Wittgenstein (Special Edition)
by Derek Jarman
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Actor: John Quentin, Karl Johnson, Michael Gough, Tilda SwintonDirector: Derek Jarman
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.77:1
Running Time: 69 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-06-24
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Zeitgeist Films
DVD Reviews of Wittgenstein (Special Edition)
DVD Review: Sad Life Transformed by Art into a Touching Comedy
Summary: 4 Stars
There are obvious paralles between Derek Jarman and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both were prodigys and both were homosexuals who struggled to make sense of themselves in a world that either did not acknowledge that homosexual culture existed or vilified it. And both were iconoclasts in their respective mediums who were nonetheless obsessed with religious themes and reading their own lives within the context of traditional culture. But there the parallels end for temperamentally the two are absolutely incommensurable. Wittgenstein is a humorously irreverent child prodigy but a humorless adult. Lucky for us Jarman keeps the child version of Ludwig around as a kind of ludic spirit to lighten the gloomy load that is always weighing on the adult Ludwig's joyless mind. Cleverly, Jarman has everyone except the joyless adult Ludwig wear primary colors and act as if nothing at all weighed on their clever Cambridge minds.
The primary relationships and philosophic pursuits of Ludwig's life are briefly explained and explored. The Cambridge set ( represented here by philosopher Bertrand Russell, gay economist John Maynard Keynes, and haughty Bloomsbury socialite Lady Ottoline) are drawn to the Viennese genius and enjoy having him around even though he is for all intents and purposes socially dysfunctional. In fact this philosopher of language is such a poor communicator that he makes a disasterously poor professor. When Bertrand tells Ludwig that his students imitate his behavior it seems ambiguous as to whether Russell means that they mock Wittgenstein's aristocratic and effette mannerisms or affectionately appropriate them. Its also not clear if this means that Ludwig has made it fashionable to be gay at Cambridge. All of these meanings seem to be suggested but the latter one seems to be the one that Jarman wants to stress without spelling it out (this was made for BBC television after all). It is clear that Jarman is interested in telling gay history here and as such Ludwig would fit into the gay-man-who-cannot-accept-himself-as-gay-man subject position which is doubly sad since the young Ludwig was so proudly and fearlessly anti-normal. As a result of this self-loathing all of Ludwig's relationships (including his relationship with philosophy) are of the love/hate variety. Jarman makes it clear that it was his ascetic nature, his love of clarity and purity, that made him such a groundbreaking philosopher; and he also makes it clear that it was this love of purity that made his self-hatred all the more intense. But, again, Jarman keeps things light. One never feels the heaviness of the actual life as Wittgenstein himself must have felt it. You can judge for yourself whether this is an achievment or an evasion.
In addition to the tragic nature of Wittgenstein's personal story, Jarman is also interested in drawing parallels between the fin de sielce zeitgeist of Ludwig's suicide rampant Vienna and the fin de siecle zeitgeist of his own AIDS rampant London. These contextual parallels would probably have been more fully explored had this been a full blown feature film and not simply a one-hour made for BBC production. As a result this is more like an appetizer than a full meal. But, given the scarcity of Jarman projects, it is savored for what it is.
Ideally, I think Foucault (who was as playful as Jarman when it came to dissecting the systems that order us about) would have been a better match for this director. But its an oddly appealing film nonetheless.
Ironically, Wittgenstein is known for enabling us to see language as a game not with a singular set of rules but with as many sets of rules as there are speech communities. This breakthrough proved to be liberating for many artists and thinkers (Foucault among them who has shed much light on the way discourses shape identity) that followed in his wake, but Wittgenstein himself (tied as he was to the dominant discourse of conventional morality) never seemes to have experienced this breakthrough as liberatory.
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