Wittgenstein at the Movies

Wittgenstein at the Movies

Cinematic Investigations
Edited by Béla Szabados and
Christina Stojanova

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wittgenstein at the movies : cinematic investigations / edited by Béla Szabados and

Christina Stojanova.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-4885-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4887-7
(electronic)
1. Wittgenstein (Motion picture) 2. Wittgenstein Tractatus (Motion picture) 3.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951—In motion pictures.
PN1997.W5863W553 2011
791.43'72—dc22 2010052935

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
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Printed in the United States of America

 For Haya and Stan Stein

and Yuli and Iskra Stojanov

 Contents

Introduction ix
Béla Szabados and Christina Stojanova

1 Showing, Not Saying: Filming a Philosophical Genius 1

William Lyons
2 Remarks on the Scripts for Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein 25
Michael O’Pray
3 The World Hued: Jarman and Wittgenstein on Color 33
Steven Burns
4 Sketches of Landscapes: Wittgenstein after Wittgenstein 49
Daniel Steuer
5 “How It Was Then”: Home Movies as History in Péter Forgács’s
Meanwhile Somewhere . . . 79
William C. Wees
6 Meaning through Pictures: Péter Forgács and Ludwig Wittgenstein 91
Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg
7 Beyond Text and Image: Péter Forgács and his Wittgenstein
Tractatus 121
Christina Stojanova

Index 139
About the Contributors 145

vii
 Introduction
Béla Szabados and Christina Stojanova

The title of this book, Wittgenstein at the Movies, is deliberately ambiguous.

It promises to say something about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s love of movies,
the role they played in his life and philosophy, and recent films made about
him or his philosophy.
Wittgenstein loved the movies, especially American movies. He was fond
of Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton and before visiting the United States in
the late 1940s, demanded in jest that he be introduced to Ms. Hutton. In his
memoirs Norman Malcolm, a former student, gives a lively idea of what it
was like to go to the movies with Wittgenstein. After a demanding lecture or
seminar, Wittgenstein would invite one of his favorite students to see “a
flick” and on the way to the cinema he would buy a bun or a pork pie and
munch on it while he watched the film.
Malcolm recalled that Wittgenstein’s “observation of the film was not
relaxed or detached. He leaned tensely forward in his seat and rarely took his
eyes off the screen. He hardly ever uttered comments on the episodes of the
film no matter how trivial or artificial it was, in order to free his mind
temporarily from the philosophical thoughts that tortured and exhausted
him.” He would sit in the front row as close to “the action” as he could get.
“This way the screen would occupy his whole field of vision, and his mind
would be turned away from the thoughts of the lecture and his feelings of
revulsion. Once he whispered ‘This is like a shower bath!’” (Malcolm 1966,
27–28).
What did Wittgenstein mean by saying such a thing? A shower cleanses
and refreshes. Was it his “sins” committed in the self-perceived flaws of his
lecture and discussion that had to be washed away? Did he need release and
distraction? One wonders why he felt this way about his seminars that by all
accounts were lively and nourishing albeit a struggle both for him and his
ix
x Introduction

students. Perhaps because in his passionate struggle to give expression to and

engage with “the problems that trouble us,” he was sometimes frustrated
because he could not articulate to his own satisfaction the difficult problems
he was treating. And in the discussion that followed, Wittgenstein said things
to students that he may have regretted: “It’s like talking to a stove.” Perhaps
in retrospect he was haunted by the realization that such remarks were not
helpful—they did not promote his aim to erect sign posts to help people
avoid the danger points at all the junctions where language—that immense
network of well-kept wrong turnings—set the same traps for everyone (Witt-
genstein 1998, 25). In any event, there is compelling biographical evidence
that Wittgenstein went to the movies to get away from philosophy rather than
to do philosophy as the title of this book might suggest.
But not so fast. Some remarks in his notebooks indicate a more complex
attitude toward the movies. In 1930, after watching “a very old film” at the
cinema, Wittgenstein remarked:

A modern film is to an old one as a present-day motor car is to one built 25 years
ago. The impression it makes is just as ridiculous and clumsy & the way film-
making has improved is comparable to the sort of technical improvement we see in
cars. It is not to be compared with the improvement—if it’s right to call it that—of
an artistic style. . . . What distinguishes all these developments from the formation of
a style is that spirit plays no part in them. (Wittgenstein 1998, 5)

This remark suggests that watching films was not merely a “rest for the
mind” but sparked thoughts in Wittgenstein that connect up with the role of
style in his aesthetics. For him, style is the “picture of the man” that is
expressive of “spirit” and puts a face on the work in contrast to its merely
mechanical or technical aspects. His “take” on art is that unless a work
exhibits a distinctive style, sensibility, or expressive cast, it is merely techne
rather than art. For Wittgenstein the epigram “Le style c’est l’homme même”
opens up a fresh perspective on artistic style: “It says that style is the picture
of the man” (Wittgenstein 1998, 89).
Wittgenstein’s remarks on “a very old film” can be read several ways: as
an observation that films of the early period were preoccupied with mastering
the techniques of the movie camera; as expressing doubts about the possibil-
ity that a film could exhibit a distinctive style or sensibility characteristic of
works of art; or even as conjuring up, by its conspicuous absence, the pos-
sibility of a film as a picture of its director or cinematographer—the film-
maker as auteur. But no matter how we read Wittgenstein’s remarks, it is
clear that for him the cinema was not simply a holiday for the mind.
Reflecting on his enjoyment of the cinema in his private notebooks in
1931, Wittgenstein linked being modern with enjoying film: “In one regard,”
he remarked,
 Introduction xi

I must be a very modern person since the cinema has such an extraordinarily benefi-
cial effect on me. I cannot imagine any rest for the mind more adequate to me than
an American movie. What I see & the music give me a blissful sensation perhaps in
an infantile way but therefore no less powerful. In general . . . a film is something
very similar to a dream & the thoughts of Freud are directly applicable to it. (Witt-
genstein 2003, 29–31)

He goes on to make further interesting remarks:

When I am gripped by a tragedy, in the cinema, for example, I always tell myself:
no, I won’t do it like that! Or: no, it shouldn’t be like that. I want to console the hero
& everyone. But that amounts to not understanding the occurrence as a tragedy.
That’s why I only understand the happy end (in the primitive sense). The downfall
of the hero I don’t understand—I mean, with the heart. So what I always want is to
hear a fairy tale. Therefore my enjoyment of movies. And there I am truly gripped &
moved by thoughts. . . . As long as it is not frightfully bad, [a film] always provides
me with food for thoughts & feelings. (Wittgenstein 2003, 97)

If this is one of the effects of the cinema on Wittgenstein, then Malcolm’s

remarks about it being a mere “shower”—simply a catharsis as it were—are
misleading. On Wittgenstein’s own account, movies nourish thoughts as well
as feelings, so for him, it seems, there is no getting away from philosophy.
There is only the peace of mind that comes with having a method that allows
him to do philosophy whenever he wants to:

The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy
when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer
tormented by questions which bring itself into question.—Instead, we now demon-
strate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off.—
Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. There is not a
philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.
(Wittgenstein 2001, §133)

These biographical fragments give us a more complete picture of Wittgen-

stein at the movies and also suggest connections with his philosophy. There
is however another sense in which Wittgenstein is at the movies. In the art of
recent cinema two rather different but equally striking films invoke his name
and work. Out of Hungary comes Péter Forgács’s Wittgenstein Tractatus
(1992) and out of England comes Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein (1993), two
films discussed at length in this book. Both films explore Wittgenstein’s
philosophical themes and character but they differ in approach, style, look
and feel, as well as ambition. If “rest for the mind” was exclusively what
Wittgenstein wanted out of the cinema, neither of these films would satisfy
him. Both are complex and experimental in character, both put a face on the
xii Introduction

work of art, both are a far cry from the “resting place” of the fun-films of
Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton.
Although Jarman said that his film is “not a film of Ludwig Wittgenstein”
(Eagleton and Jarman 1993, 63), he takes a biographical narrative approach.
Throughout the film the historical subject Wittgenstein—not some fictional
character named Wittgenstein—is palpably in the foreground. The narrator is
the boy-Wittgenstein, a character immune to age, with an intimate personal
voice. He traces his existential and philosophical journey from Vienna to
Cambridge, his travels to the wilderness of Norway, his active military ser-
vice in the Great War, and so on. We are also given—in snapshot carica-
tures—insight into Wittgenstein’s attitude to his family and Cambridge
friends, in particular to Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes, as well
as indications about his distinctive teaching methods and style, his struggles
with logic and language, his relationship with students, and the evolution of
his philosophical perspective from the early work of the Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus to the later work of the Philosophical Investigations.
The film also delves into Wittgenstein’s character, his ethical/aesthetic
perspective, his love of music and his sexuality. Jarman takes Wittgenstein to
be unequivocally gay and attributes great philosophical significance to Witt-
genstein’s “discovery” of his gay sexual identity—indeed he traces the tran-
sition between the early and later philosophy to this discovery. Here we see
Jarman, the gay filmmaker, working on himself through working on Wittgen-
stein.
The script is witty, ironic, and often humorous, and its treatment of the
Bloomsbury Group brings out a lively sense of the absurd with its masterly
caricatures of Bertrand Russell, Lady Ottoline Morrell, and Lord Keynes.
The film is also effective as a source of inspiration for engaging with Witt-
genstein’s works as it draws the viewer into his world. Enough of Wittgen-
stein’s character, appearance, and accent are captured by Karl Johnson, an
actor who has a striking resemblance to the philosopher himself. Through his
expressive gestures and characteristic moods, Wittgenstein’s passionate en-
gagement with philosophical problems comes through clearly, making it easy
to see why he had such an effect on many of those who came in contact with
him.
The biographical and philosophical infelicities in the film reduce to ab-
surdity the idea that it is to be understood as a documentary. Jarman himself
brings this to the viewer’s attention when he remarks that “this is not a film
of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” although surely it is also true, for reasons already
mentioned, that it is a film about Ludwig Wittgenstein. Jarman is partly right
and partly wrong: right in the sense that the film is not a visual biography, a
documentary, or anything in the historical realm; nor is it a representation of
Wittgenstein. “My film,” Jarman remarks, “does not portray or betray Lud-
wig. It is there to open up. It’s logic” (Eagleton and Jarman 1993, 67). Yet he
 Introduction xiii

is also wrong, since the film’s significance, quips, ironies, insights, serious-
ness, and humor depend on what we know about the historical Wittgenstein
and his works. The film is best seen as a window into Wittgenstein’s life and
work since it engages both, and to Jarman the artist working on himself as he
is working on the film. So this is and is not a film about Ludwig Wittgen-
stein.
In sharp contrast to Jarman’s film, the voice in Forgács’s Wittgenstein
Tractatus is a distanced impersonal voice rendered even stranger by the
Hungarian accent of the “voice-over.” Wittgenstein’s head, detached from a
widely disseminated photograph, occasionally hovers above as a disembod-
ied voice intones central propositions from the seven sections of the Tracta-
tus, which in turn are accompanied by home movies. Aside from such photo-
graphic traces, Wittgenstein as a historical individual seems to disappear in
Forgács’s film, even though the script occasionally includes fragments from
Wittgenstein’s private notebooks. In contrast to the Jarman where the story
of a life and philosophy move and unfold sequentially, watching the Forgács
film we get a sense of the sub specie aeterni. In the Jarman there is theatre
and dialogue, characters and actors; in the Forgács there is the monotone
impersonal voice with a series of home movies showing unnamed individuals
and groups. The slices of filmed life are presented as isolated fragments
leaving a similar impression to that we get on first looking into the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus. The film not only throws light on the Tractatus, but
raises deep questions about that work and the core of Wittgenstein’s early
philosophy.
Another difference worth highlighting here: Terry Eagleton’s original
film script was extensively rewritten by Derek Jarman, so the script is twice
removed from the original source—namely Wittgenstein’s writings. This
contrasts with Forgács’s film, where the scriptwriter is Wittgenstein himself,
though Forgács does the selection and the editing. The same goes for the
images in the film by Forgács: it is found footage, as is the musical score.
Everything is already there but was gathered and made anew. This is very
much in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy: “You must say something
new & yet nothing but what is old. You must indeed say only what is old—
but all the same something new!” (Wittgenstein 1998, 45–46).
What aspects of the relationship between film and philosophy can we
uncover from reflecting on these two films? Two rather general questions
arise: What can cinema do for philosophy? And what can philosophy do for
cinema? To begin with the first: Both films can be used to inform people
about the facts of Wittgenstein’s life as well as his early and later philosophy.
Like biographies, a cinematic recreation of Wittgenstein’s life—his world,
milieu, and times—may draw us in and stimulate us to read his works.
Certainly, Jarman’s film is compelling enough to do this. But through the
mini-lectures and the conversations with the green Martian, Wittgensteinian
xiv Introduction

skills and techniques are also imparted: the method of example, the reduction
of the idea of a logically private language to absurdity, and the generation of
ethical problems in unexpected everyday settings; presenting and exploring
different possible worlds from our own; depicting counter-examples to gen-
eral theses. This is film at work in the service of philosophy.
All this, however, may seem a rather passive affair, since all we do is look
at and listen to representations of others doing philosophy. We ourselves may
not be involved at all. What is more, too many aphorisms asserted dogmati-
cally may mislead about the nature of philosophy as an activity. After all,
argument, questions, conversation, dialogue with those present as well as
past philosophers are at the very core of philosophy as a practice. So the
films may also be used to point to the limitations of film in doing philosophy:
to represent is one thing; to engage in the to and fro of an open philosophical
exploration—in analysis, conversation, and argument—another.
In their different ways both films act on and release the viewers’ imagina-
tive capacities as they carve out their own terrain and jurisdiction without
being reduced to a mere device in the service of philosophy. Viewers must
decide for themselves which film is more in tune with the spirit of Wittgen-
stein’s aesthetics and which, more closely, enacts the strange aphorism that
“ethics and aesthetics are one” (Wittgenstein 1961, 6.421).
Since these two films are rather different, and do different sorts of things,
a fruitful approach that is in keeping with Wittgenstein, is to “look and see”
what they do and how they shed light on Wittgenstein the person and his
philosophy, and the other way around. The Forgács film releases our imagi-
native capacities using the Tractatus as a spur to explore meaning through
pictures. The Jarman uses biographical vignettes, mini-lectures, and conver-
sations to provide insight into Wittgenstein’s character and his philosophical
activity. Factual errors do not seem to matter since the film is admittedly not
a historical document, even though it relies on Wittgenstein’s life as a back-
drop.
Few if any among the great philosophers have engaged artists and critics
more than Ludwig Wittgenstein. Novelists, composers, and critics have been
inspired and nourished by his works and methods, yet his influence on the art
of cinematography has not been adequately investigated by philosophers or
film theorists. The aim of this book of essays is to explore Wittgenstein’s
influence on the art of filmmaking and draw connections between philoso-
phy, film, and broad cultural issues. The exploration proceeds with close
attention to Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein and Péter Forgács’s Wittgenstein
Tractatus.
The essays take up various themes including the relation of the films to
the early philosophy of the Tractatus and the later philosophy of the Investi-
gations; affinities between Wittgenstein’s methods and how the two films are
made and cut; issues concerning meaning as picture and picture as meaning;
 Introduction xv

the status of assertions about the past in the Tractatus; how to write a film
script in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that shows, rather than bab-
bles. Since films show as well as say, do the films under consideration show
the problematic nature of the say/show distinction? How are we to make
sense of a picture or visual representation unless we already have a back-
ground against which the picture has meaning? Are there affinities between
the role of retrieved home movies and the role of ordinary language in the
Tractatus and the Investigations? How is the ordinary and the everyday
transformed respectively into art and philosophy?
The essays also address issues concerning the historical, social, and cultu-
ral context of Jarman’s and Forgács’s films and their reception; questions of
biography and authenticity; of Freudian preoccupations about how film and
philosophy relate to desire and sexuality; whether film’s value is essentially
cathartic and expressive, or does it lie in its content and the representations of
actions and events. Are film and philosophy essentially humanistic disci-
plines in that both are primarily concerned with the generation of meaning
and the enhancement of our expressive powers? Other topics broached in-
clude whether philosophy is in the films or is externally imposed on the
films. Finally, what might be the connection between film and modernity.
The book project “Wittgenstein at the Movies” began in the winter of
2009 at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Regina, where we
organized a Wittgenstein mini-film festival. A screening of Jarman’s and
Forgács’s films on Wittgenstein was followed by our presentations that
prompted lively public discussion. The project continued in a more formal
scholarly setting with symposia at the Canadian Society for Aesthetics at the
Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Ottawa, May 2009, and
subsequently at the 2010 meetings of the Canadian Philosophical Association
in Montréal. We then solicited additional contributions from prominent
scholars in film and Wittgenstein studies, thus commissioning papers from
Steven Burns, William Lyons, Michael O’Pray, Daniel Steuer, and William
C. Wees. Here are brief sketches of the papers written with the aim of
enlivening readers’ interest in them rather than to summarize their contents.
In “Showing, Not Saying: Filming a Philosophical Genius” William
Lyons sets out to explore some of the immense practical problems involved
in writing a film script about a cult intellectual figure that is not intellectually
meretricious. Using the example of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the
author confronts such problems as how to show, rather than didactically and
boringly talk about Wittgenstein’s philosophical genius, and how to generate
iconic intellectual “quotations,” both visual and auditory, that will come to
inhabit the viewers’ memories long after they have left the cinema.
Michael O’Pray’s “Remarks on the Scripts for Derek Jarman’s Wittgen-
stein” discusses the two scripts for Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein, the
original written by the Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton and the final
xvi Introduction

version by Jarman. The two scripts were published by the British Film Insti-
tute in 1994 to resolve a conflict between the two men. It allows a fascinating
insight into the scripting process of the film and into two very different
approaches to film aesthetics: politics and sexuality, and into Wittgenstein
himself. Eagleton’s more realist standpoint stresses the years from 1930 until
his death when Wittgenstein was, primarily, a professor at Cambridge Uni-
versity. It focuses, often wittily, on issues of class and the philosopher’s
contribution to analytical philosophy by way of a complex and modernist
system of ideas. In contrast, Jarman’s pared-down mise-en-scene and carica-
turist depiction of leading figures of the Bloomsbury set is anti-realist and
covers Wittgenstein’s entire life with an emphasis on his thwarted attempts at
homosexual relationships with young men. Jarman’s inclusion of the boy-
Wittgenstein as an interlocutor throughout the film depicts to some extent the
life-long internal struggle of the philosopher with mental breakdown. Neither
script successfully deals with the relationship between Wittgenstein’s tor-
tured mind and the nature of his philosophical thinking.
In “The World Hued: Jarman and Wittgenstein on Color,” Steven Burns
begins with Stanley Cavell’s chapter on color in The World Viewed (1979)
where Cavell considers the familiar claim that moving from black and white
to color film represented a dramatic increase in realism. The world is col-
ored, after all, but Cavell dismisses that as a juvenile argument before offer-
ing his own proposals. Derek Jarman’s film constitutes a different objection
to the realism thesis. His Wittgenstein is very much a film in color, but the
effect is decidedly anti-realistic. Jarman makes philosophical points, and
even makes philosophical jokes with his use of color. Burns also discusses
Wittgenstein’s own philosophical preoccupation with color. It is a phenome-
non that offers a central example for his first systematic treatise (the Tracta-
tus Logico-Philosophicus) and later provides a counter-example (in “Some
Remarks on Logical Form”) that leads him to abandon that system; it appears
at a key moment of the exposition of the Anti-Private-Language Argument of
the Philosophical Investigations; and in his final year it is the subject of
several manuscripts—now a book, Remarks on Colour. So a consideration of
color can give us reflections on Wittgenstein’s relation both to film and
philosophy.
Daniel Steuer’s “Sketches of Landscapes: Wittgenstein after Wittgen-
stein” compares Wittgenstein’s method in the Philosophical Investigations to
photography, the basis of the art of film. Wittgenstein offers his readers
snapshots/sketches from our form of life, while his aim to present these “in a
natural order and without breaks” points towards their paradigmatic nature.
The specific meaning of “paradigm” involved here will be discussed by
looking at Giorgio Agamben’s recent essay “Che Cos’è un paradigma?” (in
particular his interpretation of Plato’s dialectic in the Republic), Derek Jar-
man’s film Wittgenstein (interpreted as a sequence of paradigmatic scenes),
 Introduction xvii

and Stanley Cavell’s Wittgenstein-inspired book on film The World Viewed

(in particular his notions of “automatism” and “medium”). Tying the results
together, the piece concludes that the shift in perspective the paradigmatic
method of the Investigations is designed to effect should allow its readers
(Plato’s cave dwellers, the first movie audience) to see the truth of things in
themselves, the light in the refraction of light, the form in the formed object.
This is why philosophy can leave everything as it is, and yet cause a revolu-
tion—a turning around.
In “How It Was Then” William Wees probes the idea of “home movies as
history” with special attention to Péter Forgács’s films Meanwhile Some-
where . . . and Wittgenstein Tractatus. Home movie footage has been charac-
terized by film scholar and theorist Patricia Zimmermann as “ an open text
that can only be completed by historical contextualization.” For Meanwhile
Somewhere . . . (1994), the Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács drew upon an
extensive archive of home movies to produce a vivid account of what it was
like to live in Europe during World War II. With extensive research and
skilful combination of documentary and experimental film techniques,
Forgács provides the disparate fragments of home movie footage with the
“historical contextualization” Zimmerman calls for. But more than that, he
created a complex, multilayered chronicle of what might be thought of as a
cinematic visualization of the collective consciousness of wartime Europeans
and the entangled ethical issues they lived with every day. According to
Forgács, the film’s structure derives from his experiments with recycling
home-movie footage for a film he made two years earlier: Wittgenstein Trac-
tatus. A brief discussion of that film and its relevance to Meanwhile, Some-
where . . . provides an open-ended conclusion to this essay.
In “Meaning through Pictures: Péter Forgács and Ludwig Wittgenstein”
Andrew Lugg and Béla Szabados look at Péter Forgács’s film as a contribu-
tion to philosophy as well as to film. After describing the film’s seven move-
ments from the world, through language, to value (keeping with Wittgen-
stein’s insistence on the importance of description in aesthetics), they go on
to argue that Wittgenstein Tractatus is in part a critique of the picture theory
of meaning by means of pictures, words, and music. Thus, despite its title,
Forgács’s film is closer to Wittgenstein’s later work in the Philosophical
Investigations. Following this they discuss the question how the ordinary
(home movies and everyday language) is transformed into art or philosophy
in Forgács’s film and in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. They then turn to
Tibor Szemző’s musical composition accompanying the film and suggest
that it not only sets the mood but underscores the Wittgensteinian theme that
philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by lan-
guage. Finally, they explore the mystical and the role it plays in Forgács’s
film and Wittgenstein’s philosophy.
xviii Introduction

Christina Stojanova’s study “Beyond Text and Image: Péter Forgács and
his Wittgenstein Tractatus” establishes the unique place of the film on the
backdrop of the scantly populated Wittgensteinian cinematic world, mostly
thanks to the ingenious way Wittgenstein’s pronouncements (written and
read) interact with the found-footage images to express abstract notions, far
greater than the simple sum of its visual and sonic components. By engaging
theoretical concepts and paradigms, borrowed from a wide array of schol-
ars—from Sergei Eisenstein and André Bazin to Gilles Deleuze, Walter Ben-
jamin and beyond, the paper concentrates on the role ambiguity plays in the
formation of meaning on aesthetic as well as on philosophical and ethical
levels. In the process, it discusses various techniques the director applies to
harness the power of the home-movie fragments within the elaborate audio-
visual orchestration of his film, thus espousing a congenial approach to Witt-
genstein’s world of ideas.
The editors are grateful to Andrew Lugg for his helpful advice and inci-
sive comments throughout the preparation of this book; to Heather Hodgson,
Lynne Cohen, and Ivan Gekoff for discussion, encouragement, and moral
support; to Professor Nicholas Ruddick, the former director of the Human-
ities Research Institute at our university, for his support of the project at its
inception; and to the University of Regina for a subvention towards the
publication of this book.
Since the book is published in 2011, it commemorates the sixtieth anni-
versary of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s death in 1951.

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 Introduction xix

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second edition 2001.
———. Public and Private Occasions. Translated and edited by James Klagge and Alfred
Nordmann. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
 Chapter One

Showing, Not Saying: Filming a

Philosophical Genius
William Lyons

She told me that she had asked her tutor at Oxford about Wittgenstein, whose name
she had heard at parties. Lindsay [her tutor] replied, “Wittgenstein does not exist.”
She believed him.
—Frederic Raphael, Personal Terms

1. INTRODUCTION

Whenever I did something particularly foolish, my grandfather would say,

“You need your head read.” That is to say, I was in need of some psychiatric
treatment. Though my grandfather is long dead, I generally meet much the
same response when I say that I am trying to write a film script about Ludwig
Wittgenstein, a philosopher known for his profound, enigmatic, and difficult
texts.
This response arises from two distinct sets of belief. The first is that, if
you are working outside the studio system, then the chances of any film
script ever going into production are exceedingly slim, approaching zero.
The successful novelist Nick Hornby writes about his own experiences as a
freelance screenwriter in the following way:

Once you have established yourself as a novelist, then people seem quite amenable
to the idea of publishing your books: your editor will make suggestions as to how
they can be improved, of course, but the general idea is that, sooner or later, they
will be in a bookshop, available for purchase. Film, however, doesn’t work that way,
not least because even the lower-budget films often cost millions of pounds to make,

1
2 William Lyons

and as a consequence there is no screenwriter alive, however established in the

profession, who writes in the secure knowledge that his work will be filmed. . . .
I know . . . that London is awash with optioned books, unmade scripts, treatments
awaiting development money that will never arrive. (Hornby 2009)

Now I should make clear that I am not a novelist, successful or otherwise,

and that I have never before produced or even attempted to produce a film
script.
The second belief is that it is impossible to film the work of a philoso-
pher, whether the philosopher in question be Wittgenstein or anyone else,
because the work of a philosopher, his or her raison d’être, is a set of written
texts often of great density and complexity and so in no way lends itself to
images on a screen. Any attempt to get around this, by concentrating on the
life of the philosopher in question, will ipso facto be, under one aspect at
least, a failure, because the very thing for which the philosopher in question
is famous, his or her philosophical views, will be missing. Thus the film Iris
about Iris Murdoch, is a brilliant evocation of her relationship with John
Bayley, in particular of the strains in that relationship when Iris fell victim to
Alzheimer’s disease, but it reveals nothing about why and how she became a
fine novelist and a very accomplished philosopher.
So why the masochism? Why am I trying to produce a film script about a
subject that is impossible to film and almost certainly never will be filmed?
Partly it is the pleasure of being confronted by a difficult challenge, mixed in,
I suspect, with a helping of hubris. But the major part of my motivation
comes from the fact that Wittgenstein, both in regard to his life and his work,
has had a strong appeal for me for decades. No one who is an indentured
academic philosopher in a university in the western world can avoid coming
across the work of Wittgenstein as, along with Heidegger, he dominated
teaching and research in philosophy in the last half of the twentieth century.
Quite early on, while still an undergraduate student, I also became fascinated
by what I knew of Wittgenstein as a person. This led to an addiction to
biographies and memoirs of him. In turn this led me to write a play about
Wittgenstein and finally to wonder if perhaps an austere, moody, “indie” film
might be the right medium for depicting a self-lacerating, brooding, ascetic,
lonely, disturbing genius with impossibly high standards in both behavior
and intellectual endeavor.
After reading the erudite, perceptive, witty, and often hilarious, early
volumes of the notebooks of Frederic Raphael, published as the series Per-
sonal Terms (2001), I realized that he too had a fascination with Wittgenstein
and from time to time had contemplated making a film about him. Raphael,
of course, has a raft of awards for writing for film, TV, and radio, including
an Oscar for the original screenplay of the film Darling (1965) and an Oscar
nomination for the original screenplay for the film Two For The Road
 Showing, Not Saying 3

(1967), and wrote, though the auteur himself felt the need to “improve” it in
various ways, the screenplay for Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
He also read Moral Sciences at Cambridge in the 1950s and so was taught by
that generation of philosophers that came immediately after Wittgenstein. At
any rate, in the first of Raphael’s cahiers, Personal Terms: The 1950s and
1960s, I came across the following passage referring to events of 1968:

In Bond Street I was flagged down by a passing Jonathan Miller and walked with
him to the underground station. He wore a khaki overcoat and seemed like a man
designed by Gaudí and claiming, despite all the asymmetrical discrepancies, to be
rationally put together. We talked (again) about a film about Wittgenstein. He was
on his way to the BBC and promised to raise the idea with S. Hearst [Stephen
Hearst, head of arts programming for BBC television]. He was confident we should
be able to do something. (Raphael 2001, 173)

To my knowledge, nothing ever came of this approach to the BBC. So with

my “New World” ingenuousness still intact, in 2005 I wrote an unsolicited
note to Frederic Raphael about my having written a play about Wittgenstein
and expressing my interest in trying to write a film script about him. He was
not merely most courteous and welcoming in his reply, but over the next five
years he proceeded to give me a wealth of advice, together with kindly and
wittily administered corrections and warnings about the need, with film,
often “to show, not say.” Needless to say, but I shall say it anyway, my naïve
efforts discussed below should not be blamed on him.

