Focus on DEREK JARMAN: Wittgenstein (1993)

Jarman's narrative films have, since the beginning, owed a great debt to the stage. Jarman, as artist, had a developed sense of space and its impact on purpose. Since Sebastiane, his films rely have relied ever more heavily on enforced artificiality. Like Bertolt Brecht, Jarman was not interested in enveloping the audience. Artificiality ensures distance. Distance ensures reflexive thought.

Jarman isn't interested in stirring emotions (not that he is not capable of that) but in engaging his audience in philosophical and political intercourse, which as a means to an end has also often meant a good deal of the sexual.

In Wittgenstein he takes this to another level, engaging frustratingly with the philosophical. Frustrating, not in his inability to translate the German philosopher's theories into (the film, written with the assistance of literary theorist Terry Eagleton, is exceptionally lucid) but in the effectiveness with which he captures Wittgenstein's own philosophic exasperation. "The limits of my language are the limits of my world..." the philosopher spits at his circle of intellectuals, not as the culmination of his theories about thought and communication but as an expression of his own frustration at not being able to bring them to climax.

Jarman's film is an exercise in simplifying Wittgenstein's theories and making them more complex. It is a study of genius and its contradictory enigmas, presented in a way that focuses on human existence in the actual world without allowing the audience to perceive its protagonist as being part of it. Jarman's black sound stages isolate the players, just as the screenplay makes them (or at least the prickly philosopher played by Karl Johnson) understandable. His interactions are far from simple and rarely warm. The closest we come to an intellectual connection (one that is not stared down in distain) is with a visiting alien. That is how left of field Jarman and Eagleton go.

The sensuality so often used as an access point to Jarman's characters is almost an afterthought here. In the battle between body and mind, mind has won out. The expression of sexuality is marked not by bodies but by post-coital chatter. Admittedly, much of this revolves around Wittgenstein's desire to take up on a farming co-op in Soviet Russia and his pressing need to dissect the lives of the working class, which he thinks holds the answer to his personal intellectual conundrums and, by extension, those of the human race.

Viewing the treatment of Wittgenstein's sexuality as a marker of Jarman's progression of representation, it would seem he has finally reached the point where homosexuality is not only treated as a matter of fact, but also as completely immaterial. Sexuality is presented but never impacts the direction of the film. If anything it is just another of the real life "frictions" that roughed up Wittgenstein's theorising, frustrating his intellect and ultimately humanising him.

I'm intrigued by Jarman's choice of subject here and his detached approach to it. Wittgenstein would have been being made by Jarman in the grips of his illness, with the director knowing his own end was fast approaching. Yet, possibly ironically, the film doesn't present as an artwork of someone attempting to make sense of his own existence. Rather, it feels as if Jarman is throwing up his hands, confirming the impossibility of defining what life is or how we live it.


Next up: Blue.

This post contributes to Director Focus: Derek Jarman.