Wittgenstein

This is the type of biography where the protagonist (as a child) introduces his family to the camera and they proceed one by one to climb a stage and gather around a piano. It is theatric, sparse, with often a few props arranged on an empty dark stage: Wittgenstein in bed with his lover, arguments around a table, a blackboard with a few chairs around it where he taught.

I came to it after a series of film viewings on celebrated thinkers: Socrates, Augustine, Pascal, Descartes. All done by the same maker, Rossellini, they featured more or less adequate exposition of thought against sober tapestries of history. By contrast here we have bare snippets of the thought, no scenery and only a vague history: the man in soldier's costume alone enacting a WWI trench etc. It's called surreal; more apt to simply call it unusual, eccentric.

What was missing from that series I felt was an inclusion of someone more recent and preferably from our own century. Fittingly the only one I found was on Wittgenstein who would have been my own choice as well. Incidentally Wittgenstein fits better than any other with what was delineated in the other project starting with Socrates: drawing limits to reason as what can be reasonably said, embodying what's on the other side.

His disdain for philosophical noodling (seen in the desire for a concrete logic), refusal to bother with an academic knowledge of Aristotle and view that philosophy only creates muddles of thought, in all these he can be seen to be in line with Socrates, right down to the quest for a rigorous moral life.

His algebraic formulations of logic have disappeared along with that whole school that depended on them for a mechanics of truth, what still seduces is this: the notion that we can strive to speak clearly about the things we can, and more deeply something on the other side of that ('of which we must remain silent') opens itself to us. His project was perhaps obscure in details, a bore; but so amazingly attractive in its large span.

And he does deserve a better film than this; not because this one is eccentric by convention rather because the craft is too simple.

It's not the fact that homosexuality is so central as many users complain either; it is, but the filmmaker resists implying this wholly explains the man; it softens him if anything as someone who seeks his lover's hand in a dark theater, but it's not said to be the real cause of tension, that remains the quest for a life of clarity.

We do get only a rough sketch of the thought; but I urge you to bother with the film on Descartes I mention above, three times the length and full of lengthy dissertation, and you'll see no more than a sketch there either. It's after all the sketch of Wittgenstein's thought that seduces; it's a clear picture. So it's not that either.

No for me the real issue is that the cinematic medium offers a richer language (the richest one we know next to personal experience) to lightly sketch the air of those things of which logic can remain silent; love, doubt, being, all this wonderful ambiguity that opens to us. The man's project is the ideal opportunity for such examination.

(In other words it's not a fault for me that we learn too little about the real Wittgenstein to be able to explain him, or too little of his words to know the thought and only barely enough; Wittgenstein would probably balk at the thought that knowing more would explain a real him. But that we miss the richly layered picture that constitutes any life.)

The film ends with a powerful (deathbed) admission about exactly this; the world that our modern mind, logical, obsessed with knowing, attempts to freeze into sparkling ice, but take a step onto the ice and you land on your back, there's no friction; no the real world where you can go places must be embraced with all its ambiguous friction.

I was marching through comprehensive viewing of the Greenaway section in our local art video store, and got into an argument with the proprietor. He felt that Greenaway was excessive pretentious and juvenile and suggested this film as `real' intelligent filmmaking. I really wanted to discover a new director, so watched with expectation.

About the actual art of the filmmaking, I can report that this to be completely mundane. The technique is of stationary filming of a staged play with no risk and little imagination.

But the topic has real promise! Wittgenstein is among the dozen most fascinating men of ideas who ever lived. He anticipated the core ideas about logic and language that are commonplace today. But he was profoundly not influential. All these ideas were reinvented by independent means because his explications were so abstruse. I believe them to be necessarily so, and we still don't appreciate the full ambiguities he noted.

This is grand, fascinating stuff, but in this play we get the most trivial inklings of his middle period. How sad.

Independent of the ideas, his life is remarkable. He was rich and gave it away. He absolutely mastered a strain of philosophical thought and was universally celebrated (though not understood). He tossed it away, disclaiming all his ideas and starting over as his own most powerful detractor. And he did this thrice! He went from the protection of the university to hovels and degradation multiple times. Along the way he designed one of the most puzzling houses on the planet. This is great, great stuff.

But this film is motivated by a politico-sexual agenda, so while watering down the great intellectual and physical swings, ascribes them to repressed guilt of his sexuality. Wittgenstein would be appalled, I think, to have his great projects and discipline so debased. In fact, he seemed to have repressed guilt about everything he could conceive, and among these homosexuality was a lesser driver because the environment was so accepting, even encouraging. Alan Turing of the next generation, is a different, more apt story.

The report then is that this is not cinematically interesting, and some great drama has been missed in order to make a minor -- and perhaps untrue -- point.

British filmmaker Derek Jarman's penultimate film consists basically on literate deadpan tableaux dealing with the life of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). The late Jarman, who was known for making gay-themed experimental movies, filmed the whole of Wittgenstein in a indoor stage, as a series of mannerist vignettes. If you want to watch this movie to know about Wittgenstein's theories, don't bother. These are dealt superficially and perfunctorily, while emphasis is made on his homosexuality. This movie is not very deep, but is not very heavy either, I think this was a bit of frivolous exercise on the part of Jarman but it is also lighthearted and quite entertaining.

All around a good and fun movie. Like other reviews I've seen, I agree it doesn't go into the depth of it's philosophical topics that much, and it's more of an entertaining movie that is touching at times. But in that, it really succeeds.

Also, it beautifully shows the inseperable intertwinement of the personal and the public, the personal and professional.

If you (like me) you have an amateur interest in his philosophy, I think this will be an entertaining movie. It gets you in the fantasy of living in a deranged social environment consisting only intellectual aristocrats, separated from the rest of the world who are similtaneously set on trying to understand 'the world'.

This is a charming quirky little piece from Jarman at somewhere near his best.

Light, engaging and entertaining, the director has made far more difficult and challenging films than Wittgenstein. This is to the good - as the philosopher was undoubtedly a highly complex personality. He needed simplifying.

Jarman treats his subject with great love and sensitivity. The care and attention extends to ensuring that things are kept easy and simple. Wittgenstein's philosophical outpourings are exceptionally hard to access, but we are given just enough so that we appreciate the genius. It's cleverly done.

The craft extends from Wittgenstein's early life and subsequent work right through to scenes on his deathbed. Via this device we catch glimpses of the whole person. We come to learn a lot about our subject through Jarman's deft and sympathetic treatment.

Don't watch this expecting the surreal grit of Jubilee or high art of Caravaggio. Instead, ready yourself for an eclectic journey through the life and works of one of the world's greatest minds. Your guide is Jarman. He clearly cares about Ludwig Wittgenstein and by the end so do we.