2. THE STRUCTURE OF A WITTGENSTEIN FILM AND ITS TITLE

In setting out to write a film script about Wittgenstein, I realized, early on,
that I had to try and decide what form or structure the film should be given.
One form would be to interview people who were still alive and had known
Wittgenstein, and then to illustrate their memories of him with various dra-
matic “scenes from the life.” Several things made me uneasy with this ap-
proach. First, by now there are very few living persons who had met Witt-
genstein. Of that number even fewer could claim to have known him well. So
these interviews would tend to give at best a very partial and possibly quite
superficial view of Wittgenstein. A related structure would be to interview
contemporary philosophers who are experts in the work of Wittgenstein or
about his life. But this approach troubled me as well. I have lived much of
my life in the company of philosophers and one thing that has impressed me
is how rarely they ever agree about the correct interpretation of the work of
any philosopher or indeed about anything. A film about philosophers dis-
agreeing about Wittgenstein did not attract me. Yet another structure would
4 William Lyons

be to give up the idea of drama altogether and just settle for a documentary.
A documentary would need the backing of some large and well-funded insti-
tution like the BBC (or like the BBC used to be), that had access to a large
research department which could hunt down archive film about Wittgenstein
and his milieu in Austria, Britain, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Norway, and
elsewhere. Besides the unlikelihood of my getting such backing, and leaving
aside the fact that a number of good documentaries about Wittgenstein had
already been made, it was not what I was really interested in.
What I settled on was a film that would interweave the life and work of
Wittgenstein without avoiding getting seriously involved in the latter. The
script should be faithful to the known facts about his life and, where appro-
priate, give a reasonably well-accepted account of at least some of his char-
acteristic philosophical views and include many of his best-known aphorisms
and metaphors. But, of course, what still remained to be thought about was
what structure would make the interweaving of the life and work engaging
and plausible. So I tried first to divine the shape, or perhaps the élan vital, of
Wittgenstein’s life and then see how this would in turn shed light on his
philosophical attitudes.
It seemed to me that his life and work fell into fairly clearly delineable
periods, where the move from one period to the next was dictated by certain
events that in turn were influenced by core aspects of his personality. I saw
Wittgenstein as initially a well-dressed young man from a very wealthy
Austrian family, used to the good things in life including the high culture end
of music, fine art, and literature, but with a conscience that was beginning to
assert itself and insist that he do something useful and serious with his life.
After first becoming involved with aeronautics at Manchester, Wittgenstein
was then drawn into trying to solve certain core problems in logic that arose
through discussions with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge, and eventually into
investigations into the nature of language. By that time he was beginning to
think of philosophy as his life’s work, but only if he could achieve work of
the highest standard. The growing intensity of his philosophical focus was
reinforced by his traveling to remote parts of Norway to work alone and in
silence, and by the increasing astringency of his style of writing philosophy.
However, with the outbreak of World War I and the involvement of his own
nation in it, Wittgenstein felt that, if he was to be “a decent human being,” he
could not stand by while others, including his brothers, fought and perished.
Incredibly, while an ordinary soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army on the
eastern front, Wittgenstein did not lose his commitment to solving what he
believed were the recalcitrant logico-linguistic problems of his time and
completed the manuscript of his first masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus (1933).
His first-hand experiences of war, including that of being a prisoner of
war in Italy, seem to have affected him deeply. Postwar he gave up his
 Showing, Not Saying 5

personal wealth and sought to live more simply. Believing that he had solved
the logico-linguistic problems that previously had engaged him so deeply, he
abandoned thoughts of returning to academic philosophy and instead became
a schoolteacher in rural Austria. It was in large part his predictable lack of
success as a schoolteacher, caused in strong measure by his angry impatience
with students who could not live up to his exacting educational ideals, that
led him back to philosophy and to Cambridge. But he returned to Cambridge
a different person. Now he was no longer a student conferring with Russell,
but the master, a dauntingly austere, ascetic, serious, and demanding master,
from whom Russell and Moore and others at Cambridge wanted to learn. But
a decade later it was war again, World War II. The need to help his two
sisters, still in Vienna, avoid being sent to concentration camps, reminded
him that there were more pressing and serious problems than those of acade-
mia. He also felt he could not stand by and teach philosophy at Cambridge,
while the rest of Europe and eventually much of the world, was going up in
flames. So Wittgenstein volunteered for war-work in various hospitals. When
the war ended, infected now with a decided distaste for what increasingly he
viewed as the superficial posturing of academic life, he once again went into
voluntary and solitary exile, often to remote parts of Ireland. But he did not
give up philosophy. Now he focused on producing the manuscript of his
second masterpiece, the posthumously published Philosophical Investiga-
tions (1958), which would put right what he felt were the inadequacies of his
Tractatus account of language. The style was also strikingly different. Gone
were the curt propositions indicating his certainty that the core logico-lin-
guistic problems of philosophy could be solved once and for all. Increasingly
there was his growing belief that language was extraordinarily complicated
and that to subtract it from the ordinary lives of ordinary people and make it
into a specimen for an academic laboratory enquiry, would be to distort and
misunderstand it. But, at the same time, he sensed that his energy was slip-
ping away and his powers weakening. When cancer was finally diagnosed,
he returned via America to Cambridge, to die in the home of his GP with the
apt address “Storey’s End.”
Put in the form of “a pitch” to a Hollywood producer, whose attention
span is often alleged to be that of a grasshopper, the theme of the film is as
follows: Wittgenstein’s life and work were shaped by his own complex,
fascinating, and frequently forbidding personality. In a life that spanned two
world wars and their devastating aftermath, his personality evolved from
being a rich, clever, cultivated, and cosseted young man from the Viennese
haute bourgeoisie into being a driven, restless, self-lacerating, intense, pas-
sionate, uncompromising, unforgiving, solitary, alienated, and finally self-
exiled intellectual. Yet, with superb irony, it is reported that Wittgenstein’s
last words were “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”
6 William Lyons

But it might be worth exploring how a spine might be assembled for a

film that is hardly going to be mainstream. Some years ago, Frederic Raphael
drew my attention to the non-mainstream feature film, Thirty-Two Short
Films About Glenn Gould, directed and co-scripted by the French-Canadian,
François Girard. This 1993 film takes its structure from J. S. Bach’s Gold-
berg Variations, a musical opus much loved and performed by the subject of
the film, the eccentric Canadian pianist prodigy, Glenn Gould. As the title
indicates, the film is composed of thirty-two vignettes about Gould, filmed in
both color and black and white (one scene is animated X-ray footage). Some
vignettes are dramatic re-creations of events in Gould’s life, others inter-
views with those who knew him, others abstract animations set to music,
others scenery associated with him and so on. The music on the soundtrack is
mostly Bach but also includes other pieces of classical piano music, all
performed by Gould himself. It is a masterpiece of eccentric cinema.
The structure of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus suggested to me a structure for
a Wittgenstein film not unlike that of Girard’s use of the Goldberg Varia-
tions. The Tractatus has an unusual but quite precise numbering system in
relation to its propositions and paragraphs, a system taken from Bertrand
Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s three-volume magnum opus about the
logical foundations of mathematics, Principia Mathematica. Thus the first
proposition of the Tractatus, in English translation, is “The world is all that is
the case,” and is numbered 1. The next proposition, a comment on proposi-
tion 1, “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” is numbered 1.1. The
next proposition, a gloss on that comment on proposition 1, is numbered
1.11, and so on. The very last and now most famous proposition in the
Tractatus, numbered 7, is (in English) “What we cannot speak about we must
pass over in silence.”
Thus a carefully selected series of salient and iconic filmic “propositions”
in Wittgenstein’s life and work could be given Tractarian numbering that in
turn would invite viewers to reconstruct the “complete text” of Wittgen-
stein’s life and work. This would be both starkly to separate scenes, without
the usual “cutting to” connections, but also to connect them in an unusual
putting-intellectual-demands-on-the-viewer way. It would be a deliberate
subversion of orthodox continuity editing that, I imagine, Wittgenstein would
have liked. In suggesting this structure, where great emphasis would then be
put on “the scene,” I get some comfort from the following passage in David
Mamet’s On Directing Film:

The smallest unit is the shot; the largest unit is the film; and the unit with which the
director most wants to concern himself is the scene.
First the shot: it’s the juxtaposition of the shots that moves the film forward. The
shots make up the scene. The scene is a formal essay. It is a small film. It is, one
might say, a documentary. (Mamet 1991, 3)
 Showing, Not Saying 7

To return to the numbering, the very first scene would be numbered 1 and,
immediately before it begins, there would be a blank screen with just the
number 1 on it. The next scene, if internally linked to that scene, would be
1.1, and so on. Also, given the enigmatic quality not merely of the Tractatus
but of so much of Wittgenstein’s oeuvre, and given that the last proposition
of the Tractatus is numbered 7, a suitably enigmatic title for the whole film
might be “7.1.”

3. WHERE TO BEGIN?

The first page of a book, sometimes read in the bookshop, can often be the
deciding factor as to whether a reader buys the book or, if he or she’s been
given the book as a gift, reads on. While one rarely leaves a cinema mid-film,
at least if one has paid for the ticket, it is nevertheless true that the very first
scene, or even what accompanies the opening credits, can easily influence
one’s enjoyment of the film as a whole.
My preference is to begin back to front. Not with Wittgenstein dying, as
that would be a cinematic cliché, but with Wittgenstein at “Storey’s End” not
long before his death. I receive some comfort in this decision from the
following note sent to me by my philosophical friend, Tony O’Connor:

I’m thinking of what is probably an apocryphal story but attributed to Jean-Luc

Godard. When asked at the height of the nouvelle vague if his next film would have
a beginning, middle and end, he is reputed to have replied ‘Yes, but not necessarily
in that order’!

My idea for the opening scene, and its immediate “glosses,” is to make clear
that this is a film about philosophy, itself a rather strange subject, and about
an austere and uncompromising practitioner of it who also had a Bauhaus
“ornament as excrement” approach to aesthetics. But to do all this with some
economy and visual wit. So in the opening sequence of scenes, I do not, of
course, suggest what the “shots” should be, for to do so would risk being shot
by the director. But I supply some general scene-setting to help a director
visualize his or her shots, and enable the reader of this essay to think them-
selves into the scene.

1. EXT. GARDEN, DR. BEVAN’S HOME, CAMBRIDGE—MARCH 1951.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, now in his early sixties and afflicted with severe cancer, has
returned once again to Cambridge to seek treatment from a Dr. Bevan who had
been recommended by his Irish friend, Con Drury. His health has deteriorated so
fast that, soon after his arrival, he is in effect a terminally ill patient in Dr. Bevan’s
home. Though it is the end of March, it is still quite cold. It is early morning.
8 William Lyons

WITTGENSTEIN is in the Bevans’ rather pretty cottage-garden, sitting hunched up

on a plain garden chair, dressed in neat “Oxfam” clothes of dark hue, with a rug
over his shoulders and a blanket over his knees, and writing at a small table. (This is
his last-ever bout of philosophical writing.)
Wittgenstein
(Voice-over.) I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again
“I know that that’s a tree,” pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives
and hears this, and I tell him: “This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philoso-
phy.”
A bird in the branches of a tree nearby begins to sing. Wittgenstein stops writing
and listens to the bird-song. (This “bird theme” will be taken up again, several
times, later in the film, for example for a group of scenes centering on Wittgenstein’s
lonely self-exile in Connemara, Co Galway, in Ireland.)
1.1 EXT. GARDEN, DR. BEVAN’S HOME, CAMBRIDGE—SAME DAY,
MARCH 1951.
It is later that same morning and Wittgenstein is still writing at the small table in the
Bevans’ garden. Mrs. Bevan then enters the garden from the back door of the house.
She is wearing an overcoat that has four buttons down the front and a button on
each of two faux breast pockets.
Mrs. Bevan
I’m off to church. I won’t be gone long. Do you need anything?
Wittgenstein briefly turns towards her and shakes his head, indicating a “No,” then
turns back to his writing. She turns away, takes a few steps towards the back door,
but then turns back and approaches Wittgenstein again.
Do you like my coat?
Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein turns his body towards her and, after carefully scrutinizing her coat,
says in a quiet authoritative voice. Fetch me a scissors, Mrs. Bevan.
Mrs. Bevan goes inside the house and returns with a scissors. Wittgenstein takes the
scissors.
Wittgenstein
Would you come a little closer?
Mrs. Bevan stands next to his chair. Wittgenstein takes the scissors and cuts off the
buttons from the faux breast pockets and then the top button of the four down the
front of the coat. Mrs. Bevan, at first surprised, even a little shocked in her middle-
class way, is then pleased at the result and, after carefully picking up the cut-off
buttons and retrieving the scissors, walks almost jauntily back into the house. Witt-
genstein, satisfied by his “tailoring,” returns to his writing.
1.2 INT. SITTING ROOM, DR. BEVAN’S HOME, CAMBRIDGE—26th APRIL
1951.
 Showing, Not Saying 9

It is a few weeks later. Wittgenstein is sitting hunched up in a chair in the Bevans’

sitting room on the ground floor, with a rug over his shoulders and a blanket over
his knees. There is a fire in the grate. He is reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and
Punishment. It is Wittgenstein’s 62nd birthday. Dr. Bevan and Mrs. Bevan enter.
Dr. Bevan moves a few steps towards Wittgenstein.
Dr. Bevan
(Hesitantly.) May we disturb you for a moment?
Wittgenstein stops reading and turns towards the Bevans. Mrs. Bevan, who is carry-
ing a gift-wrapped parcel, Wittgenstein’s birthday present from the Bevans of an
electric blanket, approaches Wittgenstein.
Mrs. Bevan
(Handing him the present.) Many happy returns!
Wittgenstein
(Receiving the present, then looking up directly at her.) There will be no returns.
Dr. Bevan says nothing, knowing that it is true. Mrs. Bevan sheds some tears but
tries to conceal them. Wittgenstein then unwraps the parcel and, looking up at Mrs.
Bevan, smiles and nods kindly at her.
1.3 INT. A BEDROOM, DR. BEVAN’S HOME, CAMBRIDGE—28th APRIL
1951.
It is the night of 28th April, 1951. Wittgenstein is lying in bed in an upstairs
bedroom, close to death. He moves in and out of consciousness. Dr. Bevan enters
the room, feels Wittgenstein’s pulse, stands gazing at his sleeping countenance and
then silently leaves. Mrs. Bevan then enters the room, sits down by the bed and
silently watches over him.
Mrs. Bevan
(When she sees him open his eyes.) I hope you slept well.
(Wittgenstein does not reply but stirs.) A number of your friends are coming espe-
cially to see you tomorrow. Miss Anscombe, Dr. Drury, Dr. Richards and Mr.
Smythies, I believe.
Wittgenstein
(Slowly turning his head to look straight at her.) Tell them I had a wonderful life.
Wittgenstein closes his eyes, never again to regain consciousness. Mrs. Bevan be-
gins to weep.

4. WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR?

For Wittgenstein World War I was a life-changing experience. He experi-

enced long periods of inactivity, frontline fighting, a long and exhausting
10 William Lyons

retreat, and finally imprisonment, yet interwoven with all this was an enor-
mous effort to finish the manuscript of what became the Tractatus. So there
should be a set of scenes about Wittgenstein and World War I with a prepon-
derance of non-dialogue scenes, in short, real “show” business. Let us give
them numbers beginning with 3. Let us also presume, say, that the initial
scene, 3, is a scene where a newsreel about the outbreak of World War I, with
the declaration of war on Serbia by the Foreign Minister of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire and the reaction of the Austrian people, is being shown in
a cinema in Vienna. Scene 3.1, 3.11, and so on might depict Wittgenstein
first sitting in the cinema watching the newsreel, then suddenly becoming
very angry and agitated when the Austrian people are shown in the newsreel
as cheering the decision to go to war, getting up from his seat, shouting,
“Fools! Bloody fools! Idiots! Do you think war is a game?” as he rushes past
those still seated. Then he exits from the cinema and wanders in a distracted
way through the streets immediately adjacent where there are people waving
national flags and cheering.
Then we might insert a sequence of scenes of Wittgenstein actually at
war—3.2 might be the exterior of the barracks at the military base in Kra-
kow, winter 1915, with artillery and army trucks parked around, soldiers
wandering about, feeding horses, and so forth. Then 3.21 might be the interi-
or of a hut at the same base, with Wittgenstein writing in a notebook at a
plain table in a corner, oblivious to the movements, chatter, and noise of
other soldiers in the hut. 3.22 might focus on the page of the notebook in
which he is writing, which in turn is next to his pocket-watch. The page is
covered by his hand-written remarks, such as “What is it for propositions to
approximate to the truth?” and “To anyone that sees clearly, it is obvious that
a proposition like ‘This watch is lying on the table’ contains a lot of indefi-
niteness,” and so on. Then, suddenly, deliberately so, deafeningly so, this
next scene:

3.3 EXT. HILL ON THE RUSSIAN FRONT—MAY 1916.

It is May 1916. Wittgenstein is a soldier in the 4th artillery battery of the 5th Field
Howitzer Regiment in the Austro-Hungarian Army. He is at a forward observation
post on a hill on the Russian Front. He is in a shallow foxhole and constantly under
fire from incoming shells and occasionally from sniper fire. His pack and trench
spade are next to him in the foxhole, as is a book with the title Crime and Punish-
ment clearly visible. Nearby can be seen the dead bodies of some of his fellow
soldiers, killed as the main body of his regiment retreated. He is looking through a
pair of binoculars and, to the deafening sounds of artillery fire, both incoming and
outgoing, he is shouting down a field telephone.
Wittgenstein
(Shouting, animated.) Incoming artillery fire from Gewitsch, . . . a distance of . . . of
about two and a half miles. My position . . .
 Showing, Not Saying 11

There is a massive explosion and then a pall of smoke. Damn. Can’t see. They’ve
blown up half my hill.
An artillery barrage drowns out his voice completely. Then there is a lull.
(Sarcastically.) I’d be obliged if you would return some fire. No need for good
manners!
A sniper’s bullet strikes the ground just in from of him. Sniper fifteen degrees to my
left.
Now the artillery fire again becomes deafening, the rifle fire increases, smoke be-
gins to obscure his position and we just see, through the smoke, Wittgenstein’s
mouth continuing to shout down the telephone. But we cannot hear what he’s say-
ing. Wittgenstein puts down the telephone. Then suddenly the noise ceases but for
the occasional whistle of a rifle bullet. Wittgenstein picks up the field telephone and
rings headquarters. (Calmly.) Hello? . . . Captain Fricker, please . . . Ah, Captain . . .
Yes . . . Yes, heavy . . . Yes, I’m still here . . . In one piece, I think . . . Yes . . . I was
wanting . . . I was wanting a brief word.
In my kit, at base camp, is a parcel, a manuscript. With it is an envelope with
instructions about where it’s to be sent in case of my death . . .
Yes, I’d be obliged if you . . .
Some rifle fire and mortar fire drowns out the rest of his message. Then a lull.
Wittgenstein again picks up the field telephone and rings headquarters. Captain
Fricker, please.
(After a moment or two.) I’ve made some notes about how these field telephones
might be improved. For example, I . . .
Now the artillery fire begins again, at a deafening level.

Then back to pure “showing.” Scene 3.31 might be newsreel or else a mon-
tage of stills of the carnage and destruction of war. In general, while this
might be counter-intuitive, a montage of stills can be quite effective in indi-
cating the passing of time, and much cheaper than location filming! Frederic
Raphael drew my attention to the use of stills in the film Passenger. In fact
this use of stills came about by accident when the director, Andrzej Munk,
died in a car accident before the film was finished and his Polish compatriot,
Witold Lesiewicz, completed a lot of the last section with stills. Nevertheless
the result is unexpectedly powerful and the film won an award at Cannes in
1964. Another such use of stills occurs toward the end of the film Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where it indicates the protagonists’ long
journey by ship and train from America to Bolivia.
But to return to our Wittgenstein-at-war sequence of scenes, 3.32 might
show Wittgenstein as part of the great retreat by the Austro-Hungarian army
after the Russian offensive of July 1916. But then we suddenly throw in a
12 William Lyons

scene whose moral theme could then be picked up later in a scene where
Wittgenstein is discussing ethics, thus connecting his life and thought.

3. 33 EXT. RETREAT FROM RUSSIAN FRONT—MOMENTS LATER, JULY

1916.
AN AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN SOLDIER ON HORSEBACK, directly in front of Witt-
genstein whose head is bowed in exhaustion, suddenly stops, causing Wittgenstein to
pull up his own horse and look up. The fellow soldier dismounts, takes off his boots
and gives them to one of the Russian prisoners of war who is walking alongside him
in the snow in his socks, then gets back on his horse and moves on. Wittgenstein,
after watching the prisoner put on the boots and walk on, remains stationary and
stares after his fellow horseman in amazement at this extraordinary act of kindness.
The rest of the column of mounted soldiers and walking prisoners slowly pass by
him.

5. BUT WHERE’S THE PHILOSOPHY?

I’ve already pasted up my articles on the cinema door by saying that, in

making a film about Wittgenstein, one must not shrink from including some
“engaging in the dialectic of philosophy” scenes. But how to do this without
boring the pants off the cinema audience is the problem.
In one instance at any rate, this might be done in the following way.
Post–World War I and his period of self-exile as schoolteacher and gardener,
Wittgenstein found a renewed interest in philosophy, and so returned to
Cambridge. But, as he had shed his fortune immediately after World War I,
he was told that, in order to qualify for research funding at Cambridge, he
would need to have a degree in philosophy. He was advised that perhaps the
easiest way of securing such funding would be to submit his published work,
the Tractatus, for viva voce examination for the degree of D.Phil. at Cam-
bridge. Let us give the number 5 to the first half of this examination and cut
to the second half:

5. 2 INT. TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE—JUNE 1929.

This is the continuation of Wittgenstein’s viva voce examination to enable Cam-
bridge University to appoint him to a research position. The examination is being
held in a paneled room in Trinity College, Cambridge. The chairman of the exam-
ination panel is the DEAN of the Moral Sciences Faculty, and the examiners are
Professor G.E. MOORE and Mr. Bertrand RUSSELL. They are seated on the three
chairs on the side of the table facing the door, with Wittgenstein, when he is not
walking about the room, occupying the chair on the other side facing them. It is a
considerable time after the beginning of the examination, with the examiners now
looking decidedly weary and the light coming in the mullioned windows being by
now quite faint.
 Showing, Not Saying 13

Dean
(Cutting in.) Perhaps Mr. Russell would like to ask another question?
Russell
(Always assured.) Mr. Wittgenstein, perhaps you might enlighten me on the follow-
ing matter.
(Reading from his copy of the Tractatus.) At section 4.115 you say philosophy “will
signify what cannot be said, by presenting clearly what can be said.”
What exactly does that mean?
Wittgenstein
(Becoming impatient.) It’s perfectly clear. It means what it says.
Russell
(Acidly.) Perhaps you might indulge us a little by expanding on that meaning.
Wittgenstein
(Glaring at Russell.) I’m astounded you, above all, find my work difficult.
Russell
(Facetiously.) We all have our failings.
Wittgenstein
(Angrily.) But we shouldn’t glory in them!
Dean
(Sensing that the examination was getting out of hand.) Gentlemen, please!
I wonder, Mr. Wittgenstein, if you’d be so kind as to add to your response to Mr.
Russell.
Wittgenstein
(Pauses. Stands up and then walks about and sighs deeply, at times more or less
oblivious of the examiners. Then he turns back towards the examiners.)I can show
you things of which I cannot tell. In bumping our heads against the limits of lan-
guage, we show so much about language, and life. That’s the important bit.
(Again after searching for an image.) We learn more about our kidneys when they
don’t work.
(Pause. Begins to pace up and down again. Then facing the wall, his back to the
examiners, and in a plaintive tone.) But I may as well be talking to the wall.
(He then turns to face his examiners once again.) You don’t know what agony it’s
been not to be understood. By a single person!
(Glaring at them.) We should end this nonsense.
Dean
14 William Lyons

(Summoning up a stern tone of voice.) That’s . . . that’s not called for.

