"As the scriptwriter for Wittgenstein, I have an interest in ideas but little visual imagination. The director, Derek Jarman, is just the opposite. The two of us together, then, might be thought to add up to a reasonably competent person, and when the film is really buzzing, this is what happens. But because film has to present ideas in terms of characters, there’s always the danger of reducing them to it – of catering to the prurient English interest in biography, and so reinforcing a very English anti-intellectualism. Jarman, for all his admirable radicalism, has a very English middle-class sensibility, which is light years removed from the austerity and intellectual passion of his subject. The film, then, is not uniformly brilliant. Hunky young men for whom Spinoza is probably a kind of pasta shamble around ineptly disguised as philosophers. A camp Martian crops up for no particular reason, uttering wads of embarrassing whimsy. (None of this, I swear, in the original script.) But Karl Johnson, a veritable Ludwig lookalike, is splendidly intense and intelligent, and much of the movie scintillates with Jarman's bizarrely creative imagination. Does it manage to photograph ideas? I doubt it. Nobody will emerge with a grasp of the finer points of the Tractatus. If you’re filming the story of a philosopher, you need a director with some respect for the mind. But Wittgenstein gives you a reasonable general idea of what Ludwig was on about, along with some memorable images of the life."
Terry Eagleton, Ludwig Wittgenstein - A Suitable Case for Treatment, collected in
Figures Of Dissent: Reviewing Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others.
Quite.
Fagburn
watched this curio for the first time yesterday - and was looking for some way of summing up its many failings.
The talented Mr Eagleton wrote the original screenplay for Wittgenstein, which Derek Jarman then proceeded to muck around to buggery.
But I suppose any collaboration between the Marxist critic Eagleton and the arch snob Jarman was bound to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
Hi,
Solving the problems of philosophy once is quite something, but solving them twice? Now that is unique. After a spell in engineering, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein had his first go, tracing the limits of language to provide a cocksure account of what could be said with any meaning. The rest, said the last line of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, "one must pass over in silence". The author planned to do just that, packing his bags to work in an Austrian primary school. He stopped penning difficult words, and instead published a manual for children about how to spell them. But the meditative itch returned after he noticed the semantics of colour didn't fit with his grand model of meaning. He was soon back in Cambridge, with Keynes writing: "God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train." An otherworldly appearance fed this caricature, as did the monastic digs and the band of disciples. Wittgenstein would harangue them to quit the academy and do something useful, like grinding lenses in Omsk. A newly discovered archive from the most devoted of the devotees, Francis Skinner, will illuminate the relationships of the master's "wonderful life", as well as the emergence of his later thought. It uses weird images (beetles in boxes) and off-the-wall questions (can dogs have headaches?) to expose ontological anxieties as mere confusions, produced by entanglement in words. Ill at ease with modern life, he tried dissolving that with language too. Encountering a jukebox at the end of his life, he asked "what, pray, is a juke?"
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