazi leadership and apparatus, worked through a sort of a reckoning with Nazism that amounted to something like a profound distancing without a complete break, what might be thought of as a tentative and incomplete deconstruction of National Socialism, which in that sense deeply informed the work of Lacoue-Labarthe in particular. The Ister is the title of a poem by Hölderlin that Heidegger made the subject of one of his courses in 1942, as it was becoming apparent that the Third Reich would not survive and quite some years after Heidegger realised that the Party would not follow anything like the path he would have liked to set for it.
User Review - 10/10 by Y'ng YA very engaging glacial paced film with many interesting thoughts that would be difficult to encapsulate in a tiny review. To give you an idea, the film culminates in the middle with Heidegger's controversial position, industrial agriculture and the mechanized final solution mentioned in the same breath as the result of technology, the same technic which had its origins in Greek mythology through Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus as told by Bernard Stiegler (himself previously a thief before becoming a philosopher!) in the beginning of the film. And the rest of the film is filled with discussions about time, memory, being, history, politics,etc. it is equally interesting for a viewer who is equipped with philosophical knowledge and a beginner like me who has much more to piece together towards the sad denouement at the source of the Danube..
User Review - 6/10 by Carlos Alejandro PYou have to been fan of philosophy!! , although, it has his good moments!!

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