I think there’s room for one last question?
Wittgenstein
(Impatiently, now taking his seat.) If you must.
Dean
(When no question is forthcoming.) Mr. Russell?
Russell
(Reading from the text of the Tractatus.) Right near the end of the Tractatus you say
that “the sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as
it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did
exist, it would have no value.”
This seems to imply there are no propositions of ethics. Isn’t that a dangerous thing
to say?
Wittgenstein
(Exasperated.) You’ve understood nothing. Nothing at all! It’s the other side of the
same door!
This time we look outwards, onto the world. In the world we find no values. If we
did, they wouldn’t be values but facts, and so not the business of philosophy.
(Pauses.) The world and its events just happen. Like raindrops. But ethics cannot be
like that.
Moral values do not belong in the book of the world.
Russell
I’m still struggling with this, I’m afraid.
Wittgenstein
(Looking straight at Russell.) It’s good that you struggle; have uncertainties.
(Then pacing up and down, he resumes his meditative master class.) Like the form
of the world, the nature of values is revealed in our language. But in this case in the
failure of language. God would not lower himself to speak to man.
(Stops dead in his tracks.) We will begin to see, when we have become indifferent to
the world. But not indifferent to what we set out to do in the world. There’s no rule
for that.
(After becoming for a few moments completely still, almost catatonic, staring at the
floor, and struggling with his thought, he then continues.) In that dreadful winter of
1916, I saw a soldier mounted on horseback in front of a column of Russian prison-
ers, get off his horse and give his boots to a prisoner who was barefoot.
There’s no rule for that either.
(He again lapses into silence.)
 Showing, Not Saying 15

Dean
(Waiting and then breaking the silence.) Perhaps I may be permitted a question at
this point. I see that the very last section of your book . . . thesis . . . numbered 7,
consists of just this sentence, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in
silence.” I know I’m the amateur in philosophy here but I wonder if you’d care
to . . . to, well, expand on your meaning here.
Wittgenstein
(Glaring at him but saying quietly if firmly.) No.
Dean
(After recovering his composure, he breaks the silence, awkwardly.) Perhaps this is
a good point to draw matters to a close?
Russell
(With a sigh.) Certainly.
Dean
And you, Professor Moore?
Moore
(Startled out of his reverie.) Oh?
Dean
I think we’ve examined Mr. Wittgenstein enough, wouldn’t you agree?
Moore
(Only too happy to finish.) Oh yes. Indeed.
Dean
(To Wittgenstein.) You may retire now, and we’ll consider our decision and let you
know in due course.
Wittgenstein
(Stands up and then addresses the examiners as he moves towards the door.) I knew
you’d never understand.
(He opens the door but, instead of going out, turns back again.) What I wrote in the
Tractatus may be wrong. Dead wrong. My thoughts have moved on since then.
Wittgenstein turns quickly, goes out the door and then starts down a long winding
stairway.

For reasons of the coherence and development of Wittgenstein’s character

and so in turn of the film, there should be an earlier segment focusing on a
meeting between Russell and Wittgenstein, soon after the latter had first
come to Cambridge. Then Wittgenstein was more or less the pupil of Russell.
But here we see the balance of intellectual power has changed and Wittgen-
16 William Lyons

stein is the maestro. Also Wittgenstein’s words in the viva voce examination,
“In that dreadful winter of 1916, I saw a soldier mounted on horseback in
front of a column of Russian prisoners . . .” would refer back to the “Wittgen-
stein at war” sequence number 3.33, where Wittgenstein’s comrade-in-arms
gave his shoes to the Russian prisoner. But the main purpose of this viva
voce sequence is to see Wittgenstein philosophizing in the flesh, and thereby
to witness his restless, intense, and frequently curt and intimidating ambula-
tory style of thinking.
Of course these sorts of questions recur here, “Wouldn’t a philosophical
discussion be too much for a modern cinema audience?” or more bluntly,
“Wouldn’t real philosophy just bore the pants off any viewer?” For a start
there is nothing wrong with including some humor with the philosophy, even
some farce. As Gilbert Ryle used to say, philosophy should be serious but not
solemn. One could also deliberately break up a long passage of philosophiz-
ing with a knock-about one; not quite a grave-diggers’ scene but something
like that. For example, take a scene where Wittgenstein is conducting one of
his intimidating, silence-punctuated, séance-like “lectures,” before his cho-
sen few in deck chairs, in his austere rooms in the Trinity College Cambridge
Annex, Whewell’s Court, in the late 1930s. One could break it into two
halves with a short “porter’s scene” like this intervening—one that at the
same time would also show Wittgenstein’s growing world fame:

5.7 EXT. ENTRANCE TO WHEWELL’S COURT—SAME AFTERNOON, NO-

VEMBER 1939.
A VISITOR, a neatly and expensively dressed female American “tourist academic”
approaches the entrance to Whewell’s Court. She is about to enter when the PORT-
ER emerges from his lodge.
Porter
I’m sorry, Ma’am, this is private property.
Visitor
Oh? I’m wanting to go to Professor Wittgenstein’s lectures.
Porter
I’m afraid that’s not possible.
Visitor
Why ever not?
Porter
Well, for a start, Ma’am, you’d have to be registered for his course.
 Showing, Not Saying 17

(Looking over the visitor, skeptically, and noting her gender.) But even that mightn’t
be much help to you, as Professor Wittgenstein is very particular about who attends
his lectures.
Visitor
Couldn’t I just audit his class?
Porter
I’m not sure what you mean but I’m afraid not.
Visitor
(Getting indignant.) I’ve come all the way from America.
Porter
(Astringently.) It isn’t a matter of how far you’ve travelled, Ma’am. Even those
registered for the Moral Sciences at Cambridge aren’t guaranteed entry.
Visitor
(Dryly.) I suppose that’s quaint old England for you.
Porter
In fact Professor Wittgenstein is Austrian.
Visitor
Quaint old Austria, then.
Porter
(More to himself.) Whatever he is, I doubt he’s quaint.
Visitor
It looks as if I’m not going to get to see him after all.
Porter
I’m afraid not, Ma’am.
Visitor
That’s a real shame. He’s very famous you know and I’d like to tell my students I’d
seen him.
Porter
We have many famous people here at Cambridge, Ma’am.
Visitor
(She rummages in her bag and then hands him her business card.) At least you
could give him my best regards.
Porter
18 William Lyons

(Looking at it quizzically.) Indeed I will, Ma’am. I’m sure he’ll be most pleased to
receive them.
The visitor retraces her steps out of Whewell’s Court, watched closely by the porter
who then returns to his lodge.

I should also protest that it is rather insulting to presume that a cinema

audience today would not put up with or could not cope with an on-screen
philosophical discussion. Think of all those French movies where they end-
lessly discuss Descartes at the dinner table or over coffee in some version of
the Café des Deux Magots. Besides there are now probably more educated
people in the world than there has ever been in any previous age and the most
likely audiences for a movie about Wittgenstein are going to be those of
undergraduate film clubs, art house cinemas, and graduate take-home-a-
DVD-with-the-curry consumers.

6. WITTGENSTEIN AND “CINEMATIC QUOTATION”

What do I mean by “cinematic quotation”? I mean those sounds or sights or

words that will resonate with the viewer long after he or she has left the
cinema because they have become a “character” in the film. Sometimes a
sight or sound, say a snatch of music or soundtrack noise, will be repeated
throughout a film and enter deeply into one’s memory, not because it was
repeated but because its repetition came to be associated with something
central to the film, and perhaps associated with some emotional reaction to
that central idea or event. Think of John Williams’s ominous, repetitive, two-
note, tuba music on the soundtrack of the film Jaws that acts as a herald
announcing the arrival of the awesome man-eating shark. It enables the audi-
ence to know, before the people of Amity Island do, that the shark has
returned to the water around Amity beach, which in turn indicates immediate
danger to the unknowing swimmers in the water and so ratchets up the
emotional intensity in the viewer.
However, taking a cue from Eric Rohmer, my inclination is not to have
any “soundtrack music” at all. There should be lots of silent or almost silent
passages, something Wittgenstein would have liked. When music occurs, it
should occur naturally as part of the action or ambient sounds. For example,
an early scene might be of the young Wittgenstein listening intently to a
concert in the Musiksaal of the grand mansion of his parents in the Allee-
gasse in Vienna. The concert might include piano music by Richard Strauss,
a family friend, and Wittgenstein’s brother, Paul, before the latter lost his
right arm. Such a scene would not only show the rich bourgeois background
which Wittgenstein deliberately left behind but also his passionate love of
 Showing, Not Saying 19

music. Another scene might be of Wittgenstein after World War I, now a

self-exiled under-gardener in the monastery of the Brothers of Mercy at
Hutteldorf, Austria. Stopping his work of carefully training vines to grow up
a trellis, he listens in the twilight to the monks singing Mozart’s Magnificat
from his setting of Vespers in 1774.
Another possibility is that a particular piece of music, say the Adagio
from Mozart’s Clarinet concerto in A Major, a piece much loved by Wittgen-
stein, could become more or less another character in the film, an intimate
friend of the often isolated and alienated Wittgenstein. For example, as he
liked playing the clarinet, Wittgenstein could be depicted as playing this
piece of music at dusk in his self-built hut in Norway. Or again, when he did
war work during World War II in the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle,
he lived alone in digs. There could be a scene, against the background of the
Luftwaffe bombing of the harbor at Newcastle, of Wittgenstein playing the
Adagio in his humble workman’s digs. Yet again he could be depicted as
playing this same piece in his remote cottage at Killary Harbour in Connema-
ra in the west of Ireland or by the seashore there, after having puzzled for
some time over his drawing of the “duck-rabbit” with his finger in the sand.
Other possibilities for “quotation” are Wittgenstein’s liking, post World
War I, for simple and often unvarying “peasant” meals, such as porridge or
bread and cheese. This might be emphasized, say, by including a scene where
he tells Norman Malcolm, his former student, when he visited him in Ameri-
ca, to ask his wife always to serve him the same plain food, every day, during
his visit. Also something could be made of his gradual adoption, as he be-
came ever more ascetic, of very plain “workman’s clothes,” for example,
workman’s solid boots, plain coarse trousers, leather jacket or else his now
faded military coat. This tendency might be deliberately simplified for dra-
matic effect, so that in the film, after the scenes of World War I, Wittgenstein
appears in more or less the same clothes in each subsequent scene, with just
minor variations.
Wittgenstein also liked Bauhaus style utility furniture. He considered the
deck chair a precursor of brilliant modernist design. Whenever there is a
Wittgenstein interior, whether it be his rooms in Whewell’s Court or his
cabin in Norway or his cottage in Connemara, there could be a deck chair
visible. Then there could also be a scene where, while visiting Norman
Malcolm in his departmental office at Cornell University in America, he
curtly remarks that the deck chair in the office is out of keeping with the
room’s other furniture and architecture. This would have unspoken reso-
nances about Malcolm’s discipleship and love for Wittgenstein but also how
this does not shield him from Wittgenstein’s sharp rebuke for his aesthetic
sin.
For a philosopher so much involved in puzzling over the nature of lan-
guage, another form of “quotation” could and should, of course, be linguistic.
20 William Lyons

Wittgenstein had a loathing for anything that smelt of humbug or hypocrisy,

especially anything like posturing or inauthenticity in the practice of philoso-
phy. This loathing he applied not merely to others but, at times, to himself.
Thus we might have an earlier scene in which Wittgenstein is “lecturing”
(another chance to include some “real” philosophy in the film) but finding
that he is not getting anywhere and worries that he might be “cheating his
students.” It might be numbered 5.8 (and so come immediately after the
“porter scene,” 5.7, described above):

5.8 INT. WITTGENSTEIN’S ROOM IN WHEWELL’S COURT, CAMBRIDGE—

NOVEMBER 1939.
[So far the scene has comprised Wittgenstein giving one of his astonishing, intimi-
dating, mind-stretching “lectures” or, nearer the truth, mixed monologue and
séance. We join it near the end and include an emphatic nod to “Wittgenstein’s
Poker.”]
(Wittgenstein groans again.) This is not easy stuff . . . Bloody hard!
We might identify the risen Lazarus by his looks, by his face. But that’s not how it is
with words. They don’t come with their meaning on their countenance.
(Silence.) When you play tennis, you’ll miss the ball if you try to watch it make
contact with the strings of the racquet. You’re too close. You’re missing the bigger
picture. You’ll mishit . . . You’ll play badly . . . Like a damn professor of tennis!
You play a shot. You don’t guide your racquet on to the ball . . . You say something
to somebody. You don’t give meanings to words in your head and then string them
together out loud . . .
(Long silence. Wittgenstein comes back from the window and sits down again. Then
Wittgenstein gets up and pokes the fire with the poker. He retains the poker in his
hand as he walks about.)
I am so helpless today . . . Hopeless.
(Glaring at his small audience and gesturing with the poker, somewhat menacingly.)
And nobody helps me!
You’ve a fool for a teacher today!
(Pause.) How can I get at the core of the problem? To where the pips are. Today, I
just give you the pip.
Do you know that saying? I give you the pip?
(Silence. The silence seems to go on forever.)
Malcolm
(Summoning up courage to ask a question, and so very tense and nervous.) Profes-
sor Wittgenstein. Would you say . . . What do you think of . . . of the causal theory
 Showing, Not Saying 21

of meaning? The meaning of what you say is the intended effect? There’s a cur-
rent . . .
Wittgenstein
(Interrupting him, loudly.) What do I think of that? What do I think of that, Mal-
colm?
(Waving the poker in his direction, causing Malcolm some alarm. Then shouting.)
NONSENSE!
Nonsense in an academic gown! High table b-l-o-o-d-y nonsense. There’s no worse
nonsense than that, believe me! (Pause, then calming down a little.)
If I say to you “I think you’re a fool” and, in saying that, I intend to insult you so
deeply that you’ll leave the room, do the words “I think you’re a fool” mean
“Malcolm left the room deeply hurt”?
(Shouting again.) GO HOME! Go home, all of you! You’ve learnt nothing!
(More calmly, almost to himself.)
I’m no good to you today! You deserve a better teacher. I’m nothing but a damn
fool! And I’m in danger of CHEATING you! And myself.
(Now looking at them but still calmly, almost kindly.) And you’re damned fools
today as well! We’re all fools! Perhaps when you come back next week, my brain
might be back from holiday. And you might be of some use to me.
(Students fold up their deckchairs and begin to leave. Then Wittgenstein, in an
appealing tone of voice, says.)
Malcolm?
(Waits till Malcolm, understandably reluctant and anxious, turns around.)
Could I beg a favour? Could you bear to see a flick with me? I believe there’s a
western on at the Plaza. Maybe some tough talking from the cowboys will restore
my sanity.
(In an almost childlike tone of hopeful anticipation.) Maybe Betty Hutton’s in it. We
could eat pork pies. Those “hunky dory” Melton Mowbray ones, while we watch it.
(The last of the other students have left. Back to a censorious tone.)
I hope you’re not one of those who wait for the national anthem at the end and stand
up?
Malcolm
(Momentarily nonplussed). Ah . . . no. No, not really.
(With lighter tone.) I think Americans are probably excused anyway.
Wittgenstein and Malcolm depart together, starting down the stairs.

Besides setting up the word “cheating” for future use, it also brings out again
the touchy and fraught relationship between Wittgenstein and probably his
22 William Lyons

favorite student, Norman Malcolm. And one “future use” for this word
“cheating” is one already briefly referred to, again with Malcolm in the
picture:

6.4 INT. NORMAN MALCOLM’S OFFICE IN THE PHILOSOPHY DEPART-

MENT, CORNELL UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK STATE—AUGUST, 1949.
The office is a room in an early 20th century neo-classical building on the campus of
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York State. Somewhat incongruously, alongside the
period furniture, and against the wall, there is a stack of deckchairs of the same type
as Wittgenstein used in his Cambridge rooms. Malcolm, now aged thirty-eight, is in
conversation with Wittgenstein, now aged sixty.
[We join the conversation halfway.]
Wittgenstein
(Interrupting and taking something from his pocket.) I’ve something for you as well.
A book by Tagore. Do you know it? The Religion of Man.
Malcolm
(Looking at it, then somewhat doubtfully.) Oh? Thanks.
Wittgenstein
Perhaps you could get your students to read it.
Malcolm
I have to admit I’ve never read Tagore . . . I’m not so sure that I could set them for
my class . . . The syllabus is set . . . I’ve been . . .
Wittgenstein
(Showing annoyance.) That’s what I tried to warn you about! A syllabus! A sham!
You’ll end up giving them the same stale old thing. Reading from your stale old
notes! You’ll give up thinking altogether!
(Animatedly.) You must risk everything in your classes! Even if for just one decent
thought.
(More calmly.) Of course you will fail sometimes, but it’ll be an honorable defeat.
Malcolm
(Rather taken aback.) You seem to forget that few of us are capable of that. We see
ourselves as doing the best we can . . . as
Wittgenstein
(Interrupting and now really agitated.) Then you shouldn’t be teaching philosophy!
Is that all I’ve done for you? Ruined you?
(Shouting.) TAUGHT YOU TO CHEAT?
Malcolm
 Showing, Not Saying 23

(With shell-shocked voice.) Ah . . . Aren’t you . . . ?

Wittgenstein
(Beside himself with anger and frustration.) This is just too much for me!
(Shouting again.) You’ve learnt nothing! NOTHING!
(Suddenly noticing how unnerved and unhappy Malcolm is.)
Forgive me. These are probably just the outpourings of a silly old man.
I should just thank you for your great kindness in inviting me here.
Malcolm
(Collecting his coat from a coat hanger and trying to come to terms with the strain.)
It was . . . Let me take you home. Lee will have dinner ready and is looking forward
very much to seeing you.
Wittgenstein
Tell her not to fuss over me. I don’t mind what I eat as long as it’s always the same
thing.
They slowly exit Malcolm’s office.

This seems as good a place as any to end this essay. I realize that, no matter
how hard I try, I will never be able to get behind the face, the gestures, the
words, the actions to “the real Wittgenstein.” My Wittgenstein, or that of any
other writer or filmmaker, never existed. But I should leave Wittgenstein
himself with almost the last word. “Work on philosophy—like work in archi-
tecture in many respects—is really more a work on oneself. On one’s own
interpretation. On one’s own way of seeing things” (Wittgenstein 1998, 24).
So too, work on a film script about someone’s life is also, most probably,
more a work on oneself, on one’s own way of seeing things.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hornby, Nick. “Nick Hornby on An Education.” Daily Telegraph, online 23 October 2009.
Mamet, David. On Directing Film. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Raphael, Frederic. Personal Terms: The 1950s and 1960s. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2001.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921]. Translated by D. F. Pears and
B. F. McGuinness, with introduction by Bertrand Russell. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1933.
———. Philosophical Investigations [1953]. Revised edition edited by G. E. M. Anscombe
and R. Rhees, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958.
———. Culture and Value [1980]. Revised edition edited by G. H. Von Wright and H. Nyman,
translated by Peter Winch, revised edition by Alois Pichler. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
 Chapter Two

Remarks on the Scripts for Derek

Jarman’s Wittgenstein
Michael O’Pray

Jarman’s film on Wittgenstein was his penultimate film, and his last “image”
film so to speak. It was followed by the monochromatic Blue (1993), which
was first broadcast on BBC radio. Wittgenstein (1993) was an odd and
unique film in post-war British cinema in its bringing together of a formid-
able and wide array of talents. It also produced a major private (Jarman 2000,
246–48) and public row between the original scriptwriter Terry Eagleton and
director Derek Jarman who reworked the script fairly radically much to the
former’s chagrin. Colin MacCabe eventually and unusually resolved the dis-
pute as far as he could by publishing both Eagleton’s and Jarman’s scripts for
the British Film Institute (Eagleton and Jarman 1993). Thus, without this
dispute and MacCabe’s judicious reconciliation by way of publishing both of
them we would not have the following discussion or, for that matter, a
fascinating insight into the transformational aspect of script rewriting. We
also need to be reminded that they are not two distinct scripts. Jarman has
absorbed much of the dialogue and many of the scenes written by Eagleton.
We have an original script and its fairly drastic rewrite, an uncommon state
of affairs in cinema. These two texts are to be the main focus of my remarks
in this essay insofar as they represent two different filmic and intellectual
approaches to the philosopher’s life and works. However, my main concern
will be with the end result that is Jarman’s film.
The film was commissioned by the left-wing radical and writer Tariq
Ali’s production company Bandung (O’Pray 1996, 194–97; Peake 1999,
502–3; Wymer 2005, 158–59). It was to be part of a television series on
“great” philosophers to include Socrates, Locke, and Spinoza. The Left-wing
radical and writer Tariq Ali was the producer; the Marxist-Catholic literary

25
26 Michael O’Pray

theorist Terry Eagleton wrote the original script; Sandy Powell was costume
designer; radical filmmaker Derek Jarman directed with his muse since Car-
avaggio, Tilda Swinton; Karl Johnson returned to the fray with an uncanny
resemblance to the lead he played (he first appeared in Jarman’s Jubilee
(1978) and gave a memorable performance as Ariel in The Tempest (1979).
Michael Gough, Jill Balcon, and John Quentin joined him from the top
drawer of the British acting establishment, while the famous ballet dancer
Lynn Seymour played Lydia Lopokova. Among the rest of the cast were
Jarman’s old friends and some new ones too! For my part, I must declare an
interest here as I appeared in the film too as one of the philosophy tutors
alongside Derek’s agent at the time and his future biographer Tony Peake,
together with the artist and actor Roger Cook who had played Jesus in The
Garden (1990). I wrote about the experience (O’Pray 1993). There was an
irony here, in that unbeknownst to Jarman I had studied analytical philoso-
phy at the University of London in the 1970s and for some years had actually
been a philosophy tutor. I was also very familiar with Wittgenstein’s philo-
sophical ideas.
A few years later, in 1994, Jarman died. When I saw him, for the last
time, in Bart’s hospital a few months before his death, he remained pleased
with the film and remarked that of course it was the pain of a gay Wittgen-
stein that had been the attraction though the offer of financing had been, as
always, welcome. He also insisted that it was his recognition of a personal
internal struggle in Wittgenstein that was clearly part of Jarman’s own life
and of his films centred on his sexuality, rather than any philosophical inter-
est that interested him.
There was perhaps a secondary reason for Jarman’s enthusiasm for the
project and that was Wittgenstein’s unhappy but decisive involvement from
1911 with key members of the Bloomsbury set, namely Bertrand Russell,
Maynard Keynes, and G. E. Moore. In fact Wittgenstein entered English
intellectual life under their auspices in the pre–World War I years at Cam-
bridge, brief as his time there was. Fascinating though this may be it does not
draw us nearer the question of Wittgenstein qua philosopher and Jarman’s
film. My idea in this essay is to look at the two scripts and draw out their
quite different approaches and attitudes to Wittgenstein and his work. As to
the philosophical aspects of Wittgenstein the film, I don’t believe there are
any. Philosophy is related to film in two ways. First, it can be the subject of
philosophy as a form of making images and art, thus falling under aesthetics
or philosophy of art, as does literature, music, painting, and so on. Second, it
can through dealing with the motives and actions of characters raise concerns
and in cases supply insights that can then serve philosophical ends. For
example, as a student I attended postgraduate philosophy seminars at King’s
College University of London in the late 1970s run by Peter Winch (who
translated Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value) on Conrad’s novels (especially
 Remarks on the Scripts for Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein 27

