"Wittgenstein" (1993) was the last narrative film directed by maverick English gay director Derek Jarman (1942-1994), whose best-known films were "Caravaggio" (1986) and "Edward II" 1991). They usually included a lot of nudity and Tilda Swinton. "Wittgenstein" has some fairly chaste kisses, no nudity, and a small but extravagantly costumed (especially hatted) Tilda Swinton as the notorious Lady Ottoline Morrell.

She is included for her relationship with Bertrand Russell (Michael Gough), who was Wittgenstein's primary sponsor in the English philosophical world. Russell and John Maynard Keynes (John Quentin) were Wittgenstein's sponsors at Cambridge, to which he returned in 1929, was granted a Ph.D. for the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (which had been published a decade earlier) and became a lecturer at Trinity College.. In the biopic Keynes remarks that if he could arrange financing of postwar Europe, he could arrange a fellowship for Wittgenstein at Cambridge -- however unconventional a lecturer Wittgenstein was, and although Wittgenstein despised philosophy.

Jarman did not have to do anything to make Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889-1951) seem eccentric: the man was plenty eccentric. The philosopher was frustrated that no one understood what he thought he was clearly articulating: neither Russell nor country school children. (The former admired him, the latter hated him and seems to have been quite cruel to them.) Wittgenstein had no patience for human society, though he enjoyed movies, especially westerns and the most artificial musicals (Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton were his two favorite actresses).

Jarman combined the young men who shared Wittgenstein's bed (notably David Pinsent, Francis Skinner, and Ben Richards) into a single engaging balm of a youth called Johnny (sent by the bisexual Keynes to try to make Wittgenstein happier). The part is played with charm and a steady admiring gaze by Kevin Collins, Jarman's own life partner.

According to produced Tariq Ali, when the film premiered at Cambridge with many people in the audience who had known Wittgenstein, the combination of yearning and irritability of Karl Johnson as the adult Wittgenstein was accurate and even recognizable. I doubt that anyone is going to understand Wittgenstein's ideas on the basis of Johnson's delivery (in a DVD bonus he admits to not understanding what Wittgenstein was trying to say), but the movie is a biopic not a philosophical lecture.

I enjoyed the deadly serious absurd young, bespectacled, and somewhat effeminate Ludwig Wittgenstein as played by Clancy Chassay. Unlike the adult Wittgenstein, this one meets his match in the Green Man (possibly a Martian philosopher, played by Nabil Shaban, a dwarf born in Jordan). Herein, even the young Wittgenstein seems very British (though he says out loud that he was a super-rich Viennese Jew with lots of tutors).

The whole 69 series of tableaux from the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein was shot in a studio with stationary camera setups and is visually stylized. There are no sets, unless a large cage which the philosopher shares in one scene with a parrot in a smaller cage counts as a set.

I found all three of the bonus feature interviews interesting. Swinton and Johnson worked on many films with Jarman and talk about that. Tariq Ali (born in 1943) talks about what was to have been a series of twelve biopics of philosophers that dwindled to three (Ali wrote one on Baruch Spinoza, the third was on John Locke; I'm not sure either was completed). The original script that preceded Jarman's involvement was written by Terry Eagleton (born in 1943, author of Exiles and Emigres, Marxism and Literary Criticism and many other books), a literary theorist influenced by Wittgenstein, who was at the time Thomas Wharton Professor of English Literature at Oxford (he is now at the University of Manchester, which was the school to which Wittgenstein first went in England). Eagleton's script was published.

Although interesting to someone familiar with the outline of Wittgenstein's life and/or some of his ideas, I think that the portrayal of Wittgenstein might seem Ken Russellish to others (which is to say exaggerated and filled with the director's fantasies rather than biographically accurate). I think that a far more dramatic film could be made of the quite remarkable, self-annihilating life and that what Jarman did here is less cinematic than some of his other historical movies shot on bare-backgrounded studio sound stages. Perhaps with more money and more time (he was dying)...

I don't know about "endearing" (maybe the English-born characters in it), but the very English eccentric Jarman made Wittgenstein a very English self-abnegator, so this can be a contribution to the English part of Barbara's Franco-English writeoff.


(BTW my title line is an exclamation of Keynes within the movie. I have similar doubts about the possibility of understanding Wittgenstein's ideas from a movie of any sort.)

© 2008, Stephen O. Murray





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