Lord Jim) in relation to certain kinds of moral issues. Similarly, most good
science fiction has at its core a philosophical problem (often one of personal
identity or the role of reason or the emotions in defining a human being,
compared say with some kind of “alien” life form). In Wittgenstein, we have
the reverse scenario, where the idea of someone stumbling on our world from
another (Jarman’s Martian/Green Man borrowed from Wittgenstein's final
work On Certainty, 1969b) and being perplexed by some piece of behavior
or belief is used in film, thus throwing into relief a particular assumption or
set of assumptions that may encourage us to think differently about a certain
philosophical problem.
The use of the Martian in the film was one of the major additions made by
Jarman to Eagleton’s script and was an imaginative response to the problem
of dealing with abstract philosophical ideas. It also aligned itself with the boy
Wittgenstein as a humorous character, again an attempt on Jarman’s part to
distance himself from Eagleton’s more realist and rather sober account of the
philosopher. Interestingly, Jarman also added female characters, most promi-
nently Wittgenstein’s sister Hermine and Russell’s lover Ottoline Morrell
who in many ways is a cipher for Bloomsbury and its caricature in the film.
Though Jarman seems to admire Morrell’s vivacity and plumage, he also
uses her to emphasize a more cruel and shallow aspect of the Bloomsbury
“elite.” In its wonderful camp performance by Swinton, Jarman sets a
counterpoint to the excellent Karl Johnson’s understated one of Wittgenstein.
Together with the minimal but richly coloured sets, Ottoline expresses Jar-
man’s teasing with the pantomime, the grotesqueries of a world perceived by
Wittgenstein as so fundamentally alien and at times nightmarish.
For Eagleton, it is Wittgenstein the academic who is the focus. He places
the action between 1929 when the philosopher returned to Cambridge and
entered the academic community for the first time in his life, and 1951 when
he died. Jarman, on the other hand, takes Wittgenstein’s entire life as his
subject matter. In Eagleton’s text it is class that resonates throughout, espe-
cially in Wittgenstein’s relationship to his lover, while for Jarman it is sexu-
ality. The latter expresses a more emotional and tender version of the rela-
tionship with younger men, while for Eagleton class sexual exploitation is
ever present, though interestingly he targets Russell as well as Wittgenstein.
Especially in the scene, deleted by Jarman, with Daisy who in fact is of
aristocracy but mimics a working-class demeanor, leading Wittgenstein
snobbishly to accuse Russell of liaising with a “shopgirl” (Eagleton and
Jarman 1993, 29–32).
In terms of philosophy, Jarman relishes its more absurdist, turn-the-
world-on-its-head aspects, especially in his introduction of the Martian bor-
rowed from On Certainty. It is the modernism and revolutionary nature of the
Philosophical Investigations that grips Eagleton. As an English Marxist-
Catholic academic and literary theorist, Eagleton naturally shapes a script to
28 Michael O’Pray

his own interests. For example, a key episode, omitted from the final version,
is the humorous scene at high table when Wittgenstein is requested to leave
for not wearing a tie (Eagleton and Jarman 1993, 37–38). In this scene two
cultures clash, two class positions almost: the aristocratic patrician eccentric-
ity of Wittgenstein’s and that of upper middle-class Oxbridge. The humor is
provided by Russell (a “real” English aristocrat) attempting to act as an
intermediary in the confrontation in which, to add to the humour, a lower
class butler becomes the dignified bearer of the quarrel. While the scene
expresses Wittgenstein’s indifference to the Oxbridge Establishment (though
he is not what we might call anti-Establishment), it is the mediations on class
operating in the scene that is Eagleton’s point and it reminds us so much of
English comedy of manners in which a telling and serious point is being
made about the iniquities of the English class system. One imagines that for
Jarman, his identification with Wittgenstein here did not allow the filmmaker
to see the point of a scene when that point could be made elsewhere. The
English class system and the bourgeois values of the Bloomsbury set and of
Oxbridge academic life were a continual irritation to Wittgenstein, not least
in its pomposity, mixed with a tolerance for an amorality he found quite alien
and disturbing. While Jarman is interested in class, it is usually where it
gathers in elites of power especially as they influence sexuality and art, as
depicted in Jubilee, The Tempest, Caravaggio, and Edward II.
Of course, Eagleton as an influential literary theorist and Jarman as a
visual artist are sensitive to different issues. For example, it is the modernism
of Wittgenstein’s seminal work Tractatus as a text that interests Eagleton,
whereas Jarman, no great lover of modernism, stresses something different—
the “modern.” By the latter Jarman means something like an anxiety about
the self. He remarks, “Ludwig said, ‘How can I be myself?’ That is modern”
(Eagleton and Jarman 1993, 64). This does not separate them so much in
substance as in nuance. A form of crisis of identity and a central aspect of
twentieth-century modernism as witnessed, say, in Joyce’s Ulysses. An au-
thor cited by Eagleton as standing alongside the Wittgenstein of the Tracta-
tus in his modernism. And perhaps Eagleton’s long monologue for Keynes
could be seen as shared critique of high modernism, where he manages to
merge philosophical doctrines with Wittgenstein’s psychological problems
(Eagleton and Jarman 1993, 55), and which Jarman retains in his script in a
slightly modified form. I will discuss this monologue later in more detail.
What seems to interest Eagleton is Wittgenstein as an eccentric, patrician
Austrian Jew in the context of an iconic English setting—Cambridge Univer-
sity. While for Jarman, it is a tortured gay in the context of a frivolous
Bloomsbury world that attracts his attention, allowing him to express a trade-
mark high-camp style embellished by outlandish costumes, especially those
of Tilda Swinton’s outrageous Ottoline Morrell. For Jarman such “deca-
dence” was always a sign of cultural intelligence and a homosexual call to
 Remarks on the Scripts for Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein 29

arms, whereas for Eagleton it smacks of a class in decline, talented but lost in
its own superficial indulgencies. But for Jarman, Bloomsbury for all its faults
afforded a social space in English culture where homosexuality found some
kind of place and expression (the same class we might argue did the same for
Communism). As Wittgenstein was giving his influential lectures at Cam-
bridge throughout the 1930s and 1940s, in the same university, Antony Blunt
was busy recruiting.
Jarman’s decision to encompass Wittgenstein’s “life” and not simply
some fragment of it, fits with much of his post-HIV work—that is, post The
Last of England (1987). In the remaining films childhood and death are
strongly present, the sense of beginnings and endings as in Edward II (1991)
and The Garden. And of course Wittgenstein, though Caravaggio presaged
them all with its memorable final scene of the painter laid out on his death-
bed with coins on his eyes and the intercut memory of a childhood love. It
would seem that there was some need on Jarman’s part for the child to peruse
and accompany his future life as a man, right to its final moments, as if to
make it all of a piece. This does not reflect anything to be found in Wittgen-
stein’s own writings, though his remark on his deathbed that he had had a
“wonderful life” may have resonated with Jarman at that point when he knew
very well that his own health was in fairly rapid decline.
Wittgenstein’s own dysfunctional family, with its surfeit of suicides
(three brothers) and mental illness (obviously his own plus his sister’s analy-
sis with Freud) as well as its achievements, is treated oddly by Jarman in the
juxtaposing of a rather jaunty young boy Wittgenstein with a morose tortured
adult. Of course this only reflects what is a schematic and abstract film,
compared with Eagleton’s naturalistic script, thus rendering, as I have al-
ready mentioned, the boy-Wittgenstein as a witness and commentator rather
than as a depiction in any way of the young philosopher as we imagine he
was (in this way it is an echo of the young boy in Edward II). What does this
tactic on Jarman’s part express, one might ask. Ray Monk perhaps hints at an
explanation when he suggests that Jarman’s film is an expression of what
takes place in the philosopher’s mind (Monk 1993, 16). We are witnessing,
in other words, a kind of internal construct of Wittgenstein’s own mental
state, a neutral memory, hence the jaunty boy whose own view does not
intrude, he being a fairly objective storyteller. Jarman had already experi-
mented with this in The Garden when he introduces a voice-over and struc-
tures the film around his self as a dreamer, so that the film, like Wittgenstein
perhaps reflects Jarman’s own mental state, however we wish to describe
that—dream, memory, or conscious thoughts.
This implies an experience of loss incurred between childhood and the
grown man. The boy who grasps states of affairs, who understands the shape
of the life he was to live and has lived, survives alongside the defeats,
struggles, and pain of the adult, until his death. I earlier asserted in relation to
30 Michael O’Pray

Wittgenstein that the “boy figure who had lurked in the side-lines in previous
films is now confidently established, as if Jarman had put behind him the
horrors of childhood” (O’Pray 1996, 198). For sure, in Wittgenstein there is
none of the deprivation and trauma found in Caravaggio and Edward II
respectively. In fact this boy Wittgenstein seems closer to a young Jarman
(he was his nephew after all) than to anything resembling the philosopher as
a boy, his Englishness alone being quite marked. To this extent, Wittgenstein,
like all of Jarman’s bio-films, echoes, probably unconsciously, to some de-
gree or other his own biography.
Keynes’s monologue is the penultimate scene in Jarman’s film. Slightly
edited, it has been lifted almost intact from Eagleton’s script. It is a brilliant
piece of writing. In contrast to Eagleton, Jarman places the speech in an even
more key position in his script—that is, at the end adjoining the death-bed
scene, where it acts as a poignant summation of Wittgenstein’s life, both as a
philosopher and as a man. Jarman uses the monologue as a voice-over for a
collage of images of Wittgenstein playing as a child in the snow. Eagleton
had used the monologue more naturalistically and earlier in the film. Jar-
man’s filmmaking talent shows here, where its placement gives it more im-
pact and at the same time lessens its diegetic role, situating it outside time so
to speak. We are not shown who speaks though we may recognise Keynes’s
voice from what has gone prior. Neither is it given a time or space, enhancing
thus its fairy tale quality.

KEYNES: Let me tell you a little story. There was once a young man who dreamed
of reducing the world to pure logic. Because he was a very clever young man, he
actually managed to do it. And when he’d finished his work, he stood back and
admired it. It was beautiful. A world purged of imperfection and indeterminacy.
Countless acres of gleaming ice stretching to the horizon. So the clever young man
looked around the world he had created, and decided to explore it. He took one step
forward and fell flat on his back. You see, he had forgotten about friction. The ice
was smooth and level and stainless, but you couldn’t walk there. So the clever young
man sat down and wept bitter tears. But as he grew into a wise old man, he came to
understand that roughness and ambiguity aren’t imperfections. They’re what make
the world turn. He wanted to run and dance. All the words and things scattered upon
this ground were all battered and tarnished and ambiguous, and the wise old man
saw that that was the way things were. But something in him was still homesick for
the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless. Though he had
come to like the idea of the rough ground, he couldn’t bring himself to live there. So
now he was marooned between earth and ice, at home in neither. And this was the
cause of all his grief. (Eagleton and Jarman 1993, 142)

The speech works at many levels, but most effectively in providing a power-
ful metaphor for the philosophical ambitions of Wittgenstein while at the
same time, I would argue, also creating a metaphor for the philosopher’s
internal life, his dominating mental states that were “the cause of all his
 Remarks on the Scripts for Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein 31

grief.” Wittgenstein’s life-long struggle with mental anguish could be de-

picted in terms of a desire for a world, and especially people, without “imper-
fection and indeterminacy” and on the other hand, as baffled by the “rough-
ness and ambiguity” of reality and relationships. While it may be argued that
Wittgenstein became more accepting of what was “battered and tarnished
and ambiguous” as he grew older, it is in his failed attempts at relationships,
usually with much younger men, that this bipolarity in his mental life still
rages. The demands for and of love encapsulated a promise of something of
the nature of ice—pure and spiritual—that could never match the battered
terrain of real feeling and especially sexual demands treated with much
shame.
Finally, it is worth considering the following remark by Wittgenstein:

After someone has died we see his life in a conciliatory light. His life appears to us
with outlines softened by a haze. There was no softening for him though, his life was
jagged and incomplete. For him there was no reconciliation; his life is naked and
wretched. (Wittgenstein 1980, 46e)

One cannot help but think that these words by Wittgenstein circa 1945 were
uttered with himself in mind. Of course, in the case of Derek Jarman’s film
Wittgenstein, the focus is on his philosophical ideas and his sexuality. What
was “naked and wretched” while being touched upon in the film is never
given the role it seemed to play in Wittgenstein’s life as evidenced in his
notebooks and the memories of his friends. The quote also suggests that
somehow a completeness in life is possible, or at least imaginable, and that
“reconciliation” is equally possible. But what is being reconciled here? And
reconciliation with what? And would this reconciliation lead to complete-
ness? These are questions that can be answered by reading the notebooks and
what Monk (1990) has gathered from his research, alluding to mental turmoil
as an overwhelming aspect of the philosopher’s life. A turmoil that seems
ferocious and unceasing and of which his philosophical work was both an
outlet and a symptom so to speak; he saw philosophical thinking itself as a
descent into a “primeval chaos” in which one must “feel at home” (Wittgen-
stein 1989, 65e). More generally, it is his fear of madness that accompanies
his entire adult life and seems so central to his emotionally intense philoso-
phising in which his brooding tortured monologue dominated the Cambridge
seminars of the 1930s and beyond. His escapes to isolated locations to write
and think (particularly to Norway and Ireland) were also a means of wres-
tling with severe depressions from which his philosophy emerged.
Of course, Wittgenstein’s psychological states and his struggle with “ill-
ness” or madness and suicidal tendencies cannot be the sole focus of any
biography or bio-film for that matter, but how far they allowed those to be
seen as formative of his life is a further question. In other words, to what
32 Michael O’Pray

extent is any narrative of his life without a full account of his mental states a
deformation of it?
It is one of the criticisms of the film and perhaps of all films that attempt
to depict a life, that it never fully realizes the force of Wittgenstein’s mental
condition. More problematically, it suggests at times that this mental turmoil
may be caused singularly by his repressed sexuality. Of course, the opposite
is more likely to be true from his own history and family background that
Jarman does include. There is no doubt that Jarman’s film with its pared
down mise-en-scenes, unreal colour and use of black drapes to suggest a
world of the mind, does express imagistically the world that Wittgenstein
occupied. To that extent, it does add through formal means a much needed
and important dimension that goes some way toward portraying a deeply
tormented man.

*Thanks to Kamila Kuc for her comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eagleton, Terry, and Derek Jarman. Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, the Derek Jarman
Film. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1993.
Jarman, Derek. Smiling in Slow Motion. London: Century, 2000.
McGuiness, Brian. Wittgenstein: A Life Young Ludwig 1889–1921. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1988.
Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990.
———. “Between Earth and Ice: Derek Jarman’s Film of the Life of Wittgenstein.” Times
Literary Supplement, March 19, 1993, 16.
O’Pray, Michael. “Philosophical Extras.” Sight and Sound 4 (1993): 24–25.
———. Derek Jarman: Dreams of England. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1996.
Peake, Tony. Derek Jarman. London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999.
Schultz, William Todd. “The Riddle That Doesn’t Exist: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Transmogrifi-
cation of Death.” Psychoanalytic Review 86, no. 2 (1998): 1–23. www.psychobiography
.com/articles/transdeath.html.
Waugh, Alexander. The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious
Belief. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966.
———. Notebooks, 1914–1916. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969a.
———. On Certainty. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969b.
———. Culture and Value. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Wymer, Rowland. Derek Jarman. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
 Chapter Three

The World Hued: Jarman and

Wittgenstein on Color
Steven Burns

I. A SCARLET THREAD

Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein (1992) was, I believe, the second-last of the

eleven feature-length films (not to mention forty-plus short films) that he
made in his twenty-five years of work. He died at fifty-two, in 1994. His
Wittgenstein film creates many vivid first impressions. There is the remark-
able, look-alike performance by Karl Johnson (and the lively characteriza-
tions of Keynes and Russell, for that matter). There is the clever selection of
texts (due mainly to Terry Eagleton), no matter how jumbled they end up
being in the final version of the film. 1 There is the appropriately spare story-
telling technique—as aphoristic in cinematic terms as is Wittgenstein’s own
philosophical prose, and a good approximation of the album of sketches that
we are promised in the preface to Philosophical Investigations.
The most vivid impression of all, however, is made by the garish palette
of colors which Jarman uses. From mauve bed-sheets and pink ostrich feath-
ers to yellow canvas chairs, from a red pillar box to a little green Martian, the
viewer is assaulted by dramatic and unexpected colors, laid on not with a
brush but a palette knife, in broad, bold strokes. Jarman describes another
ostrich feather hat as “acid green.” 2 I intend to say something about color in
the movies in general, and about Jarman’s use of color in his Wittgenstein
film in particular. But I also intend to argue that color offers us a scarlet
thread that leads us through Wittgenstein’s philosophical work.
This thread leads us from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where
colors present us with putative examples of the simples into which complex
states of affairs can be analyzed, through the transitional critique of Tractar-
33
34 Steven Burns

ian atomism, to the Philosophical Investigations, where such simples are

subjected to devastating re-analysis, and finally to the Remarks on Color
which preoccupied Wittgenstein during the final year of his life. Jarman’s
use of color, and Wittgenstein’s use of color, may seem to pass one another
by, but I think that in fact they intersect, and throw light on one another. The
film tries to sketch some of Wittgenstein’s serious philosophical thoughts,
and by saying more about his philosophy I shall also be saying helpful things
to viewers of the film.

II. SEPIA

In the same year that Jarman made his Wittgenstein, Péter Forgács made
Wittgenstein: Tractatus (Hungary, 1992). It is a thirty-three-minute collage,
constructed of segments, each based on a quotation from Wittgenstein and
consisting of further quotations accompanied by what look like snippets of
home movies from the years between the Wars. In fact, Forgács founded an
archive of amateur film material from the 1930s, and takes his material from
that archive. It is a short trip from Budapest to Vienna, and the film footage
matches quite well scenes that Wittgenstein might have experienced.
Forgács takes seriously Wittgenstein’s claim that his thought is often
metaphorical; a rotting apple that has infected other apples nearby strikes
him as a perfect image for a sentence which he has written, one clause of
which is badly expressed. He needs to cut away the rotting phrase to prevent
its corrupting other sentences, too. But I think that Wittgenstein’s use of
similes is tightly focused, while Forgács likes much looser associations. Here
is just one example: a slide containing the sentence, “The object is simple”
(TLP 2.02), is followed by footage of a young woman, and then a dog
playing with a child. Dogs and people (and their lives), however, are undeni-
ably compound, at least for the author of the Tractatus. The child and dog do
not directly elucidate Wittgenstein’s thesis. They are in what I called a loose
association with the thesis that they presumably reflect.
For my immediate purposes, what offers the most telling contrast to Jar-
man’s film is Forgács’s use of color. He has re-cast his old black and white 3
films in (what is now called) “sepia.” The touch of burnt-brown, oddly
enough, makes the B&W films look even older and more faded than they are,
while at the same time making them warmer and easier to view. What might
look ghostly in old B&W looks in sepia like real people, in flesh and blood—
but the film itself looks aged. It is a commonplace that adding color to film
makes it more realistic. The world is colored, after all. But both Forgács and
Jarman make us re-think that thesis. Forgács does so because his sepia under-
lines the impression of agedness. 4 I shall later compare this effect to Stanley
 The World Hued 35

Cavell’s claim that some uses of color make films look not realistic but
futuristic. And Jarman, in turn, uses colors that at first sight are more surreal
than realistic.

III. MR. GREEN

Let me begin again with Jarman’s Martian. The little green man is a whimsi-
cal character developed by Jarman, who lends continuity to the film by
appearing in conversation with Wittgenstein at various stages in his life. He
also adds Brechtian alienation to some scenes, while playing the rôle of an
alter ego, citing Wittgenstein’s own lines, at other times. But one of his jobs
is to be a color joke. He introduces himself (to the young Ludwig) as “Mr.
Green.” This is of course a joke, for Mr. Green is green. But it is also a
reference to one of Wittgenstein’s own rare jokes: he offers, at TLP 3.323,
the ambiguity between the name of a thing and the name of a property—with
a straight face (“In the proposition, ‘Green is green’—where the first word is
the proper name of a person and the last an adjective—these words do not
merely have different meanings: they are different symbols.”). 5 With a
straight face, I say, but Wittgenstein is surely aware of the joke potential
here. Jarman, actually, reminds us at the end of the film that Wittgenstein
once said that he would like to have written a philosophical work entirely in
jokes. 6 “Why didn’t you?” asks Maynard Keynes. “Sadly, I didn’t have a
sense of humor,” replies the dying Wittgenstein, with a straight face.
Wittgenstein is here portrayed with Teutonic earnestness; he does not
think that jokes are funny; he thinks that grammatical ambiguities and plays
on words illustrate conceptual traps that plague philosophers. He follows his
Green example with the following claims:

3.324 In this way the most fundamental confusions are easily produced (the whole
of philosophy is full of them).
3.325 In order to avoid such errors we must make use of a sign-language that
excludes them by not using the same sign for different symbols . . .

We might conclude that in a philosophically acceptable language, jokes

would be impossible. But in our everyday languages, the same ambiguities
that make jokes possible can also be revealed by jokes, which thus assist the
philosophical project of clarification. 7
36 Steven Burns

IV. OBJECTS ARE COLORLESS

Any quick summary of the Tractatus will tell us that the book gives an
account of “the world,” such that states of affairs in the world can picture
other states of affairs. Such pictures are thoughts or propositions. Normally
they are complex, but they can be analyzed into their simple parts, which are
pictures which have no parts that are themselves pictures. These elementary
or “atomic” pictures or propositions are either true or false. They are false if
the (possible, atomic) states of affairs that they picture happen not to obtain.
If they are the case, then the pictures of them are true.
If we were to picture all of the (possible) atomic facts, saying which were
true and which not, we would have a complete picture of the world. All
complex propositions could be derived from them, and the truth or falsity of
all the complex propositions could be demonstrated, because their truth is a
function of the truth or falsity of the component propositions. This consti-
tutes an account of the logic of any possible language, too. Thus Wittgenstein
claims to have delimited the world and specified the limits of language, of
what can be said. He famously concludes: “Whereof we cannot speak, there-
of we must remain silent” (TLP 7).
How does a state of affairs picture another state of affairs? The answer is
the so-called Picture Theory of Meaning. According to the Tractatus, a prop-
osition is made up of names; a name refers to, or stands for, an object. So far,
nothing has been said. We have only potential reference, and we do not have
sense, to use Frege’s terms. “Only in the nexus of a proposition does a name
have meaning” (3.3), and it is the proposition that has a sense. 8 So the least
unit of thought or speech is not the word, but the “configuration of names”
that constitutes a proposition. The names reach out to objects, and their
configuration pictures the relations of the objects in a state of affairs.
These objects which can only be named, not described, are primitives in
the Tractatus system. They are not Aristotelian substances, in which proper-
ties inhere. The Tractarian metaphysics is directly opposed to the traditional
view of beings and Being. “The world is the totality of facts, not of things”
(1.1). The naked things, the objects that cannot have properties or be de-
scribed, constitute the possibility of worlds. Wittgenstein uses a crucial meta-
phor to indicate this propertylessness of objects: “In a manner of speaking,
objects are colorless” (2.0232). That very lack of properties is what allows
“objects” in Wittgenstein’s early metaphysics the openness to participate in
various possible states of affairs.
 The World Hued 37

V. A SPECK IN THE VISUAL FIELD . . . NEED NOT BE RED

When he turns to discuss colors themselves, Wittgenstein has thoughts that

pull in two directions. First, there is a standard reading of the Tractatus due
to Russell. It holds that the elementary empirical data from which we can
construct a world take the form of sensations. Colors are supposed to be
prime examples of the primitive objects of experience which allow us to
build up a picture of the world. We get a glimpse of this reading at 2.0131,
where he writes: “A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red, must
have some color: it is, so to speak, surrounded by color-space.” Here it looks
as though “specks in the visual field” are typical elements at the end of
analysis.
In a later passage, however, the other standard reading is clearly sup-
ported. This is the reading which treats the elements of physics as the typical
elements at the end of analysis. In the penultimate section of the Tractatus,
the propositions beginning with “6,” Wittgenstein summarizes the implica-
tions of his theory. In the 6.1s he explains logic; in the 6.2s mathematics; the
6.3s are about the physical world and the laws of nature; the 6.4s are about
ethics and whatever transcends the natural world (they begin with the re-
mark, “All propositions are of equal value” [6.4]). The final example in the
6.3 section is about color.

6.3751 For example, the simultaneous presence of two colors at the same place in
the visual field is impossible, in fact logically impossible, since it is ruled out by the
logical structure of color. Let us think how this contradiction appears in physics:
more or less as follows—a particle cannot have two velocities at the same time; that
is to say, it cannot be in two places at the same time; that is to say, particles that are
in different places at the same time cannot be identical.

The purpose of this illustration is not to claim that the physicist’s reduction is
more fundamental than Russell’s epistemological one. Its purpose, I believe,
is to defend the atomism of the theory. If colors are elementary, then the
presence of one must be independent of the presence or absence of another.
Thus, that the presence of one in fact rules out the presence of another must
be explained at a simpler level. Colors on this interpretation are complex, and
they are to be explained by reduction to elements that are really atomistic,
logically independent of one another.
This claim is fundamental to the Tractatus, but it turns out to be a funda-
mental flaw.
38 Steven Burns

VI. BLUE, HERE, NOW

The Tractatus does not commit itself to the empiricist thesis that elementary
sense-data are the simples that lie at the end of philosophical analysis. It
avoids any epistemological commitments such as to the elementary experi-
ences that constitute the evidence (protocol sentences, as the logical positi-
vists called them) for the truth or falsity of a hypothesis. Nor does it commit
itself to the ontological thesis that elementary physical particles are the sim-
ples that lie at the end of philosophical analysis. But it does strive to articu-
late a way to treat colors, either as simples, or if not then as analyzable into
simples. Upon his return to Cambridge in 1929, Wittgenstein had second
thoughts about this whole idea. He takes Russell’s BPT (blue at a place at a
time) to be a hypothetical candidate for elementary proposition. “Blue, here,
now” was Russell’s particular example of this proposition. We could also
call it a blue fleck in the visual field.
Invited to contribute to the program at the Joint Session of the Mind and
Aristotelian Societies (Britain’s main annual philosophical congress), Witt-
genstein submitted a paper, “Some Remarks on Logical Form.” 9 The custom
at the Joint Session was to circulate in advance a printed version of the paper,
and then at the conference, instead of having it read aloud, to plunge into
discussion of it. Wittgenstein, when the time came for his paper, insisted on
discussing something else, since by then he was already dissatisfied with the
“Remarks.” Nonetheless, they represent a stage in his rejection of the Tracta-
tus. His central claim in the paper is that there are many factual claims that
seem to be irreducibly committed to a continuum. If something is blue it is
not red, but it is also not orange and not black. There seems to be no way for
the statement of such facts to be reduced to being simply true or false. If such
a proposition is true, many other equally elementary propositions are false.
Or, as Wittgenstein puts it, the first line of the normal truth table for BPT and
RPT (red at a place at a time) simply does not exist. (The table would be: TT/
TF/FT/FF.) By the standards of the Tractatus, there is no way to preserve the
logical independence of elementary propositions if BPT cannot be further
analyzed. Someone might wonder why a proposition that has multiple nega-
tions cannot still be considered an atomic proposition, one with no parts that
are themselves propositions, and thus not further analyzable. 10 I think the
answer is: BPT and RPT and GPT (green at a place at a time) just are not
independent. If we want them to count as simples they should all be possibly
true, but they are not.
This is a very important moment in the development of Wittgenstein’s
philosophy. The example of color, dependent for its specification on its rela-
tions to all the other colors on the spectrum, shows that his logical atomism is
not sustainable. It may be possible to reduce color predicates to some other
 The World Hued 39

more basic elements, but the feature of belonging to a continuum, and thus
not being atomistic, will nevertheless persist. As a result, Wittgenstein is
forced to think in new ways both about color and about the foundations of
meaning, about the fundamental nature of philosophy.

VII. IT’S NOT ALL B&W

Let us step back to the question of color in film. I have mentioned that when
it became technically possible to produce film in color a debate began about
whether B&W (and shades of grey) presented a more realistic representation
of the world, or at least of the subject of the film. The discussion became
wonderfully sophisticated, but the opening move remains this: the world is
colored, so a representation of it as colored is more realistic than one in B&
W, and thus color film is an advance on B&W. Stanley Cavell rehearses this
argument in the voice of his adolescent self. 11 But he immediately refutes
himself. It wasn’t just that early film colors were poor approximations of the
actual colors of things in the world, though that made for significant non-
realism by itself. Cavell has a more arresting thesis. Painting had moved
beyond the iconic or hieratic when it began to use light and shade to model
individual subjects; it became “humanly dramatic.” “Black and white was the
natural medium of visual drama” (89). So when film adopted color, “film
color masked the black and white axis of brilliance, and the drama of charac-
ters and contexts supported by it, along which our comprehensibility of per-
sonality and event were secured. Movies in color seemed unrealistic because
they were undramatic” (91).
Cavell then offers a positive account of what color does add to films.
Apart from noting that it offers a glitzy new dimension of commercial suc-
cess, he first observes that it invokes a new world, a fantasy world, “the
consistent region of make-believe” (as in The Wizard of Oz, or the Errol
Flynn Robin Hood from the 1930s [81]). In more recent films, however,
color invokes “a world of an immediate future” (82). Antonioni’s Red Desert
is a key example. This claim dominates the essay; color does not welcome us
into the actual world, the present reality, but beguiles us into a sense of
having entered a world not yet come to be.
Cavell discusses problem cases. Godard’s Alphaville, which is futuristic
but shot in B&W, is an apparent counter-example to his thesis, and Cavell
allows that color is not the only way to invoke a future world. “Nor have I
said that futurity can be projected only through color” (95). Also problematic
for the thesis is Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The latter “establishes the moment of
moving from one color space into another as one of moving from one world
into another . . . establishing a world of private fantasy” (84, 85). 12 But both
40 Steven Burns

the public fantasy world of Oz and the private fantasy world of Vertigo 13 are
sufficiently analogous to the fantasy of a futuristic world that Cavell is con-
tent to stick to his thesis. Elaborate discussion of Hitchcock’s strengths and
Godard’s weaknesses do not detract from the impression that Cavell is de-
fending a central idea, that B&W is the natural medium of human drama, and
color’s effect is not to strengthen the reality of human drama, but to “un-
theatricaliz[e]” (89) its subjects, to project a future.
In the last section of the chapter, however, Cavell offers a more modest
account of what he has been up to. “I have described certain uses of color in
film—as packaging, as unifying the worlds of make-believe and of fantasy,
and as projecting a future. I have not claimed that these are all its uses” (95).
I want to accept this judgment, and to claim that Derek Jarman has accom-
plished some different things again with his uses of color in his Wittgenstein
film.

VIII. SOMETIMES IT’S B&W AND GOLD

Jarman presents Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family, for instance, in black and

white and gold. They stand around a Bösendorfer grand piano wearing tails
or white gowns, but with the occasional gold tiara thrown in. This I take to be
a simple way of symbolizing the wealth of the family; and when Ludwig
gives away his fortune, the gold disappears.
Jarman, himself, has said that he used garish colors in the film because, as
he fell victim to symptoms of AIDS his eyesight began to fail, and he needed
bold colors in order to see them at all. True though that may be, once com-
mitted to the bright colors he did wonderful things with them. First, color is a
sort of Queer iconography, and suggests a bright world from which Wittgen-
stein felt excluded. In Jarman’s own words: “The forward exploration of
Color is Queer. . . . [Wittgenstein] was uncomfortable with his sexuality.” 14
Second, consider the portrayal of Bertrand Russell. Garbed mainly in the
crimson of a Cambridge academic gown, he also appears with Ottoline Mor-
rell on a grand bed, swathed in scarlet and mauve and rosé. Surely this is a
fantasy world, but it is not a futuristic one. It encapsulates the exotic nature
of the English as Wittgenstein experienced them. 15 The flamboyant silks and
satins also of course underline the sensuousness of some of Russell’s inter-
ests in contrast to Wittgenstein’s adopted asceticism.
Or consider the folding chairs. The students at Wittgenstein’s seminars
wear an assortment of bright sporting gear—they are not as serious as they
ought to be—and they sit in folding chairs painted a very bright yellow.
Nothing is quite as callow as yellow. And of course these characters show
their inadequacies in other ways as well. But Jarman’s greens and reds and
 The World Hued 41

yellows serve his cinematic and story-telling purposes in many such ways.
They are no more surrealistic than they are realistic, I think. Rather than
invoking other worlds, they invoke other readings of Wittgenstein’s world.
They do their work first of all for us, the viewers, who receive them as extra
data about the subjects of the film, and second they do their work for the
film’s Wittgenstein, himself, who is thus portrayed as a bird of a different
feather, or as a fish out of water. I shall return to these metaphors shortly.

IX. A SENSATION OF RED

As we have seen, when he returned to Cambridge in 1929, to re-engage with

philosophy, Wittgenstein very quickly gave up the Tractarian notion that
color predicates are simple. But he also gave up the idea that they are com-
plexes that can be reduced to some other sort of simple elements—e.g., to the
motion of physical particles below the level of color vision. The physics of
color and color perception certainly exists, but does not, or would not, an-
swer the conceptual questions that the later Wittgenstein considers of philo-
sophical interest. Some of those questions concern the role of sensations in
the foundation of knowledge—thus epistemological questions. Others con-
cern the status of the subject who receives the sensations, and his/her so-
called private access to them—thus ontological questions about conscious-
ness and the status of persons. About these questions he wrote a great deal,
especially in the later 1930s, and most notably in what is known as the Anti-
Private-Language-Argument in the Philosophical Investigations.
Derek Jarman’s treatment of the privacy issue is relevant and quite mov-
ing. He develops a homoerotic sub-plot between Wittgenstein and “Johnny,”
who is a stand-in for several young men in Wittgenstein’s life. Johnny first
appears as an angelic figure who is sent to Wittgenstein in Austria to entice
him to return to Cambridge. (It was actually Frank Ramsay, a brilliant mathe-
matician who died young, who visited Wittgenstein in 1923 and 1924, and
re-engaged his interest in philosophical questions.) Johnny then plays the
rôles of student, companion at the cinema (where they watch from the front
row, and on their third visit hold hands), and finally bed-mate. 16 In the latter
scene Wittgenstein has finally achieved some physical intimacy with Johnny.
He explains that his current philosophical work has to do with how a human
being can escape from his loneliness and make contact with other human
beings. This is a poignant way of setting the problem of privacy. But let us
return to the Investigations, and discuss just one of Wittgenstein’s arguments.
It is common to think that what I see as green and what you see as green
could be quite different, and that we might never be able to tell. In §272
Wittgenstein puts it this way: “The assumption would thus be possible—
42 Steven Burns

though unverifiable—that one section of mankind had one sensation of red

and another section another.” One version of this is called the “inverted
spectrum problem”—namely that one person’s experiences of all of the col-
ors might be the inverse of another’s (where I experience red, she experi-
ences violet, and so on through the whole color spectrum), and that we might
nonetheless use the same color vocabulary and never be able to tell that your
violet experience is just like my red experience. We thus think that our
language and behavior is public and coordinated, but our experiences are
private and unknowable by others. We tend to derive from this thought about
the privacy of sensation various worries: that we are locked in our own
private world, that every person not only dies alone but for parallel reasons
can also be said to live alone, or that we are incapable of real communication
with others. Wittgenstein does not “solve” this problem, by explaining how
to achieve real communication. He “dissolves” the problem by showing how
to see it as a non-problem. “‘I know how the color green looks to me’—that
makes sense.—Certainly, which use of the proposition are you thinking of?”
(§278). There are various possible uses of it. But the so-called philosophical
use is a pointless one. “Imagine someone saying: ‘But I know how tall I am!’
and laying his hand on top of his head to prove it” (§279). The “we could
never tell” of my original formulation is the giveaway. It’s not just that there
is an epistemological uncertainty here in the face of a real ontological abyss;
we have lost our identity criteria for the abyss itself. The abyss is a non-
worry. As he puts it in §293, one can “divide through” by the private ob-
ject—just delete it from both sides of the equation.

X. SHADES OF GREY

We left the Wittgenstein of Jarman’s film feeling like a fish out of water in
the social circles in which he moved in his adopted Cambridge. No matter
how exciting the colors of Keynes and Russell (who at this point stand in for
G. E. Moore, the Cambridge professor who really did attend Wittgenstein’s
lectures in the early 1930s), and no matter how insistently shallow the yel-
lows of his students, when Wittgenstein stands before his blackboard in the
presence of these exotic creatures, he himself is brownish-grey. He fades into
the blackboard. I don’t pretend to know how Jarman achieves this effect, but
it is as though the film is shot in B&W when we are looking at Wittgenstein,
and shot in vivid Technicolor when we are looking at the rest of the frame.
This accomplishes the alienation of which I have already spoken, and also
underlines the earnestness of the philosopher. Keynes puts it more dramati-
cally: “Wittgenstein, you suffer from a terminal case of moral integrity.” We
might say that things are B&W for Wittgenstein.
 The World Hued 43

This technique is applied consistently through the film. For DVD pur-
poses the film is divided into ten sections, each with a title. In the final
section, “Between Earth and Ice,” a brief scene shows Wittgenstein telling
Maynard Keynes that he plans to leave Cambridge. Keynes expresses the
hope that it won’t be to the “worker’s paradise,” Russia, again. “There’s
nothing wrong with labor,” insists the grey and earnest Wittgenstein. “There
is if they shoot you for not doing it,” retorts the brightly dressed Keynes. But
Wittgenstein explains that he intends to go to Ireland to work on his still
unfinished book. Keynes retorts, “In Ireland they shoot you if you work.” It’s
the guy in grey who’s the straight man; the guy in green has the punch-
lines. 17
Jarman turns an episode from Eagleton’s script into a memorable death
scene that concludes the film. Keynes sits at Wittgenstein’s bedside, and
explains to him why despite his brilliance he has not been reconciled to the
“rough ground” of everyday reality, even though his later philosophy has
required it of him. He is still entranced by the logical purity of the philosophy
of his youth, which was as frictionless as ice. Beautiful, but you couldn’t
walk on it. Thus, Keynes explains, Wittgenstein remained suspended be-
tween earth and ice, ever dissatisfied. In this scene, Keynes is as grey as
Wittgenstein. The two worlds, the monochrome and the brightly colored,
have come together, both for the viewer and for the Wittgenstein that Jarman
has portrayed. The alienation has been transcended.
And so, too, when Wittgenstein is dead, he is visited by his Martian. The
Martian intones a message from “beyond the world,” that realm of which the
young Wittgenstein had written, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must
remain silent” (TLP 7). In another anachronism, this death-bed text is entire-
ly Tractarian in spirit. Nonetheless, in this final visitation, the Martian, too,
has lost his color. He is no longer green. In this way, I think that Jarman
achieves, by his use of color, a palpable resolution to the film; the alienation
of Wittgenstein from his English friends is overcome, the mismatch between
philosopher and real world is overcome, and a sort of eternal truth overlies
the life and death of the subject of the film, as well, of course, as over the life
of the filmmaker, who was nearly on his own death-bed as the film was being
completed.

XI. GREENISH-RED

In the year before his death Wittgenstein continued to work intently on

philosophy. The material published as On Certainty is of great importance. 18
But for my present purposes, Remarks on Color is the proper endpoint. I
wanted to title this section “Skilligimink,” after the magical color of Uncle
44 Steven Burns

Wiggily’s airship, but I shall make do with the impossible color of some of
Wittgenstein’s final manuscripts: greenish-red. I shall focus on the first sec-
tion of Remarks on Color. It is the much-edited version of the remarks in the
second and third sections of the volume, and thus will help me to focus my
own brief remarks.
Here are two very specific color facts: (a) We speak of bluish-green or
yellowish-green, but we do not speak of reddish-green. This is a fact about
our language, but it is also reflective of a fact about color: nothing actually
looks greenish-red. A mixture of green and red will look brown; it will not
look at all reddish or greenish, and presumably that is why we do not have a
use for the term in our language. (b) We have, e.g., glass that is colored red.
Sometimes red glass is transparent. When we look through red glass the
objects on the other side of it also look reddish. We also have glass that is
colored white. It is never transparent. If it were, the objects on the other side
of it would look whitish. This never happens. Why does this not happen?
The first thing I shall say about these preoccupations of the final Wittgen-
stein is that it is clear that he thinks color is not simple! There are of course
aspects of our color perception and our thoughts about color which are so-
cially constructed, as some will say. Some cultures divide up the color spec-
trum very differently, for instance. (A former student of mine grew up in an
African society in which his native tongue distinguished only red, black, and
speckled—or so I remember him insisting.) And a painter will have names
for far more colors than I do. But what Wittgenstein is concerned with is a
variability that belongs to the colors themselves. What is it about white that
makes it impossible for white glass to be transparent? Why can’t we find a
red greenish? These are not questions about the variability of linguistic struc-
tures, or of social settings, but about the colors themselves. 19
Secondly, one must acknowledge the physics of the cases. For instance,
we explain that in the case of colored glass (or film, for the cases are suffi-
ciently analogous), if we let light of a restricted wavelength pass through the
medium, we will see the objects behind the glass, or the figures projected on
the screen, in the appropriate color(s). Since white is not a particular color
but the combination of all colors, if we restrict no wavelengths but let all the
light through our medium, then the clear glass will not restrict the colors of
the objects beyond it, and the clear film will let the screen appear white. 20
Wittgenstein discusses this issue in terms of B&W film:

In the cinema we can sometimes see the events in the film as if they lay behind the
screen and it were transparent, rather like a pane of glass. The glass would be taking
the color away from the things and allowing only white, grey and black to come
through. (Here we are not doing physics, we are regarding white and black as colors
just like green and red).—We might thus think that we are here imagining a pane of
glass that could be called white and transparent. And yet we are not tempted to call it
that. (RoC I §25)
 The World Hued 45

So far so good, but white glass will not let any colors through, and a white
film will project a black image, that is, a shadow, on a screen (as a white
portion of a negative will make a black area on photographic paper). One
sees immediately that Wittgenstein is not trying to solve problems in physics,
nor does he think that the physics solves the conceptual problems. The phys-
ics may give us the satisfaction of another way of speaking about the phe-
nomena, but the puzzles in our ordinary way of speaking persist.
Thirdly, I think that there is an echo of the Anti-Private-Language-Argu-
ment in one remark: “People sometimes say (though mistakenly), ‘Only I can
know what I see.’ But not: ‘Only I can know whether I am color-blind’”
(RoC I §83). We can tell whether a person is color-blind in various ways; and
that person can find out from us that we can make discriminations that she
cannot. But there is no question here of the inverted spectrum problem which
we discussed above (§IX). That is what is “mistakenly” considered to be a
problem. And in another echo of the Investigations Wittgenstein adds: “Here
language-games decide” (RoC I §6). But this last injunction also goes beyond
the Investigations. It would be wrong to think of it as a simple invocation of
language-games as Wittgenstein conceived them in the 1930s. Consider §32:

Sentences are often used on the borderline between logic and the empirical, so that
their meaning changes back and forth and they count now as expressions of norms,
now as expressions of experience.
(For it is certainly not an accompanying mental phenomenon—this is how we ima-
gine “thoughts”—but the use, which distinguishes the logical proposition from the
empirical one.)

Some of this is familiar to readers of the Investigations: the dismissal of

accompanying mental phenomena, which are not constitutive of meaning;
the gesture toward looking to the use of a word to learn about its meaning. 21
But now Wittgenstein is taking matters much deeper. In the very first remark
in Remarks on Color he says of his example: “The form of the propositions
in both language-games is the same. . . . But in the first it is an external
relation and the proposition is temporal, in the second it is an internal relation
and the proposition is timeless.” This is of a piece with the investigation of
the contingent certainties discussed in On Certainty. One would like to em-
bark on a long exposition, but it really is time to stop. So I shall summarize
my conclusions.

XII. BRIGHTLY HUED CONCLUSIONS

Questions about color serve to illuminate both Jarman’s work and Wittgen-
stein’s, and to show ways in which they are interrelated.
46 Steven Burns

Color serves Derek Jarman in innovative and expressive ways. In his

Wittgenstein, they enable him to make visible the inherently invisible (as
postmodernists like to put it 22 ). He uses color to make conceptual jokes; and
he uses it to express the difficulties of friendship. He uses color as an alienat-
ing device; and he uses it to express the apparent abyss between self and
other. Finally, he uses it to express the overcoming of this gap. Taken with
Cavellian seriousness, these new uses lead to a deeper conception of the
nature of the medium of film itself.
Color gave the early Wittgenstein either an example of epistemological
simples, or else an example of a physical complex that could be further
reduced to other simples. In the transitional period, color was the basis for
his rejection of that atomism itself, and for his turn to new methods in
philosophy. At the height of his later period, color played a central role in
explaining the impossibility of an empiricist foundation of knowledge, in the
context of his exploration of public language games. An inverted color spec-
trum is a non-worry, as is the claim that communication with others is
doomed to failure. In his final work, Wittgenstein shows how attention to
multiplicity and particularity raises new philosophical questions, and vali-
dates his new methods in philosophy. “In every serious philosophical ques-
tion uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem. / We must always
be prepared to learn something totally new” (RoC I §15).

NOTES

1. See Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, the Derek Jarman Film (London: The
British Film Institute, 1994). Jarman used most of the main ideas and conversations from
Eagleton’s forty-five-page script, though they were trimmed to about half their length. Jarman
also cut the external locations, filming exclusively in a small studio. He adopted a biographical
narrative structure, adding many scenes of Wittgenstein’s Vienna childhood. Nonetheless,
Eagleton’s work has a predominant place in the final script. The visual presentation, on the
other hand, is all Jarman’s.
2. Eagleton and Jarman, Scene 17, 88–89.
3. For “black and white” I shall use the abbreviation B&W in what follows.
4. I think that Forgács means, too, that we are to read the Tractatus with this warning: none
of this is happening now, or means what the reader might take it to mean now; the TLP offers
us epigrams particular to a time and a place. If I am right about this, then I think that Forgács is
exaggerating; the Tractatus has a claim to timelessness, too.
5. And compare “Mr. Scot is not a Scot,” discussed in Investigations II:ii. In this passage
the notion of meaning being discussed is quite different, however. Wittgenstein suggests: “Try
to mean the first ‘Scot’ as a common name and second one as a proper name.”
6. This is reported by Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London: Oxford
University Press, 1966), 29. Cf., Investigations§111: “The problems arising through a misinter-
pretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes;
their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language, and their significance is as great as
the importance of our language.—Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to
be deep? (And that is what the depth of philosophy is.)”
7. “My work of clarification” is a phrase from Culture and Value (from 1931, 19e).
 The World Hued 47

8. “Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have
meaning” (TLP 3.3).
9. See Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, ed. Klagge and Nordmann (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), chapter 4.
10. In fact I am grateful to my colleague Duncan MacIntosh for pressing me about this.
11. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), chapter 13, “The World as a Whole: Color,” 80–101.
See 90–91.
12. Cavell’s most specific example: “James Stewart’s opening of a storage-room door—the
whole car-stalking passage leading up to this moment shot in soft washed-out light—into a
florist shop alive with bright flowers, predominantly red” (1971, 84).
13. “No other movie I know so purely conveys the sealing of a mind within a scorching
fantasy” (Cavell 1971, 86).
14. Eagleton and Jarman, op. cit., 64.
15. Cf. the fascinating passage about English women, and their incomprehensibility, in a
note collected in Culture and Value (74). I have suggested that this remark belongs next to “If a
lion could talk we could not understand him,” not even if we had learned to speak his language
(PI II, 223). See Steven Burns, “If a Lion Could Talk,” Wittgenstein Studien 1 (1994).
16. “Johnny” in various ways fills in for friends as different as David Pinsent, Francis
Skinner, Frank Ramsay, Yorick Smythies, Norman Malcolm, and Ben Richards. Some of these
fit much less well than others the homoerotic sub-plot that Jarman has put him in.
17. This is Scene 50 of the 53 scenes in Jarman’s own script.
18. For an incisive evaluation of this, see Michael Hymers, Wittgenstein and the Practice of
Philosophy (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2010), chapter 6.
19. Or about their “concepts,” as philosophy always is. I won’t let this beg questions about
reality, idealism, constructs, constructivism. And of course these are also questions about our
sensibility, the range of wavelengths to which we are in fact sensible. And especially about the
language games we do play. And so on.
20. I thank my friend Dr. Harald Jelinek for pressing these issues in discussion.
21. This injunction appears famously in §1 of Philosophical Investigations, but we often
forget that the Tractatus, too, reminds us: “In philosophy the question, ‘What do we actually
use this word or this proposition for?’ repeatedly leads to valuable insights” (6.211).
22. See for example Jean-François Lyotard, “Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime,”
Art Forum 20, no. 8 (1982): 331–37.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burns, Steven. “If a Lion Could Talk.” Wittgenstein Studien 1 (1994).

Burns, Steven, and Alice MacLachlan. “Getting It: On Jokes and Art.” AE 10 (2004).
www.uqtr.ca/AE/Vol10/.
Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1971.
Eagleton, Terry, and Derek Jarman. Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, the Derek Jarman
Film. London: The British Film Institute, 1993.
Hymers, Michael. Wittgenstein: The Practice of Philosophy. Peterborough, Ontario: Broad-
view Press, 2010.
Lyotard, Jean-François. “Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime.” Art Forum 20, no. 8
(1982): 331–37.
Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. London: Oxford University Press, 1966
[first printed 1958].
Szabados, Béla. Ludwig Wittgenstein on Race, Gender and Cultural Identity. Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen Press, 2010.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Color. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977.
48 Steven Burns

———. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,

1968. [First published in 1953. A revised fourth edition was published in 2009 by Wiley-
Blackwell.]
———. Culture and Value. Ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch. Oxford: Basil Black-
well, 1980. [A considerably revised edition was published in 1998.]
———. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul Ltd., 1983. [First published in 1922. Also, cf. translation by David F. Pears and Brian
F. McGuinness, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961.]
———. “Some Remarks on Logical Form.” Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951. Ed. James
C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, 29–35. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.
 Chapter Four

Sketches of Landscapes: Wittgenstein

after Wittgenstein
Daniel Steuer

So I am returned to an old disappointment with philosophy—the sense that it asks

me to give up one set of fixations for another set. Is this the price of the recovery
from illusion that philosophy has from the beginning promised?
—Stanley Cavell, The Interminable Shakespearean Text 1

1. INTRODUCTION

In 1931, Adorno suggested that the dualism between the intelligible and the
empirical in Plato may well be the product of a post-Kantian perspective, and
typical of (scientific) “research” (Forschung), rather than (philosophical)
“interpretation” (Deutung). 2
Would it be justifiable to align the Tractatus (the search for elementary
propositions and the rules for their possible combinations) with “research,”
and the Investigations (the search for family resemblances) with interpreta-
tion? If yes, what does Wittgensteinian interpretation point to? And how does
it do its pointing if it operates beyond the opposition between the intelligible
and the empirical?
Wittgenstein describes the philosophical remarks of the Investigations as
“sketches of landscapes,” made in the course of his intellectual journeying
which brought him to the “same or almost the same points” time and again.
The sketches were often weak, “had to be arranged and sometimes cut down”
(“pruned”) in order to present a picture of the landscape. 3
Though his metaphors are taken from drawing and gardening, they allow
for a reading in terms of photography, and hence film. We have original

49
50 Daniel Steuer

shots and secondary processing; we have a final product that presents a

picture of a totality made up of individual images; snapshots which all point
toward and at each other.
It appeared essential to him “that the thoughts should proceed from one
subject to another in a natural order and without breaks.” But of the concrete
form which this proceeding should take, he had different ideas at different
times. Finally, he acknowledged to himself that he would never achieve this
totality (the “book”), that “[his] thoughts were soon crippled if [he] tried to
force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.”
The philosophical wanderer has no aim that could be found in any one
direction; she grows tired on straight highways. She wanders almost aimless-
ly. (Therefore without method or without any one method?) Which form
results from aimless wandering? Which directions do our thoughts take if we
let them go where they want to go? What patterns do they form?
Wittgenstein does not blame himself for the lack of direction and system-
aticity, the tiring of his thoughts when straightened, as “this was, of course,
connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this [nature] compels
us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.”
Some directions:
1. The form of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is the form
Plato’s dialectical understanding—knowledge proper, the fourth segment of
the divided line— aims to achieve. This form emerges when phenomena are
seen as paradigms, in a specific sense of paradigm close to, but not identical
with, the one Giorgio Agamben articulates in “Che cos’è un paradigma?”
2. Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein: a sequence of paradigmatic
scenes—“The film was pared away. I was always removing things.” 4 The
film has a lot of both the film’s director and the film’s object—work and
life—in them. What can the film of an “activist witness,” a witnessing acti-
vist, tell us about Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Can the Philosophical Investi-
gations be read as the script for an unshot film?

2. PLATONIC PLATO AND PARADIGMATIC PLATO

In his lectures on Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems of 1965, Adorno

followed up on his earlier suspicion that “Platonic” readings of Plato (i.e.,
readings which take Forms as transcendent and assume that Plato valued the
transcendent over the immanent) are anachronistic. 5 He assumes that the
genuine problematic of metaphysics emerges in Plato’s works, but becomes
explicit only in Aristotle:

1. Ideas are hypostasized general concepts.

 Sketches of Landscapes 51

2. The late Plato, in the Parmenides, offers a dialectical revision of this

notion. Here, the one exists through the many, and the many through the
one, the universal concept through the objects falling under it, and vice
versa.
3. The universal, in Aristotle, is neither conceived as completely dependent
on the particular, nor is it meant to be a pure abstraction.
4. It is only possible to speak of something universal to the extent that it is
represented in the particular.
5. Aristotle’s term “ousia,” variably translated as substance, essence, or be-
ing (the immediate phenomena) leads straight to the critical question how
immediacy can be conceived, as whatever appears as immediate appears
to a consciousness which predicates this immediacy.

We find in Aristotle, Adorno says, on the one hand almost a cult of immedia-
cy, on the other the idea of universal mediation; all this without a dialectical
resolution. On the contrary, the tension between these two inclinations in his
thought constitutes the problem of metaphysics.
(And don’t we find a similar constellation in Wittgenstein’s Investiga-
tions? They return, again and again, to the seemingly immediate facts of our
language use, only to realize, again and again, that they can only be under-
stood once mediated through their context, which, ultimately, is nothing but
the entire form of life to which they belong, but certainly no less than the
entire text that we do not have.)

1. The relationship between universal concept (eidos) and individual beings

(ta onta), in Aristotle becomes that between form (morphe) and substance
(tode ti).
2. Immanent form, as moving force, becomes Aristotle’s energeia.

At this point, Adorno argues, Aristotle becomes a Platonist again, as he

assumes that the noumenal and intelligible sphere (form, energeia) is more
real than the empirically given or that the potential is more real than the
actual. Ever since, the abstraction has been set over and above that from
which it has been abstracted, whereas a perspective that sees both sides as
two “moments” of an ongoing reciprocal mediation will recognize that the
quest for an absolute first principle (prima philosophia) is itself the mistaken
result of an abstraction. 6
My suggestion will be that paradigms are such forms of ongoing “con-
crete mediation,” in which the particular and the universal are inseparable
and constitute each other. Wittgenstein’s philosophical wanderings return
universal meaning to the snapshots he took (in themselves abstracted particu-
larity) by rearranging them into a totality.
52 Daniel Steuer

Having, I trust, plummeted sufficiently deep into the abyss of continental

philosophy, let us turn to some Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Terry Penner re-
cently defended Plato against Aristotle, arguing that Forms just are attrib-
utes, and even that “there are no attributes which are not Forms.” 7
According to Penner, Aristotle misses Plato’s ethical intention in postu-
lating the Forms. This makes Aristotle an epistemologist who invents the
Platonic reading of Plato from a focus on knowledge as separate from the
Good, while, for Plato, the question of virtue is meant to establish the funda-
mental science of the Good.
Plato, Penner argues, did not want to “separate” Forms from particulars.
Rather, we should read him as formulating a Parmenidean, anti-nominalist
and anti-reductionist position. The reductionist-nominalist (or, in Plato’s par-
lance, the lover of beautiful sounds and sights) would say beauty itself is no
more than all the beautiful things, whereas Plato says there is one additional
thing.
Crucially, the existence of that further thing need not radically differ from
the existence of the particulars. 8 The all-important question becomes—given
the difficulties Plato himself spells out, especially in the Parmenides—what
is the third possibility beyond the position of the “dreaming” reductionists
(who mistake what is “similar to something” for that something itself) and
the understanding of Forms as transcendent? Or: what constitutes waking up,
turning around, leaving the cave, and adequately understanding the nature of
immanent Forms?
The real importance of the argument becomes apparent if we remind
ourselves of its ethical nature. The reductionist-nominalist is also a potential
sophist; for her, the problem is not how to find out what is the good life. It is
whatever you want it to be, and then you argue for it. In contrast, for Plato
both the existence and knowability of the good of anything “depends upon
the existence and knowability of the good simpliciter.” 9
Thus, the coping stone is the Form of the Good, and without knowledge
of it, we do not know anything else either. The Good informs the principle of
ordering (our actions) toward an absolute point, and in a hierarchical fashion.
Knowing what beds are requires knowing the good of beds (sleep). Knowing
what sleep is requires knowing the good of sleep (human life), and knowing
what human life is requires knowing the good of life: ultimately, the Good as
such. Remove that absolute end-point, and what you get is a field of possibil-
ities that is held together by the relationship between phenomena and what
we want of them. Within that field, you can establish necessary connections
where, however, the necessity remains largely conditional on the desired
result: when creating a particular flute, it is no longer a question of looking to
the Form for the perfect Flute; rather, if you want this from your flute, you’ll
have to build it that way. This does not rule out the existence of what Penner
calls “real natures,”a priori patterns which hold throughout the universe. But
 Sketches of Landscapes 53

it reduces the normative role that such patterns—Wittgenstein’s “very gener-

al facts of nature” (PI, p. 195)—play in the organization of our language-
games. 10
We can uphold, with Penner, that Plato’s dreaming lovers of sights and
sounds are reductionists and nominalists, while the “true philosophers, the
believers in Forms, by contrast, are anti-nominalists” 11; we can even agree
that Forms tell us what things are, that what beauty is “gives perceptible
things such beauty as they have,” and still perceive of Forms not as unchang-
ing thing-like entities but as constellations formed by phenomena. 12 (The
artichoke is an artichoke by virtue of the coherence between its leaves, and
no single leaf will give you the idea, or form, of the artichoke.) The identity
of an object is given by the fact that its elements relate to each other in such
and such a way. And this can be expressed by saying the object “partakes of
the Form” of whatever object it is. 13 Under a non-hierarchical reading, this
identity of Forms with that of which they are the forms, would make of the
Good the most general Form, hence the name for the overall coherence of
perceptible particulars or phenomena—our lives; which, however, we never
know in their entirety.
Could it be that the Investigations aims to invoke this overall coherence,
in the absence of completeness, and that the Investigations, as much as Ador-
no’s thought, want to avoid prima philosophia in favour of the mediation
between form and substance in (textual) constellations? Could it be that

1. the philosophical text, on the one hand, and language as spoken in the
world, on the other, and
2. the image given of language by the philosophical text, on the one hand,
and the world as known to humans, on the other, both stand in the same
uncanny relationship to each other as
3. film and reality?

The film is all real, everything on it/in it is real, as real as the objects that
were in front of the camera, and yet it is a fictional representation. Every
remark in the Investigations is real, as real as the words spoken outside the
text, yet the text is fictional. The difference between real and fictional lies in
the isolation and suspension of use in the case of the latter. The uncanny
relationship between the two becomes apparent when the shotgun on the set
is loaded with live ammunition.
54 Daniel Steuer

3. INTERLUDE: FAMILY RESEMBLANCE AND PLATONIC

ESSENCE

Baker and Hacker, in their Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical

Investigations, argue that Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblance’ is
primarily “an antidote” 14 (222) to Platonic essences, and undermines “the
traditional Platonist conception of definition in philosophy.” 15
The Commentary concedes that the map which the text provides “is the
treasure,” 16 yet distinguishes between what is in view “in the form of a map”
and “less metaphorically, in the form of a description of the salient grammat-
ical features” of a problematic expression. 17 Wittgenstein’s “sketches con-
junctively give us an idea of the landscape—as an album does. On the other
hand, it is also true that he does not give us, or on the whole try to give us,
paintings. He does not supply systematic surveys of the subjects he deals
with, in the sense of surveying the grammar of expressions in, for example,
chapters on understanding, thinking, imagining, the meaning of a word, the
meaning of a sentence, and so forth. But he often supplies, in his multitudi-
nous scattered remarks, the materials for such synopses.” 18
Is it possible that the very resistance expressed in this shift from
“sketches” to “paintings,” from scatteredness to systematicity, from giving
the idea of a landscape to supplying systematic surveys, was the one that
Wittgenstein was trying to dissolve through the form the Philosophical In-
vestigations took? 19
Once the universal mediation between particulars and universals is bound
to the actual wandering of the philosopher, meaning and text have become
inseparable. If there is no abstract grammatical rule, just because there is
‘grammar’, then maybe the synopsis will forever remain tied to the task of
reading, and the clarity is no longer one that could be abstracted from the
route the text takes.

4. GIORGIO AGAMBEN: WHAT IS A PARADIGM?

Agamben’s “Che cos’è un paradigma” is an attempt to reconstruct the metho-

dology he followed in his previous work, such as Homo Sacer, Remnants of
Auschwitz, and State of Exception. 20 Notions like “homo sacer,” or the “con-
centration camp,” are to be understood as paradigms whose purpose, in their
multiplicity, “was to make intelligible a series of phenomena whose family
relations have, or could have, escaped the historical gaze.” 21 Thus, para-
digms detect and articulate connections. The peculiar understanding of para-
digm he develops turns out to be an interpretation of Plato’s “forms” and
“dialectic.” It is therefore useful if we remind ourselves shortly of some of
 Sketches of Landscapes 55

the features of books VI and VII of the Republic, one of Agamben’s main
points of reference.
Toward the end of Book VI of the Republic, we are given the analogy
between the Good and the sun: “What the good itself is in the intelligible
realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the
visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things.” 22 The sun provides the
visible things with the power to be seen, and also causes them to grow and
become, though it is not itself coming to be. Thus, objects of knowledge can
be known because of the Good, and “their being is also due to it, although the
good is not being but superior to it in rank and power.” 23 Instead of “not
being,” other translations give “beyond being,” strengthening the “Platonic”
reading of Plato’s Forms as transcendent. Socrates is urged to continue with-
out omitting anything but replies that he is “certainly omitting a lot,” insists
that he has to “omit a fair bit,” and only promises not to “omit anything
voluntarily.” 24
The Good, the highest Form, has been presented by way of an analogy
only; and we have an acknowledgment of the unavoidable incompleteness of
what is to follow, due to Socrates’ limited powers of volition.
The conversation continues with the discussion of the model of the line
(end of Book VI), and of the parable, or analogy, of the cave, which opens
Book VII. All goes well while Socrates and Glaucon discuss the usefulness
of those “sciences” belonging to the third segment of the line—arithmetic,
geometry, harmonics, astronomy—in educating the future rulers of the polis,
until Socrates suddenly calls “all these subjects . . . merely preludes to the
song itself” which is “the song that dialectic sings.” 25 When Glaucon, there-
upon, rather cheerfully suggests now to “turn to the song itself,” 26 Socrates
simply replies: “You won’t be able to follow me any longer.” Instead of
discussing the Forms, Socrates returns to a recapitulation of what has been
said so far, discarding once again both the crafts that are “concerned with
human opinions and desires,” and the sciences, like geometry, that ultimately
rest on “something unknown” (i.e., hypotheses), as candidates for grasping
what the being of each thing is, giving pride of place instead to dialectic:
“Therefore, dialectic is the only inquiry that travels this road, doing away
with hypothesis and proceeding to the first principle itself, so as to be se-
cure.” 27
Still, we have not heard the song.

5. AGAMBEN’S PLATO

Agamben’s reading suggests that Plato’s dialectic must be understood as a

radically immanent “paradeigmatology,” that Forms are not some transcen-
56 Daniel Steuer

dent ideal entities, but paradigms—that is, sensible phenomena, rendered

intelligible through a particular form of exposition in which reference and
use are suspended.
Drawing on Foucault, Aristotle, Melandri, and Kant, he sketches out the
logic of the paradigmatic example as:

1. “a single object which, being applicable to all the others in its class,
defines the understanding of the totality of which it is a part, and which, at
the same time, it constitutes.” 28
2. neither based on induction nor deduction, but as a “paradoxical type of
movement from the particular to the particular.” 29
3. an analogical logic which transforms binary structures “into a field of
polar forces in which, as in a field of electromagnetic forces, they lose
their substantial identity.” 30
4. following the Critique of Judgment, an example for which it is impossible
to give the rule. 31

Thus, the paradigm has to do with chains of analogous cases that are neither
produced by pre-existing rules, nor understood by abstracting rules from
them. There is no generative principle that would allow us to derive the
instances that make up the chain. We are reminded of Wittgenstein’s image
of the rope made up of various interconnecting strings which he uses to
introduce the notion of family resemblance. 32 No one piece needs to run
from beginning to end, and yet the rope may be perfectly coherent and
reliably firm. What connects Wittgenstein’s method and Agamben’s reflec-
tions on the paradigm is the theme of a “center and variation” structure in
which the center no more, nor less, determines the variations than the varia-
tions the center, and in which the continuation of a series is neither arbitrary,
nor perfectly predictable.
Agamben illustrates “paradigmatic totality” with a passage from the
Statesman which discusses the need of a model for the idea of a “model.” 33
The example for a “model of a model” is the way children learn to identify
letters in syllables. 34 They identify them correctly in the easy cases of short
syllables, and make mistakes in the more complex cases. The way to teach
them is to use the simple cases and “to put these beside what they’re not yet
recognizing. By comparing them, we demonstrate that there is the same kind
of thing with similar features in both combinations.” 35
Thus, rather than giving a second-order model for models, Plato uses a
linguistic illustration of how something becomes a model through a particular
practice of comparing. And similarly, Wittgenstein refuses any moves onto
second-order planes in philosophy: “One might think: if philosophy speaks
of the use of the word ‘philosophy’ there must be a second-order philosophy.
But it is not so: it is, rather, like the case of orthography, which deals with the
 Sketches of Landscapes 57

word ‘orthography’ among others without then [therefore] being second-

order [orthography].” 36
Crucially, Plato extends his illustration from language to world, speaking
of the “individual ‘letters’ of everything,” 37 implying that the same method
can be applied to all phenomena in the cosmos. It becomes clear, suddenly,
why, in the Republic, Glaucon speaks of a “superhuman task”! 38

6. ONTOLOGY VS. SUBJECT-OBJECT MEDIATION: THE

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AGAMBEN’S AND WITTGENSTEIN’S
PARADIGMATIC METHODS

And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypotheti-
cal in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description
alone must take its place. 39

Agamben’s key discussion of Plato’s dialectic is centered on the following

quotation from the Republic:

It [dialectics] does not consider these hypotheses as first principles but truly as
hypotheses—but as stepping stones to take off from, enabling it to reach the un-
hypothetical first principle of everything. Having grasped this principle, it reverses
itself and, keeping hold of what follows from it, comes down to a conclusion
without making use of anything visible at all, but only of forms themselves, moving
on from forms to forms, and ending in forms. 40

Situated at the end of Book VI, this describes the fourth, dialectical part of
Plato’s line—the song, not the prelude—the superhuman task, the exit from
the cave. Everything in this passage hinges on the question of what it means
to treat hypothesis as hypothesis proper. Agamben’s answer is, of course, to
treat them as paradigms: “The non-hypothetical into which the dialectic en-
ters is first of all open towards the paradigmatic use of the sensible.” 41 What
Agamben ignores, however, is the notion of a first principle and of Forms as
given without reference to “anything visible at all.”
For Agamben, the intelligibility of paradigms “has an ontological charac-
ter; it does not refer to a cognitive correspondence between a subject and an
object, but to being.” 42 This creates some tension with his examples for
paradigmatology: Aby Warburg’s “atlas of images” (the Mnemosyne project,
in particular the theme of the nymph), and Goethe’s scientific investigations
(in particular the notion of an Urphänomen). Having pointed out that the
images of, for example, the “Pathosformel Nymphe” cannot be read as pre-
senting a developmental or chronological order leading to an origin, he
writes:
58 Daniel Steuer

But this means that the nymph is the paradigm of which the individual nymphs are
the example, or, more exactly—according to the constitutive ambiguity of the Pla-
tonic dialectic—the nymph is the paradigm of the individual images, and the indi-
vidual images are the paradigms of/for the nymph. The nymph is, therefore, an
Urphänomen, an “original phenomenon” in Goethe’s sense. 43

Thus, for Agamben the nymph (singular) is the paradigm of the individual
images, and these (plural) in turn are the paradigms of the nymph. In this
view, Warburg’s ordering activity remains altogether out of sight. However,
it was Warburg’s intention synoptically to present cultural, economic, and
imaginative forces that are at play between the individual instances, a synop-
tical understanding of the Renaissance’s reception of antiquity.
The straight transition from here to Goethe’s Urphänomen complicates
matters further. Agamben concentrates on the “analogical-synthetic” side of
Goethe’s approach, and ignores the analytical side, as well as his highly
developed sense of the role of the investigator. The Urphänomen is the result
of a long and thorough process of collecting and comparing phenomena,
reproducing observations under certain natural and experimental conditions,
until those naturally occurring phenomena have been established (“ex-
tracted”) which contain within themselves the condition for the appearance
of a vast number of other related cases. Goethe always emphasizes the poten-
tially distorting influence of the investigator’s choices and predilections. 44 In
other words, the Urphänomen, and the corresponding order of phenomena
contains the dialectical mediation between subject and object. It does not
represent, nor does it aim to represent, an ontology of being.
Goethe’s and, following him, Wittgenstein’s method of comparative
morphology (of language-games, of natural phenomena) rests precisely on
that: the act of collecting and comparing, which implies an irreducible dialec-
tic between subject and object, in the awareness that no order is “natural” in
the sense of being independent of the investigator’s activity.
Thus, comparative morphology is indeed very close to Plato’s method of
“collection and division,” as spelled out in Phaedrus—that is, collecting
(synthetically) things of one kind, and then cutting up (analytically) “each
kind according to its species along its natural joints,” trying “not to splinter
any part, as a bad butcher might do.” 45 Socrates declared himself to be a
lover “of these divisions and collections, so that [he] may be able to think and
to speak.” And those artful in this method, although he is not sure whether it
is the right name for them, he has “always called . . . ‘dialecticians.’” 46
True dialecticians, in reading and revealing the phenomena always at the
same time read and reveal themselves.
 Sketches of Landscapes 59

7. THIS IS NOT A TEXT ON DEREK JARMAN’S WITTGENSTEIN

“I have much of Ludwig in me. Not in my work, but in my life” (67), writes
Derek Jarman, someone whose work and life are as inseparable as the work
and life of Ludwig Wittgenstein. 47
London—Dungeness—London
Dungeness—London—Dungeness
“Ludwig was locked up by denial. Every now and then he bolted to
Norway or Ireland.” 48
“The cinema was Ludwig’s escape. Mine, a garden.” 49
“He was uncomfortable with his sexuality, yet could not believe he was
not part of the world. ‘The world is everything that is the case.’” 50
How embarrassing to be the owner of a body!
“Ludwig steered away from himself.” 51
What a stroke of genius to have the narrative voice remain a child. Some-
thing (in Ludwig, Derek, us) that refuses to grow up and adopt the world of
adults. Philosophers are like children, Ludwig insisted. Of himself: to the
silly questions and doubts, the ones that someone who has mastered a tech-
nique or praxis no longer harbors, I say: you are perfectly justified.
The child accepts what is the case—How do we learn denial?
The film opens: “People . . . did . . . not . . . sometimes . . . silly things . . .
nothing intelligent . . . ever get done.” 52
Left out: If, do, would.—Fill in the gaps!
“The earnest child becomes the unhappy adult.” 53
The film “does not portray or betray Ludwig. It is there to open up. It is
logic.” 54
What does it mean to be faithful to one’s subject? Not to betray it?
How does logic open up?
By showing what is the case.—“But there were no Martians on the way to
Cambridge!”
“M. This is a red pillar box.
YW. How do you know?
M. I have done my homework. Green is green.
YW. Children learn by believing adults. Doubt comes after belief.
M. I know what I believe. Where I come from there are no adults—and so
no doubts.
YW. If I post this letter to New York, does that strengthen my conviction
that the Earth exists?
M. The Earth does exist and so do Martians.” 55
Who, or what, decides upon the limits of the real? The perspective of the
child, the perspective of the extraterrestrial—in what relation do they stand to
each other?
60 Daniel Steuer

Wittgenstein moved to England twice. And spent about a quarter of a

century there.
Scene 48—mocking English upper-class politeness: “Yes . . . yes I like
that very much. Yes, Wednesday. Oh . . . is that so? Tuesday suits me fine,
yes. Yes, I thought so yes. Yes, he was. Really. Oh Bertie? Yes, I know him,
yes, for many years, yes. Christ.” 56
“It is important for our approach, that someone may feel concerning
certain people, that he will never know what goes on inside them. He will
never understand them. (Englishwomen for Europeans).” 57—Written in
1948. 1948!
“Ludwig lives in a post-Copernican world.” 58 A world with multiple, but
not unconnected, centers (or languages, or human beings): “‘I want to get rid
of the age-old picture of the soul brooding in isolation,’ said Ludwig. He
wanted a public discourse.” 59
Who, today, might brood in isolation? What is the social-economic-politi-
cal reality that corresponds to solipsism? What do isolation and solipsism
lead to?
Today, the earth is flattening out again: “the ceremonies of everyday
language are stuck in Aristotelian flat earth power, institutions.” 60
At the end of reason and compassion lies violence. Watch The Last of
England. 61
Derek Jarman’s activism, his way of bearing witness, in a society that
lives by repression, denial, hypocrisy. “Are you not as suspicious as I of the
vacant images that fill the screen each evening?” 62 —And of much more.
Oh, are you? Really?—How interesting.
Wittgenstein, looked at through Newton’s prism: “It is through transpa-
rency that the world is discovered. The camera lens.” 63 —Nothing is hidden
from view. But a lot is overlooked.
Spectral analysis of a life and work into scenes.
“Invisible worlds brought into focus. Galileo’s telescope. Newton’s
prism. The glass. Negative. The lens of the Hubble telescope and the camera
lens.
Quark, Charm and Strangeness—aka Mr. Green—holds a glass to the
film. He reflects light back into the lens.” 64
And has the last words, reporting: “Concerning the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein. Deceased. The solution to the riddle of life in space and time
lies outside space and time. But as you know and I know, there are no
riddles. If a question can be put at all, it can also be answered.” 65
He has done his homework!
Jarman’s homework: The analytic-synthetic camera, the pictures reflected
back into the lens. What the world has lost, the artist-philosopher attempts to
retrieve through re-collecting. Scattered images re-connected. Into a life.
Whose life? Whose dreams?
 Sketches of Landscapes 61

“. . . gave me the confidence to allow my dream images to drift and

collide at random.” 66
“The film was pared away. I was always removing things. It is the same
with the soundtrack. A process of elimination” (66).
“. . . a number of tolerable ones were left, which now had to be arranged,
and often pruned, so that, when looked at, they would convey a picture of the
landscape” (PI, preface, translation modified).
The cosmos as cinema (Kluge): Eberty, in 1846, claimed that cosmic
space is “an eternal, indestructible and incorruptible archive of images of the
past.” Einstein, in 1923, in his preface to Eberty’s book, explained that the
special theory of relativity imposes certain limits on this idea as a time-
traveller cannot overtake a wave of light. The speed of light being constant,
some things run away from us forever. However, Andreas Küppers, at a more
recent conference bringing together astrophysicists and philosophers, pointed
out that the recent discovery of negative energy (radiating in the opposite
direction to gravity) “relativises the obstacle to a universal cosmic cinema
that Einstein described.” 67 Kluge reports: “In the course of their discussions,
the scientists at the congress became more and more enthusiastic. It seemed
certain to them that all images of times gone by stream past us and through
us. The philosophers, who are always at the same time historians, got particu-
larly interested in this. Such a UNIVERSAL CINEMA was what they longed
for.” 68
“You cannot fall into unreason.” 69 Or out of this world.
Wittgenstein is not a film of Derek Jarman.

Throughout the film, Antonia Soulez observes, the actor playing Wittgen-
stein gives the impression of being threatened by suffocation, reflecting the
fact that Wittgenstein grew up under suffocating circumstances, and, as Marc
Cerisuelo adds, almost seems to have needed, life-long, a suffocating atmos-
phere, to be able to say what he had to say.
“Except,” Soulez concludes, “when he is on his death-bed; there, final-
ly—even the face—is relaxed.” 70
A quotation from Blue:

Over the mountain is the shrine to Rita, where all at the end of the line call. Rita is
the Saint of the Lost Cause. The saint of all who are at their wit’s end, who are
hedged in and trapped by the facts of the world. These facts, detached from cause,
trapped the Blue Eyed Boy in a system of unreality. Would all these blurred facts
that deceive dissolve in his last breath? For accustomed to believing in image, an
absolute idea of value, his world had forgotten the command of essence: Thou Shall
Not Create Unto Thyself Any Graven Image, although you know the task is to fill
the empty page. From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released from image. . . .
The image is a prison of the soul, your heredity, your education, your vices and
aspirations, your qualities, your psychological world. 71
62 Daniel Steuer

Even if this quotation, especially the end, owes a lot to the influence of Yves
Klein, 72 it is not difficult to find Wittgenstein in it: a system of delusional
imagery to be dissolved, the deception of blurred facts to be replaced by
clearness of vision, but also the need to escape one’s origins and to overcome
one’s own moral weaknesses (for “vices and aspirations” read “vanity”).
“Jarman has pointed out that a boy appears in all of his films, a ‘witness
and a survivor’ whom ‘everyone identifies with.’ In many respects, the boy is
the screen spirit of the director, who often described himself as a witness
rather than an activist.” 73
All moralizing must end, and only witnessing take its place.
All necessity must end, and only agency take its place.
All making of excuses must end, and only responsibility take its place.
Young Ludwig and Mr. Green are the two most striking deviations from
the original Eagleton script. And both are demons of Wittgenstein. Mr. Green
may stand in for an “exterior” logic, a demon that haunts by remaining
forever out of touch (if, maybe, not out of sight). But he is also the one who
talks to the boy. (Compare this to the scene with the child’s instructors.) Mr.
Green is in allegiance with the boy against a world that doesn’t understand
and does not want to understand.
And Young Ludwig?—He is the demon that kept Wittgenstein going.
None of Wittgenstein’s biographers give much space to the child. Witt-
genstein’s childhood is mostly absent in the literature on him. Smothered up
by riches and fame. (Yes, Brahms visited, too!)
The child remains child; then we have the adult Wittgenstein, all of a
sudden, but there are no degrees, no transitions, no adolescence. 74 The child
keeps reappearing until the end; hovering mid-way—an image of hope, in-
conclusiveness, despair, resistance? Hovering, but subject, irresistibly, to the
earth’s gravitational pull.
It is a serious child, a geek, someone who may get bullied at school.
Someone haunted by isolation, hence by skepticism, hence by longing. A
stranger everywhere. Unrecounted—You do not choose to become a philoso-
pher. You are being made a philosopher, an extraterrestrial, by your given
“deviance.” Thus, along with Young Ludwig, his family background neces-
sarily must enter the film.
Mr. Green, strangeness itself:

Now an idea of life as inadequate to the demands of spirit is a way of characterizing

the motive of scepticism, its ready dissatisfaction with finitude; and I note for the
future that I have also, in reading Wittgenstein as the physician of scepticism,
associated melancholy with a terror of, and desire for, inexpressiveness, figurable
romantically as being buried alive (a state of stifled unfolding). This comes out, in
Wittgenstein’s Investigations, as a sense of human strangeness to itself, a mood
endemic to philosophy. (It is a mood I have from the time of an early book of mine
on the nature of film understood as the human sense of itself as haunting the world, a
 Sketches of Landscapes 63

sense open equally to metaphysical and to psychological interpretation—as if we

knew what this difference is.) 75

How ordinary are you to yourself? Are we to ourselves? How stifled?

The female roles: in the original script there are only two women, Mrs.
Moore and Daisy. Mrs. Moore wants Wittgenstein to admire her coat (and he
goes on to cut off the buttons for aesthetic improvement), and Daisy is
nothing more than a disturbingly stereotypical student whose interests do not
exceed “the bubbly” and men. 76 This is “heterosoc” (Jarman’s term for a
certain, pervading attitude toward sexuality, gender, human relations; for a
hodgepodge of social-political mores, an attitude which—though it may ap-
pear, and sometimes be, confused—often enough knows which side its bread
is buttered on). 77
In Jarman’s film, Lady Ottoline represents her social class and its anti-
intellectualism openly. In this, she does have a point against the men. Her
claim that Bertie can never answer a straight question (‘What is logical
symbolism?’) implies not only a possible lack of genuine interest on her part,
but also a definite lack of patience on his; and both are co-dependent. 78
Lady Ottoline’s practicality and “common sense” attitude may annoy, as
it rides on social privilege, but it does have a voice, and it does provide a
counterpoint to Wittgenstein’s introverted self-paralysis:
“Wittgenstein: The most important part of my philosophy hasn’t been
written. I can’t write it. It can never be written.
Ottoline: Ah bunkum! A full English breakfast and a spot of applica-
tion.” 79
Her self-assurance and his self-doubt appear to be of a piece. If she is a
philistine, she is a suffering philistine. If she is a rod to Wittgenstein’s cage,
then she sits in a cage of her own, as do most, possibly all, of the other
characters. (Except, Wittgenstein seems more aware of it than most. Wittgen-
stein, the Hamlet of philosophy?)
Jarman literally puts Wittgenstein in a cage, the equivalent of the fly-
bottle that serves Wittgenstein to explain the purpose of philosophy. In front
of Wittgenstein, a parrot in a cage. A parrot can speak, but does not know
what the speaking means; it is pure imitation. Wittgenstein’s cage mono-
logue makes the connection between philosophy as a sickness of the mind,
and Wittgenstein’s anxiety not to infect too many young people with it, on
the one hand, and sexual relationships and infection on the other, explicit. 80
This may not be pure invention; Wittgenstein’s ambivalence over his own
activity in philosophy may well be of a piece with his ambivalence over most
of his relationships. What is it, in both cases, we must not do? This, possibly,
is the link expressed in the, by now, anecdotal remark on thinking about both
logic and sin at the same time (rendered slightly differently in both film
scripts). On whose authority is something a sin? It is this question Jarman
64 Daniel Steuer

highlights when he has Keynes “parrot” Wittgenstein: “Sins, sinners, sin-

ning. What nonsense you do talk.” 81 And from the cage scene, we move on
to the scene in which Wittgenstein and Johnny have a short conversation on
the soul as a prisoner of his own body, ending in Wittgenstein exclaiming in
despair: “Do you understand what I am saying? Do you understand what I
am saying?” 82 This is followed by a flashback to the scene with the pupil in
the classroom: “You understand what I am saying? Do you understand what I
am saying?” 83 Taken together, the analogical progression from the conversa-
tion with Keynes to the cage scene, and the scene with Johnny, establishes
the essential connection between communication, moral questions, and skep-
ticism which informs Wittgenstein’s thinking. At the same time, by including
the theme of sexuality in this, it dissolves the artificial boundary between
human communication and human sexuality.
Thus, sexuality is brought out of the closet, whereas in the Eagleton
script, the Mechanic, if probably inadvertently, symbolizes closet homosexu-
ality: he has to hide in Wittgenstein’s bedroom, while Russell and Wittgen-
stein have a row over Johnny’s future.
At least of equal importance to the differences in content is the difference
in form. Eagleton attempted to arrange the story around a certain time at
Cambridge, but retains a linear logic. We are introduced to the greatest
philosopher of our time right from the start, and are made to anticipate
intellectual marvels in seminars, and social oddities in behavior. And we are
not being disappointed in either expectation.
The Eagleton script has about eleven scenes, Jarman’s film has fifty-three
(despite being, overall, shorter; not just the film, but also the dialogue was
“pruned away”). As a result there is a much sharper focus on themes. The
scenes, despite the “linear biographical frame,” 84 are paradigmatic scenes,
sometimes symbolical, sometimes allegorical representations of aspects of
Wittgenstein’s life. The film uses plenty of textual material from the original
script, but crucially changes the arrangement. This adds to the “crystallizing”
effect of the scenes. For example, Keynes’s story, from being squashed be-
tween jocular comments on morality and Wittgenstein’s announcement that
he wants to go to the Soviet Union, is placed at the very end (bar the final
appearance of Mr. Green). It is, in many ways, a synopsis of Wittgenstein’s
life, and Keynes tells it at his deathbed.
Jarman’s film tells the story in an openly linear fashion, yet there are
hardly any “causal” connections between the scenes. We are not being made
to anticipate anything. Overall, the impression of the viewer is that the actual
sequence is not important, and could be changed, without substantially
changing anything about the story.
If we take the film as an instruction for reading the Investigations, then
we, the readers, must be the prisms that re-collect the scattered remarks into
light. We could have known this all along: “It is not impossible that it should
 Sketches of Landscapes 65

fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to
bring light into one brain or another—but, of course, it is not likely.” 85 The
likelihood depends, not least, on the approach to reading the reader takes.
Each scene a line in the spectrum, and all in equidistance to the light that
passes through the camera lens.
Each scene, each remark, could be, should be conceived so that it could
be an end-point:
“Each sentence that I write is trying to say the whole thing, that is, the
same thing over and over again & it is as though they were views of one
object seen from different angles.” 86
“The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing
philosophy whenever I want to.” 87
Wittgenstein’s prose, for fear of chaos, demands the power of closure at
every step: “various characteristics of that prose . . . fall under Wittgenstein’s
concept of ‘perspicuous representation,’ the same concept he uses to account
for the convincingness of mathematical proof. One of these characteristics
we might call a certain finish, as if it were the momentary breaking off of a
stretch of language from the rest of what is being said.” 88
If we push this suggestion to its extreme, then every morsel of language
must be a monad; finite, but devoid of the capacity for chaos or meaningless-
ness. Thus, a certain surface discontinuity precisely results from the assump-
tion of a fundamental coherence within. The logic of language refracted into
instances of its appearance; fragments of actuality.
The monad: a perfect paradigm?
“Image after image passes by, without transition, as if any connecting line
were missing that would turn them into a linear narrative.” 89
But our lives are a continuous narrative; and our lives are connected!
“The stream of life, or the stream of the world, flows on and our proposi-
tions are, so to speak, verified only at instants.” 90
We can be forgiven for thinking that we are the cameras of our own lives,
shooting a film that no one will ever watch with us.
You feel like life is slipping through your fingers? Don’t worry, that is
just a thought put in your head by a false use of language. Dr. Wittgenstein
will fix it.
“Student 1: I just can’t see it, Professor. It somehow just seems natural to
me to say ‘I know I am in pain.’
W.: Oh, natural. Tell me, why does it seem more natural for people to
believe that the sun goes round the Earth, rather than the other way round?
Student 1: Well, obviously because it looks that way.
W.: I see. And how would it look if the Earth went round the Sun?” 91 (p.
120)
66 Daniel Steuer

“I just can’t help it, but it feels as if my life is slipping through my fingers,
away from me.” And what would a life look like that doesn’t run through
your fingers?
What if our life was like the film reel? And our only desire—to arrive at
some present, to acquire presence—eternally frustrated?
What if “I had such a good memory that I could remember all my sense
impressions. In that case, there would, prima facie, be nothing to prevent me
from describing them. This would be a biography [eine Lebensbeschrei-
bung]. And why shouldn’t I be able to leave everything hypothetical out of
this description?” 92
The fantasy of a life without mourning, one in which nothing will ever be
lost. In the thought experiment which follows, Wittgenstein will fulfil this
desire for a world without loss by evacuating time and himself from the
space of experience, and turning life itself into a perfect camera.
This is still Tractarian territory:
“The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the
world.”
“And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an
eye.” 93
(Find me if you can!)
This leaves the seats in Plato’s cinema, the cave, empty. Only unseen
shadows flickering across the wall. Dr. Wittgenstein’s treatment will need
further refinement.
The perfect autobiographical film may be the closest we could get to a
description of our lives free of anything hypothetical, but this perfect film
cannot be watched by the bearer of the desire for a non-hypothetical account.
Back to the physical language then! But how should “a physical language
describe the phenomenal [das Phänomen]?” 94
Well, it can’t.
“. . . and all I loved, I loved alone.” (Poe)
“Russell: You’re not worthless, Wittgenstein; you just have this ridicu-
lous thirst for perfection. Then you get disgusted with yourself when you
can’t live up to it.” 95
“Ottoline: You know, your obsession with affection is quite, quite ridicu-
lous.” 96
What happens with someone who confuses affection with perfection?
What happens when he realizes it?
“Try to be loved & not admired.” 97
“I feel for film the same as Ludwig felt about philosophy. There are more
pressing things.” 98
Between the Philosophical Remarks and the Philosophical Investigations,
the aporia of the relationship between film and screen, between discrete
images and discrete pieces of language (language-games) and the impression
 Sketches of Landscapes 67

of continuity their application produces, is resolved in favor of the photo-

graphic logic of the film. The continuity and coherence of the discrete images
and remarks must remain virtual. The text gives snapshots against the coher-
ent background of a form of life which, in its entirety, remains beyond
representation. The distance between screen and film is collapsed, and turned
into a continuous, step-by-step change of immanent perspectives—the map is
drawn while walking the landscape. Philosophy is always also news from a
life.

8. SCENES FROM AN UNSHOT FILM

At the time of the Philosophical Remarks, the inexpressibility of the form

that language and world must share has turned into the problem of verifica-
tion. And this problem is explored through the laterna magica image: on the
one side we have the film screen (the primary system) which corresponds to
immediate experience; the visual field, which is essentially “neighborless”
and a-temporal, also a-spatial (it is indeed flat, you cannot turn around in it);
on the other side we have the film reel (the secondary system) which corre-
sponds to temporal and spatial propositions (e.g., propositions of Euclidian
geometry), where there is a before and an after, and where we find physical-
ist language and a three-dimensional space.
The verificationist problem then is: how can we verify the truth of a
proposition, situated in the realm of the reel, describing, or postulating, a
state of affairs on the screen, when on the screen there is not only the pos-
sibility of change, but in fact all is in constant flux? How can the reel touch
the screen?

The stream of life, or the stream of the world, flows on and our propositions are, so
to speak, verified only at instants.
Our propositions are only verified by the present.
So they must be so constructed that they can be verified by it. And so in some way
they must be commensurable with the present; and they cannot be so in spite of their
spatio-temporal nature; on the contrary this must be related to their commensurabil-
ity as the corporeality of a ruler is to its being extended—which is what enables it to
measure. 99

Along with this attempt at an answer, the laterna magica is also considered
to be a misleading image. In everyday life, we never feel that the phenomena
“escape us,” only when we philosophise do they seem to “pass by too quick-
ly.” It is likely, therefore, that this thought is suggested by a wrong use of our
language, associated with a misuse of the image of a reel passing by. 100 The
68 Daniel Steuer

paragraph following this insight half keeps, half discards the image of reel
and screen:

There is not—as I used to believe—a primary language as opposed to our ordinary

language, the “secondary” one. But one could speak of a primary language as
opposed to ours in so far as the former would not permit any way of expressing a
preference for certain phenomena over others; it would have to be, so to speak,
absolutely impartial. 101

The use of the image of the laterna magica situates language at a distance to
the phenomena, and thus makes it necessarily prejudiced; language is ab-
stracted from, and abstracts from, the phenomena. But we can also associate
the “reel language” with theory and hypothesis, and the “screen language”
with ordinary language. If we then collapse the difference between reel and
screen, we end up with ordinary and hypothetical language as two categories
of language use which nevertheless belong to the same plane; and this is
more or less, the plane of the Investigations’ landscape. Thus, while the idea
of a “primary language that directly presents immediate experience is inco-
herent” (Stern 1995, 144), 102 this idea is replaced with the dream of an
impartial language, one that is part of a system no longer divided into a
primary and secondary sphere.
Along with this, what (the reel) language (the corporeality of the ruler)
has to share with the screen (language of experience) in order to be appli-
cable (the extension of the ruler), is transformed from a property into a
practice (that of measuring)—but we are not there yet.
In section VII of the Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein invents a per-
fect memory camera. He assumes that he has perfect memory, and that a
landscape of plaster casts, appropriately painted, and with eyes in the appro-
priate position, allows him to record the exact equivalent of his visual field.
The arrangement is a perfect memory camera: “We could imagine that the
mechanism could be driven by turning a crank and in that way the descrip-
tion ‘read off.’” 103 In other words, what Wittgenstein imagines is a copy of
the film that is his life (as far as the visual field is concerned). In the Big
Typescript, he makes the analogy explicit: “An approximation to this would
be a representation in film.” 104
The cinematic image may be misleading, but the confusion it causes is
resolved along the image itself. For an impartial language to be possible, reel
and screen must touch. To this effect, the difference between mere appear-
ance and reality (“it is”—“it seems”), is first turned into two possibilities of
equal status within one medium; screen (phenomenological language) and
reel (physicalist language), are put on the same plane. Now the fundamental
fact becomes the fragmentation of phenomenological space. Physicalist lan-
guage and ordinary language both fragment the continuous stream of phe-
 Sketches of Landscapes 69

nomena; like a camera. And we interpolate the missing elements into the
gaps, like a cinema audience. The difference between “I see a lamp on the
desk” and “It seems, I see a lamp on the desk” is one of emphasis, not of
certainty. The “it seems” indicates that something is described as a special
instance of a general rule. 105 This is the rule according to which we fragment
our experience under normal circumstances. (In this perspective, an optical
illusion is not essentially a mistake; it only becomes an error in connection
with a particular practice. If I see something as shorter which “in reality” is
longer, this is only a mistake if there exists a practice of measuring in physi-
cal space which determines our course of action in some way.)
In these reflections we can see prefigured how the fragmenting relation-
ship between language and screen becomes the relationship between the rules
for the application of a word, and actual instances of its application, and how
the distinction between reality and grammar can be seen as entirely depen-
dent on human convention (but human convention founded in practice).
Hence: “It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in
the language they use. That is not an agreement in opinions but in form of
life.” 106 And, as the subsequent paragraph of the Investigations points out,
language as communication depends not only on shared definitions, but also
on agreement “in judgments.” 107 Read this as saying: if we all agreed ideally
on a formal system of words and their Platonic definitions, but each of us
would use them differently in fragmenting our experience, there would be no
shared world. Ideal formal agreement and a fundamental clash of worlds are
not mutually exclusive.
Interestingly, this change of perspective from a concern with the repre-
sentational nature of language toward language as an activity seems to have
begun with the recognition of the need to agree on what is to count as a word
or a sentence—with a concern, one might say, over the materiality of logic:
“I do not believe that Logic can talk about sentences in any other than the
normal sense in which we say, ‘There’s a sentence written here’ or ‘No, that
only looks like a sentence, but isn’t,’ etc. etc.” 108
This, in truth, is a double realization. Logic needs a body (material words,
signs, symbols), and this means, at the same time, that logic comes to depend
upon common sense when distinguishing between some scribble and a prop-
er word: “If a mark should happen to occur that looks like a word, I say:
that’s not a word, it only looks like one, it’s obviously unintentional. This can
only be dealt with from the standpoint of normal common sense. (It’s ex-
traordinary that that in itself constitutes a change in perspective.)” 109
Of course, by the time we reach the Investigations, this change has led to
a corollary of other changes. Not only does Wittgenstein now repeat that the
“philosophy of logic speaks of sentences and words in exactly the sense in
which we speak of them in ordinary life,” 110 but this speaking is based on
pre-logical operations: “The teaching of language is not explanation, but
70 Daniel Steuer

training.” 111 And, of course, the entities in question do not exist in isolation;
the “speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a life-form.” 112 The
desire to speak outside these activities returns us to pure noise: “So in the end
when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just
to emit an inarticulate sound.—But such a sound is an expression only as it
occurs in a particular language-game, which should now be described.” 113
Thus, the pattern created by the fragmentation of the screen has finally
turned into the pattern of activities that constitute our lives. Wittgenstein had
to fight hard to achieve this unity. In the Philosophical Remarks, he still
retained the rift between reel and screen. And that rift was symptomatic for
the one between body and mind, between the individual and his or her sur-
roundings. Thus, Wittgenstein speculates about an isolated, bodiless eye, and
even the position of that eye is considered inessential for visual space. 114 Eye
and body are substituted for by properties of an objective space (the owner-
less visual field), even if the notion of a surrounding space will bring about a
return of the body. For it is only a combination of visual and motoric sensa-
tions, the possibility to “turn around,” which bring about this surrounding
space. 115 Yet, in the Philosophical Remarks, he insists that the body is ines-
sential for the media of vision and language; the eye is as inessential to visual
space as the owner of a book to the book. 116
Even if the visual and the linguistic retain a certain privilege in the later
Wittgenstein, the drama that is being played out in the increasing importance
of practice, and of games, is the drama of the acknowledgment of the body.
Mr. Green: Where I come from there are no books without owners, and
no visual fields without bodies.
Young Ludwig: Oh God!
But who is the extraterrestrial?
If all understanding is grounded in language-learning, in the training of
the child, and remains tied to the mutual acknowledgment between teacher
and learner, then all understanding must be able to remember the child.
Section VII of the Philosophical Remarks ends with the introduction of a
further device, a metronome: “To simplify matters, I am imagining the
changes in my visual space to be discontinuous, and, say, in time with the
beats of the metronome. Then I can give a description of these changes (in
which I use numbers to designate the beats).” 117
The film is a “talkie”—“The whole is a talking film”—in which the
words are as fleeting as all other experience. 118 The soundtrack no longer
“accompanies” the film; it is purely relational rhythmic patterning consti-
tuted by human activity. Of this, the Investigations wants to provide the
score.
The remarks of the Investigations are written, as it were, from within the
screen. The distance between reel and screen is replaced by the play between
the background assumptions embedded in language, and the judgments we
 Sketches of Landscapes 71

make in the visible foreground of our present activity. No one, not the author,
nor the reader, stands on the Hegelian shore, watching the catastrophe un-
fold. We are all in the film.
The Investigations’ method amounts to what Bernard Harrison calls a
“double investigation” into linguistic convention as an expression of our
interaction with the world, hence into the activities by means of which we
constitute ourselves, or, in Harrison’s words: investigations into the “specific
modes of engagement of language with reality via the practices which ground
its possibilities as language.” 119
In Harrison’s reading, practice emerges as the irreducible mediator be-
tween language and reality. Language is never directly referential, but only
relative to a convention that is embedded in a practice. We can only under-
stand the explanation of a term if we know to what logical type it belongs.
And this we can only know, if we are to avoid an infinite regress, if we
“know how the term fits into a practice.” 120
Think of this as a “practical paradigm”: “To show how a term fits into a
human practice is to show ‘the post at which we station the word’ (PI, §29).
That is, at one and the same time, both to grasp how to make use of an
ostensive definition to fix the reference of the term in question, and to grasp
how to set about determining the truth-values of a sentence in which that
term occurs and in which the determination of truth-value depends crucially
on the reference of that term.” 121
To give a practical example: “Objects indeed have lengths; but it is not
possible to locate lengths as constituents of reality without reference to the
practice of measuring.” 122
Once again, it is our practices which, pre-linguistically, pattern the world,
and allow for the introduction of linguistic markers which reflect aspects of
that patterning.
Could we say: The world is its own transcendental condition, and it
allows for such and such practices to constitute meaning? Yet, without prac-
tice, the world would remain “continuous” (or “amorphous”). Only practices
introduce discontinuity, elements, and thus reveal aspects of the transcenden-
tal condition.
Teaching the child, the infant, where to post a word. Remembering the
child, the infant, the one without language. The pure practice beyond our
words, grounding our practices with words. How lonely is the infant, the one
without language?
The world cannot be patterned in any way the embodied mind would wish
for. And that includes us—the human world, the world of the social. The
world’s resistance to patterning, to Plato’s bad butcher.
What does this film share, in terms of properties, with the erstwhile
screen; what does it share with the erstwhile film reel? Well, the play be-
tween background (assumptions) and foreground (judgments) is a movement
72 Daniel Steuer

between concrete, and discontinuous, frames—moves we make—and an in-

determinate background, or rather: a background that a) is never fully
present, and b) contains essential indeterminacy.
Even if “the goal of providing a presuppositionless phenomenological
language, a description of experience without any hypothetical additions,
was replaced by the project of describing our actual use of language, in such
a way as to dissolve philosophical problems,” 123 this therapeutic turn does
not rule out the possibility that the Investigations still gives us a phenomeno-
logical description ex negativo, maybe not of our lives, but of the possibil-
ities of our lives.
Each paragraph of the Investigations is a still, a frame, a snapshot, and
between each paragraph and the previous and next one, there is—potential-
ly—an indefinite series of others. The reader fills in the blanks, producing
continuity (a continuous gradation of possible moves), just as the eye sees
individual frames as continuous.
(So, is reality continuous, or discontinuous? That is a question analogous
to the earlier ones: “What is the form that language and world must have in
common?” Or: “How can language express that all is in flux?”)
The (metaphysical) desire, the temptation to be inhuman, is to leave the
film; like those actors who, in some movies, step off the screen . . .
The complete language-game of, for example, “hoping” would fill thou-
sands of pages, and still remain incomplete. (This may be another point
where Wittgenstein shows that he is “modern.”) Hence, all that Wittgenstein
can do is set up paradigmatic pointers (which sum up, contain, a multitude of
related cases within them, and thus entice the reader to complement them
with intermediary cases.)
Just as Wittgenstein does not aim at an ideal exactness, he cannot aim at
completeness. But he can aim for richness—that is, the exemplary recollec-
tions he assembles should not be pre-selected according to an a priori princi-
ple, or, worse, according to a prejudice.
You are an actor and activist—like it or not.
Jarman’s films are always shot from the standpoint of the present. Ed-
ward II is not a period drama, Wittgenstein is not a biographical exercise. 124
Wittgenstein is shot from the perspective of Wittgenstein, to the extent that
Jarman shared that perspective; or, as in a Cavellian act of reading: it is the
result of Jarman allowing Wittgenstein to read Jarman, and then reading that
reading: a crossing-over of the two in the present. As a result there is a
discovery of activism in impartiality, and of impartiality in activism. (This
has nothing to do with “actualization,” everything with resonances.)
“Sexuality is everything that is the case.” And there is, for Jarman as for
the later Wittgenstein, nothing whereof one cannot speak. The aim is to be
impartial: let everything that is, have the right to be—in you, between you
and others, and in others and between others. Then you will see the world
 Sketches of Landscapes 73

aright. An impartial, undistorted and undistorting language would allow for

that. But it would require an undistorting practice, a world without denial.

You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable.
I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable).
It is there like our life. 125 (OC, §559)

Wittgenstein, Jarman: citizens of no intellectual community, impartial wit-

nesses, looking for necessary degrees of freedom.

NOTES

1. Stanley Cavell, “The Interminable Shakespearean Text,” in S. Cavell, Philosophy the

Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005),
28–60; 34f.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Aktualität der Philosophie,” in Adorno, Gesammelte Schrif-
ten, Band I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1997), 325–44; 335. English ver-
sion: “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos 31 (Spring 1977): 120–33; 126–27.
3. All quotations in this section (unless otherwise indicated) from Wittgenstein’s preface
to: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), ix–x.
4. Derek Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” in British Film Institute,
Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script\The Derek Jarman Film (London: BFI Publishing,
1993), 63–67; 66.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 2000); see in particular lectures 4–6, 15–41.
6. See Adorno, Metaphysics, 41: “However, if one takes seriously the idea of mediation,
which is sketched but not fully worked out in Aristotle, the idea that form and matter are really
moments which can only be conceived in relation to each other, the question as to which of
them comes absolutely first or is ranked absolutely higher becomes transparent as a false
abstraction. And one will then trace the forms of the concrete mediation of these moments,
instead of treating the product of abstraction which keeps them apart as the only rightful source
of truth.”
7. Terry Penner, “The Forms and the Sciences in Socrates and Plato,” in A Companion to
Plato, ed. Hugh H. Benson (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 165–83; 179. I leave aside the
thorny question exactly which Plato should be attributed with the views presented here. For an
overview on Plato’s Forms, see William A. Welton, ed., Plato’s Forms: Varieties of Interpreta-
tion (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2002).
8. “Incidentally, to take ‘each is one’ as sufficient to bring out what it is to be a Form is
surely to suggest that what is in question is the existence of something additional to the spatial
and perceptible particulars, such as a genuine attribute. It certainly does not suggest that for
there to be a Form is for there to be some mystical, quasi-theological entity.” Penner, “Forms
and the Sciences,” 181.
9. Penner, “Forms and the Sciences,” 177.
10. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 195.
11. Terry Penner, “The Forms in the Republic,” in The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic,
ed. Gerasimos Santas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 234–62; 247.
12. Penner, “The Forms in the Republic,” 248.
13. Penner, “The Forms in the Republic.” This immanent reading is further supported by the
fact that at Republic 505a2–b3 “the Idea or Form of the Good is plainly identified with the
Good” (249).
74 Daniel Steuer

14. G. P. Baker, P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Vol. 1 of An

Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, Part I: Essays), 2nd edition (Ox-
ford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 222.
15. Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein, 216.
16. Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein, 275.
17. Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein, 310 (emphasis added).
18. Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein, 303.
19. Baker and Hacker write: “So, a perspicuous statement of a grammatical rule does not
count as a thesis. And descriptions of grammar are not dogmatism either. For to remind us that
we do use words thus-and-so is not to make any essentialist claim” (298). This is correct,
except it is not (propositional) “statements of rules” that are perspicuous, but the contextual
presentation of their applications. And the grammatical rule does not exist independent of that
application. The description of grammar remains open-ended.
20. Giorgio Agamben, “Che cos’è un paradigma?” in Agamben, Signatura rerum. Sul meto-
do (Turin: Bollato Boringhieri, 2008), 11–34 (all translations are mine). Giorgio Agamben,
Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1998), Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and
the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), Giorgio Agamben,
State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).
21. Agamben, “Che cos’è un paradigma?” 33.
22. Plato, Republic, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, Cambridge:
Hackett, 1997), 508b–c.
23. Plato, Republic, 509b.
24. Plato, Republic, 509c.
25. Plato, Republic, 531d.
26. Plato, Republic, 532d.
27. Plato, Republic, 533a–d.
28. Agamben, “Che cos’è un paradigma?” 19.
29. Agamben, “Che cos’è un paradigma?” 21.
30. Agamben, “Che cos’è un paradigma?” 21–22.
31. Cf. Agamben, “Che cos’è un paradigma?” 23.
32. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §67.
33. Plato, Statesman, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, Cambridge:
Hackett, 1997), 277d.
34. Agamben (“Che cos’è un paradigma?” 24) actually speaks of identifying syllables in
words, but the difference is irrelevant for the argument.
35. Plato, Statesman, 278a–b.
36. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §121.
37. Plato, Statesman, 278d.
38. Plato, Republic, 531c.
39. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §109.
40. Plato, Republic, 511b–c.
41. Agamben, “Che cos’è un paradigma?” 28.
42. Agamben, “Che cos’è un paradigma?” 34.
43. Agamben, “Che cos’è un paradigma?” 31. See Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosy-
ne, ed. Martin Warnke, 3rd edition (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008), esp. 84.
44. “For here at this pass, this transition from empirical evidence to judgment, cognition to
application, all the inner enemies of man lie in wait: imagination which sweeps him away on its
wings before he knows his feet have left the ground; impatience; haste; self-satisfaction; rigid-
ity; formalistic thought; prejudice; ease; frivolity; fickleness—this whole throng and its retinue.
Here they lie in ambush and surprise not only the active observer but also the contemplative
one who appears safe from all passion.” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “The experiment as media-
tor between object and subject,” in Goethe: The Collected Works, Vol. 12 (Scientific Studies),
ed. and trans. by Douglas Miller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 11–17; 14.
For a concise formulation of the notion of Urphänomen, here translated as “archetypal phe-
nomena,” see §175 of the Theory of Color (194–5 in this volume).
 Sketches of Landscapes 75

45. Plato, Phaedrus, 265e.

46. Plato, Phaedrus, 266b–c.
47. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 67.
48. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 64.
49. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 67.
50. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 64.
51. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 65.
52. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 70.
53. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 66.
54. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 67.
55. Derek Jarman, “Wittgenstein: The Derek Jarman Film,” in British Film Institute, Witt-
genstein: The Terry Eagleton Script\The Derek Jarman Film (London: BFI Publishing, 1993),
69–151; 94.
56. Jarman, “Wittgenstein: The Derek Jarman Film,” 134.
57. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch,
revised 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 84e.
58. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 64.
59. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 65.
60. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 64.
61. Derek Jarman, The Last of England, Anglo International Films 1987/Second Sight
[DVD] 2004.
62. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 65.
63. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 64.
64. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 66.
65. Jarman, “Wittgenstein,” 143–44.
66. Jarman as quoted in Tim Lawrence, “AIDS, the Problem of Representation, and Plural-
ity in Derek Jarman’s Blue,” Social Text 52/53 (Autumn–Winter 1997): 241–264; 247.
67. Alexander Kluge, Geschichten vom Kino (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2007), 45.
68. Kluge, Geschichten vom Kino, 47 (my translation). I would like to thank Ladislaus Löb
for advice on the translation.
69. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 66.
70. Antonia Soulez, Marc Cerisuelo, “Wittgenstein de Derek Jarman: un film
d’>intérieur<,” Rue Descartes (2003/1, No. 39): 109–119; 116–17 (all translations are mine).
71. Derek Jarman, Blue: Text of a film by Derek Jarman (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press.
1994), 15.
72. Cf. Lawrence, “AIDS, the Problem of Representation and Plurality in Derek Jarman’s
Blue,” 253.
73. Lawrence, “AIDS, the Problem of Representation and Plurality in Derek Jarman’s
Blue,” 250.
74. Soulez and Cerisuelo, “Wittgenstein de Derek Jarman: un film d’>intérieur<”: 113.
75. Cavell, “The Interminable Shakespearean Text,” 44.
76. Cf. Terry Eagleton, “Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script,” in British Film
Institute, Wittgenstein. The Terry Eagleton Script/The Derek Jarman Film, 15–61; 29–31 and
44–5.
77. Cf. e.g. Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testament (London: Vintage, 1993).
78. Cf. Jarman, “Wittgenstein,” 88.
79. Jarman, “Wittgenstein,” 116.
80. Jarman, “Wittgenstein,” 130–31.
81. Jarman, “Wittgenstein,” 130.
82. Jarman, “Wittgenstein,” 132.
83. Jarman, “Wittgenstein,” 92.
84. Colin MacCabe in his preface to British Film Institute, Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton
Script/The Derek Jarman Film, 1–3; 2.
85. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (preface), x.
86. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 9e.
87. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §133 (trans. mod.)
76 Daniel Steuer

88. Cavell, “Interminable Shakespearean Text,” 49.

89. Soulez and Cerisuelo, “Wittgenstein de Derek Jarman: un film d’>intérieur<,” 114.
90. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Raymond Har-
greaves, Roger White (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), §48, 81.
91. Jarman, “Wittgenstein,” 120.
92. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, §67, 97.
93. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears, B. F.
McGuinness, revised edition [1974] (London, New York: Routledge, 2001), 5.632 and 5.633.
94. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, §68, 98.
95. Eagleton, “Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script,” 35.
96. Jarman, “Wittgenstein,” 116.
97. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 44e.
98. Jarman, “This Is Not a Film of Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 66.
99. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, §48, 81.
100. Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, §52, 83–84.
101. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, §53, 84.
102. David G. Stern, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language (New York, Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 144.
103. Stern, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language, §67, 97.
104. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript. TS 213, ed. and trans. by C. Grant Luckhardt,
Maximilian A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 349e.
105. Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, §70, 98–9.
106. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §241.
107. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §242.
108. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, §18, 61.
109. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks.
110. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §108.
111. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §5.
112. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §23.
113. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §261.
114. Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, §71, 99–100.
115. Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, §73, 101–2.
116. CF. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, §74, 103.
117. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, §75, 103.
118. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, §75, 104.
119. Bernard Harrison, “Imagined Worlds and the Real One,” in The Literary Wittgenstein,
ed. by John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer (London, New York: Routledge, 2004), 92–108; 102.
120. Harrison, “Imagined Worlds and the Real One,” 99.
121. Harrison, “Imagined Worlds and the Real One.”
122. Harrison, “Imagined Worlds and the Real One,” 101.
123. Stern, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language, 20.
124. Derek Jarman, Edward II, Working Title, 1991/Second Sight Films (DVD, 2010). Derek
Jarman, Wittgenstein, BFI Video, 1993 (DVD, 2007).
125. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, G. H. von Wright, trans. G.
E. M. Anscombe, D. Paul (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), §559.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor W. “Die Aktualität der Philosophie,” in Gesammelte Schriften. Band 1, edited
by Rolf Tiedemann, 325–44. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997.
———. “The Actuality of Philosophy.” Telos 31 (Spring 1977): 120–33.
———. Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jeph-
cott. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.
Agamben, Giorgio. Signatura rerum. Sul metodo. Turin: Bollato Boringhieri, 2008.
 Sketches of Landscapes 77

———. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Palo Alto,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
———. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.
New York: Zone Books, 1999.
———. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005.
Baker, G. P., and P. M. S. Hacker. Wittgenstein. Understanding and Meaning (Vol. 1 of An
Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, Part I: Essays), 2nd ed., exten-
sively revised by P. M. S. Hacker. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
British Film Institute. Wittgenstein. The Terry Eagleton Script/The Derek Jarman Film. Lon-
don: BFI Publishing, 1993.
Cavell, Stanley. Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Har-
vard University Press, 2005.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Goethe. The Collected Works (Vol. 12, Scientific Studies), edited
and trans. by Douglas Miller. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Harrison, Bernard. “Imagined Worlds and the Real One,” in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. by
John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, 92–108. London: Routledge, 2004.
Jarman, Derek. At Your Own Risk. A Saint’s Testament. London: Vintage, 1993.
———. Blue: Text of a film by Derek Jarman. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1994.
Lawrence, Tim. “AIDS, the Problem of Representation, and Plurality in Derek Jarman’s
Blue.”Social Text 52/53 (Autumn–Winter 1997): 241–264.
Penner, Terry. “The Forms in the Republic,” in The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic, edited
by Gerasimos Santas, 234–62. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
———. “The Forms and the Sciences in Socrates and Plato,” in A Companion to Plato, edited
by Hugh H. Benson, 165–83. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Plato. Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper, associate editor D. S. Hutchinson. Indi-
anapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1997.
Soulez, Antonia and Marc Cerisuelo. “Wittgenstein de Derek Jarman: un film d’>intérieur<.”
Rue Descartes 1, no. 39 (2003): 109–19.
William A. Welton, ed. Plato’s Forms. Varieties of Interpretation. Lanham, MD: Lexington,
2002.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe, G. H. von Wright, trans.
G. E. M. Anscombe, D. Paul. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.
———. Philosophical Remarks. Edited by Rush Rhees, trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger
White. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975.
———. Culture and Value. Edited by G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch, revised 2nd
edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.
———. Philosophical Investigations. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees, trans. by G. E.
M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001.
———. Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears, B. F. McGuinness, revised edi-
tion [1974]. London, New York: Routledge, 2001.
———. The Big Typescript. TS 213. Edited and trans. by C. Grant Luckhardt, Maximilian A.
E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

FILMOGRAPHY

Jarman, Derek. The Last of England. Anglo International Films, 1987/Second Sight Films
(DVD, 2004).
———. Edward II. Working Title, 1991/Second Sight Films (DVD, 2010).
———. Wittgenstein. BFI Video, 1993 (DVD, 2007).
 Chapter Five

“How It Was Then”: Home Movies as

History in Péter Forgács’s Meanwhile
Somewhere . . .
William C. Wees

These amateur films are full of faults. The majority—let’s say 99% of these home
movies are boring. Boring. And bad. So one has to dig a lot of sand before you find
one ounce of gold. But suddenly, you see all the sand is like gold. It’s also a
paradox.
—Péter Forgács (Boyle 2001)

Home movies usually appear in documentaries for what Patricia Zimmer-

mann has called their “nostalgic qualities, a time frozen outside history”
(Zimmermann 2001, 129). 1 More adventurous and experimental filmmakers
have recycled home movies for other and more interesting purposes. A prime
example is Meanwhile Somewhere . . . (1994), one of a number of films in
which the Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács uses home movies to produce
what might be called a domestic history of Europe circa 1930–1960. This
history is lived—and filmed—by ordinary people going about their daily
lives while the developments that occupy professional historians and most
documentary filmmakers—social unrest, the rise of Fascism, the war in Eu-
rope, the Holocaust, the imposition of Soviet-style Communist regimes in
Central and Eastern Europe—take place, for the most part, “off screen.”
While our awareness of these events strongly influences our response to the
footage in Forgács’s films, we can also vicariously share the kind of naive
pleasure the amateur filmmakers and their family and friends must have felt
when watching the films at the time they were made. As will become appar-
ent, however, Meanwhile Somewhere . . . offers some notable exceptions to
that generalization.
79
80 William C. Wees

Among the many experimental films made with recycled home movies,
two by American filmmakers provide a particularly useful entrée to a discus-
sion of Forgács’s Meanwhile Somewhere . . .. For The Future Is Behind You
(2004), Abigail Child re-edited anonymous home movies and added a fic-
tional narrative about a Jewish family living in Austria in the 1930s. Through
visual text, she “identifies” the family members and presents the younger
daughter as the film’s “narrator.” Also through text on the screen, the daugh-
ter supplies information about family activities, comments on her thoughts
and feelings, and recounts the fate of family members, some of whom perish
during the Holocaust, while others emigrate to Palestine and the United
States. The soundtrack includes synchronized sound effects and music, and
some of the footage is looped, slowed down, and momentarily held motion-
less in freeze frames. The narrative places as much emphasis on gender and
social roles as on “the historical moment which remains as text trace,” as
Child has put it. 2 Fact (the actual home movie footage) and fiction (the
narrative superimposed on the footage) merge in a critical/creative reading
that is historically and psychologically plausible, but is, nevertheless, an
imaginative re-creation of a family history illustrated with home movies. The
result, Child has tentatively suggested, is “a documentary with fiction intrud-
ing.” 3
Alan Berliner’s The Family Album (1987) is composed of anonymous
footage from a large number of American home movies shot between the
1920s and 1950s. Beginning with shots of newborn infants, the film pro-
gresses to young children learning to walk, to older children playing, to
teenagers and young adults partying, to marriage ceremonies, to the appear-
ance of another generation of children, to elderly people and funerals. Like
Child, he adds a soundtrack with music and some sound effects. The film is
intended to be, in Berliner’s words, “a universal yet intimate portrait of
American family life, not scripted, not rehearsed, not immune to the conflicts
and contradictions underlying family life and its rituals.” 4 To call this collec-
tive family portrait “universal” is questionable. It is essentially an evocation
of white, middle-class American family life in the first half of the twentieth
century. Berliner’s characterization of it as “an intimate portrait” correctly
emphasizes its lack of references to public events and the larger historical
contexts within which these families lived and recorded their lives on film.

PRESERVING HISTORY, CREATING ART

Like Berliner, Péter Forgács works with a large body of home movies, but
unlike Berliner, he is concerned to preserve and emphasize their historical
contexts. Home movies, he argues, “can show us a great many things about
 “How It Was Then” 81

the realities and complexities of history as it is lived by real people” (Mac-

Donald 2005, 299). Like Child, he constructs many of his films (but not
Meanwhile Somewhere . . .) from a single family’s home movies (which
generally include extended family and friends), and he arranges the footage
in chronological order so that we observe the activities and relationships of a
particular group of people over a number of years. Notable examples of these
family-oriented films include The Bartos Family (1988, made from the home
movies of Zoltán Bartos), Free Fall (1996, made from the home movies of
György Pető), both of which are included in Forgács’s Private Hungary
series, and The Maelstrom (1997, devoted primarily to the home movies of a
Dutch Jewish family, the Perrebooms, with additional footage from the home
movies of the Dutch Nazi, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Reichskommissar for
the occupied Dutch territories from 1940 to 1945). Unlike Child, Forgács
goes to great lengths to accurately identify people, family relationships, loca-
tions, and some crucial public events that the film’s subjects lived through—
whether or not the events are recorded in the home movies. In bringing these
private histories into the public sphere, he is no less interested than Child in
their psychological and social significance, but he provides only spare, factu-
al information to complement the evidence provided by the footage itself. In
his words, “These films are full of revelatory moments about how it was
then, about how they felt, about what they felt the need to represent. If these
revelations of self are then placed in a context where you can sense the whole
culture, its history and background, and how particular personalities fit into
it, the results become very dynamic” (MacDonald 2005, 300).
To create such a revelatory context, Forgács was not satisfied simply to
reproduce the footage without intervening in its presentation or influencing
its reception. In a characteristically modernist move, he exploits formal and
material properties of the medium to shape the work’s overall structure,
rhythm, and meaning. These medium-specific properties include rigorous
editing and the integration of many different audio-visual elements, includ-
ing (to quote Forgács again) “not only the particular identification of people
and moments (the history of the piece) and the tinting (for providing emo-
tional tone), but the use of slow motion, freeze frames, blowups; the use and
design of the visual texts, and all elements and layers of the sound: voice-
over, sound effects, music. Each of these is like an instrument in an orches-
tra” (MacDonald 2005, 314–15). More than a compilation, Meanwhile Some-
where . . . is a composition in which amateur films provide a crucial, but far
from the only, essential ingredient.
Meanwhile Somewhere . . . was Forgács’s contribution to a five-part
series called “The Unknown War” intended for broadcast on European TV.
The five parts were made by five different filmmakers, all of whom drew
upon a cache of fifty hours of home movies that were shot in Europe between
1936 and 1945. Forgács was assigned the years 1940 to 1943. The full title of
82 William C. Wees

the work, as it appears in the film itself, is The Unknown War “Meanwhile
Somewhere . . .” 1940–1943. With home movie footage from a dozen Euro-
pean countries, the film offers a panoramic, wide-angle view of life in war-
time Europe—in contrast to the more narrowly focused family histories in
films like The Bartos Family, Free Fall, and The Maelstrom. The film begins
with a beautiful shot of skaters on the misty, frozen Zuiderzee. They skate
away from the camera and into the mist, as if into the past and a world the
passage of time has obscured. This film, we come to realize, is intended to
penetrate that curtain of obscurity by bringing together home movie repre-
sentations of events (some banal, some deeply dramatic and disturbing) that
ordinary people lived through during an extraordinary period of European
history.
The shot of skaters fades to black and is followed by a rapid montage of
stills or photographs that set the wartime scene: a large swastika in a wreath,
fighter planes flying in formation, men in military uniforms, and so on. They
are superimposed on a shot of armed soldiers marching rapidly across the
screen from left to right. As the last soldier exits the frame, the image freezes,
and the film’s title appears over the vacated background. Another fade to
black, and the skaters return. In three shots they skate toward us, away from
us, and toward us again, until a last, lone skater glides past the camera, and
only the mist remains on screen. The same shot will end the film, some fifty
minutes later, figuratively closing the curtain that was opened at the begin-
ning. This carefully composed formal opening—like much of the remainder
of the film—is accompanied by quiet, unobtrusive, hypnotically repetitive
music composed by Forgács’s long-time collaborator, Tibor Szemző. While
the music is the predominant element in the film’s “soundscape,” we also
hear occasional, strategically placed sound effects, fragments of speeches,
crowd sounds, and isolated voices. Much of the footage is step printed to
give it a slower and slightly dreamy pace—an effect enhanced by Szemző’s
music and frequent fades to black between sequences. In the film’s montage,
the usual home movie subjects mix with the unusual events of wartime. As
macro- and micro-levels of history overlap and interpenetrate, the cumulative
effect is a kind of cinematic stream of consciousness flowing through the
collective mind of wartime Europe.
The film offers little direct evidence of the war and fighting at the front.
There are a few shots of destroyed buildings accompanied by a title, “War-
saw Eastern Entrance,” and some footage shot in the Ukraine in 1942 by
László Rátz, an ensign in the Second Hungarian Army: troops on horseback,
Russian prisoners of war, dead Russian soldiers, derailed train cars, and
soldiers on a train trading bread for eggs with a girl at the side of the track.
Otherwise, the war itself remains an understood, but unseen, context for
Forgács’s presentation of the war—not as newsreels, documentaries, or prop-
aganda films would present it, but as home movies represented it, even when
 “How It Was Then” 83

they show life proceeding as if there were no war: it is still, after all, life in
wartime.
As one would expect of home movies, there are numerous shots of chil-
dren, relatives, friends, household activities, family gatherings, parties, wed-
dings, holidays. There is also a golf tournament in Belgium, a bullfight in
Lisbon, topless showgirls at the Moulin Rouge, and a woman who bathes and
slips naked into bed while smiling becomingly at the husband or lover behind
the camera. We see the newborn Marie Olga Kubisková and her mother in
their hospital room. Later in the film she is a toddler taking a backyard
shower (one of several sequences with children or adults in showers or bath-
tubs). Early in the film a middle-aged couple playfully wrestle in a garden.
They are members of the Govaert family of Gembloux, Belgium, who appear
several times in the course of the film, including the next-to-last sequence, in
which they gather for a wedding lunch in 1943. From the same year, there is
footage of a Dutch couple celebrating their twelfth wedding anniversary with
the guests dressed in elaborate eighteenth-century costumes and wigs; also in
the same year, friends gather for a party in a garden in Belgium, where a
stout, middle-aged—and rather tipsy—woman dances and mugs for the cam-
era, much to the amusement of others at the party.
Meanwhile, somewhere . . . other home movies were recording events of
a very different order, the most compelling of which is a mini-narrative that
unfolds in nine separate sequences as the film progresses. Shot in a village in
Poland, it shows, in the words of a subtitle, the “racist punishment of lovers”:
a young woman and a young man (identified in the film as “The Polish girl
called Maria, 17 years old. . . . The German boy called Georg Gerhard, 18
years old”) are led into a village square with signs hung around their necks.
We are told in voice-over and subtitles what the signs say: “I am the traitor of
the German people” (spoken by a male voice) and “I am a Polish pig”
(spoken by a female voice). In each succeeding sequence, the voices repeat
the same self-accusatory and humiliating declarations, producing a kind of
verbal/musical refrain. Forgács has referred to them as “songs” and to the
film as an “opera” that is “devoted to these two declarations” (Boyle 2001,
61). As villagers stand around watching, a severe-looking man, identified in
visual text as Paul Hose, uses large scissors to cut off all of the girl’s and the
boy’s hair, except for a forelock that is twisted and tied into the shape of a
pig’s tail. Then the two are paraded down a village street. An unusual visual
element in these sequences is a small inserted image in the lower right-hand
corner of the frame. In each sequence a miniature “snapshot” of something or
someone in that sequence appears in the insert. 5 The most disturbing of these
is not, as one might expect, the face of Maria or Georg or Paul Hose. It
appears in the final sequence, which ends with a group of children following
behind the procession. Several of them look back at the camera as the shot
ends in a freeze frame. The insert shows one of them: a young girl whose
84 William C. Wees

pretty, expressionless face says nothing—and everything—about the ritual of

“racist punishment” and communal cruelty she has just witnessed.
Of other footage depicting the insidious effects of racist doctrines during
the war years, the most distressing comes from Westerbork, Netherlands,
where the Nazis maintained a “model” concentration camp in which Jews
were relatively well treated—before being transferred to death camps else-
where. We see them arriving and being “processed” by clerks who efficiently
type up the relevant information about each individual. Characteristically,
Forgács not only identifies the location, but explains that the footage was
“filmed by Rudolf Breslauer, prisoner, following the order of the Camp
Commander Gemmeker,” and he informs us that between 1943 and 1945,
120,000 people went from Westerbork to the death camps. Sequences of
footage from other home movies intervene before the film returns to footage
made famous—or infamous—by Alain Resnais in Night and Fog: at Wester-
bork several hundred Jews are herded into boxcars under the observation of
Nazi officers in handsome, form-fitting uniforms and sleek, black boots,
accompanied by equally sleek and handsome Doberman Pinchers. The final
shot of the train leaving the station fades slowly to white, as if the train were
disappearing into a mist not unlike the mist on the Zuiderzee at the beginning
and end of the film. In addition to its thematic significance, the fade to a
misty white has a formal, aesthetic function. From this point to the end of the
film, the fades between sequences are to white, not to black, as has usually
(but not always) been the case earlier in the film. With this formal device,
Forgács subtly prepares us for the film’s approaching conclusion.
Evidence of the persecution of Jews and the Nazification of much of
Europe appears in a number of other home movies. A Hungarian Jewish
work crew marches in formation and digs ditches; Jews in city streets wear
yellow stars on their coats; in Utrecht, “Dankt Adolf Hitler” is painted on a
wall and “Jood” painted in large letters on a shop window; over shots of
Prague’s Old Town in winter Joseph Goebbels declares, “The complete dis-
connection of the Jewry is not a question of morals, but a question of the
security of the state”; guard towers loom over a concentration camp in Plas-
zow, Poland (filmed with a hidden camera by Tadeus Franszyn, a member of
a Polish resistance group); Dutch Nazis in full uniform frolic on a beach in
Holland; in Breslau, Germany, robust young women of the German Labour
Front jog in tight formation; in Bure, Belgium, German soldiers pile confis-
cated bicycles on the back of a truck; in Lille, France, German soldiers and
civilians mix in a narrow, crowded street; a home movie’s original title,
Return of Our Glorious Troops, precedes shots of crowds of civilians giving
the fascist salute as soldiers parade through the center of Vienna; in Paris, a
Wehrmacht officer bounds down the otherwise deserted steps of Sacre Coeur
accompanied by the synchronized sound of boots hitting stone steps; in Ath-
ens, the Nazi flag flies above the Acropolis, people wait in line for food,
 “How It Was Then” 85

emaciated men lie on hospital beds, crowds march with banners declaring
“NO MORE EXECUTIONS!” “FREEDOM OR DEATH!” and are fired
upon by German troops.
The Athens footage (shot at great personal risk by an Athenian business-
man, Angelos Papanastassiou 6), the Westerbork footage, and the footage
from Poland chronicling the punishment of seventeen-year-old Maria and
eighteen-year-old Georg most vividly illustrate the suffering inflicted on vic-
tims of “the unknown war,” but because of when and where the film’s home
movies were made, all of them are pregnant with historical significance and
emotional impact. Given the depth of meaning history has accorded them,
one might ask, couldn’t they just be shown in their original form? What
justifies the formal devices Forgács applies to the home movies he appropri-
ates for his own film?

CONTEXTUALIZING “OPEN TEXTS”

One answer to that question is suggested by Patricia Zimmermann’s descrip-

tion of amateur film as “a text that defies traditional textual analysis of filmic
form because it is an open text that can only be completed by historical
contextualization” (Zimmerman 2001, 111). In Meanwhile Somewhere . . .
Forgács provides that contextualization. At the same time, he invests his
work with an aesthetic grounding and formal unity not found in the original
home movie footage. He offers an original, creative analysis of “open texts”
made by people who, as Forgács has said, “didn’t realize that they were
recording so many other things that would be important for me, for us today”
(Boyle 2001, 9). His approach encourages us to see more—literally and
conceptually—than a projection of the individual home movies in their origi-
nal form would allow. Or, as Forgács has put it, “I try to see the unseen, to
de- and reconstruct the human past through ephemeral private movies”
(Forgács 2008, 47).
The process of historical contextualization begins with supplying dates
and place names—“Prague 1940,” “Occupied Poland 1941,” “Vienna 1941,”
“Breslau, Germany 1942,” “Lille, France 1943”—and identifying, when pos-
sible, who is being filmed and where—the Govaert family and the Drugman
family in Belgium, the Svoboda family in Poland, the Apfelthaler father and
son in Vienna, Marie Olga Kubisková and her brother Petr in Czechoslova-
kia. This sort of contextualization also includes information about special
circumstances of filming—a member of the Polish resistance filming the
Plaszow concentration camp with a hidden camera, an Athenian businessman
secretly filming scenes of the German occupation of his city, a prisoner
86 William C. Wees

filming activities at the Westerbork concentration camp on orders of the

camp’s commander.
While such factual information is useful (Forgács would probably insist it
is essential), a richer, deeper historical contextualization results from
Forgács’s use of montage to place images of a familiar, family-centered life
enjoyed by the European bourgeoisie in the context of images of the abnor-
mal, unfamiliar effects of war’s intrusion into public life. The former suggest
life goes on as always, the latter suggest it does not. Through his montage,
Forgács asks us to understand and evaluate each view in the context of the
other, and as the film progresses, the absence of the war in the domestic
home movies increasingly becomes—for us, if not for the participants—a
powerful presence. It becomes impossible to look at even the most innocent
and playful scenes of everyday family life without an awareness of what else
was going on in a European society transformed by war. By contextualizing
images of private lives and public events, domestic tranquility and social
unrest, nurturing family relationships and political scapegoating and persecu-
tion, Forgács challenges traditional assumptions about the guilt or innocence,
resistance or collaboration, privileges and deprivations, and, indeed, the hap-
piness or unhappiness of millions of people in wartime Europe. As viewers,
we become intellectually and emotionally engaged with the contradictions
and ironies of the historical context forged by Forgács’s montage.
At the same time, the film’s soundtrack provides a subtler form of contex-
tualization in which the viewer’s response to Forgács’s manipulation of
sound and image becomes a crucial factor. Tibor Szemző’s quiet, contempla-
tive music and the occasional, brief insertions of synchronized sound effects
help to establish a relationship between the viewer and the film that is both
appreciative and critical, involved and distanced. As Forgács has explained,

The soundtrack is also a part of getting near and getting far from the screen. And
that’s how the music and the sound effects work. Sometimes it’s alienating and
sometime it is very meditative, and you don’t know where you are. It’s part of a bad
dream. Or sometimes you hear this very concrete voice or noise, the noise of the fire
or the noise of the steps [of the Wehrmacht officer at Sacre Coeur], and then it pulls
you back from this abstract level.

In effect, Forgács endorses and expands upon Zimmerman’s call for “histori-
cal contextualization” of “open texts” when he adds, “I would say this is a
contextual art, that the meaning comes out of the context where it appears. It
can be an abstract sound, it can be an image, it can be any layer of the piece”
(Boyle 2001, 4).
Szemző’s music works in tandem with the slowed-down movement pro-
duced by step printing the original footage. Together they introduce a subtle,
underlying rhythm or pulse that implicitly brings the diverse activities and
events recorded in the home movies into the same affective and aesthetic
 “How It Was Then” 87

context. They influence how we feel about what we are seeing, while also
contributing to the formal unity of the work as a whole. I am suggesting, in
other words, that in Meanwhile Somewhere . . . contextualizing open texts
involves more than bringing out the historical implications of the home mo-
vies’ visual content; it also provides the means for eliciting intellectual and
emotional engagement with those texts—whether regarded individually or as
part of a multi-faceted totality. It is unlikely that anything like that richness
of reception would result from a screening of the home movies as they were
originally shot—and seen by at least some of their participants.
In addition to their aesthetic contribution, the formal techniques Forgács
employs suggest a moral imperative that is given its most powerful visual
representation in his frequent practice of ending a shot with a freeze-frame of
someone looking directly at the camera. In our perceptual/psychological po-
sition as viewers, the effect is of that person looking at us. It is a look that
implicates us and implicitly challenges us to reflect upon where we stand in
relation to what’s happening on screen. Commenting on “home-movie ac-
tors’ gazing out of their movies,” Forgács writes, “They look out of the ‘local
time’ of the filmmaking moment into our ‘present time’” (Forgács 2008, 53).
The crucial issue becomes, therefore, not only “how it was then,” but how it
seems to us now.

CODA: WITTGENSTEIN TRACTATUS

“If you look at my Wittgenstein Tractatus,” Forgács remarks during a

lengthy interview with Scott MacDonald, “you’ll understand the background
for the structure of Meanwhile Somewhere . . .” (MacDonald 2005, 313). No
elaboration on this rather enigmatic comment follows, but one can speculate
that Forgács’s Wittgenstein Tractatus, made two years before Meanwhile
Somewhere . . ., was a kind of trial run for placing recycled home movies
within a structure markedly different from that of Forgács’s earlier, family-
oriented chronicles like The Bartos Family and The Diary of Mr. N (1990)
and novella-like investigations of personal relationships among a few indi-
viduals, as in Dual and Jenö and Either–Or (both from 1989). In those
works, the footage is organized chronologically and accompanied by bio-
graphical and historical information. Furthermore, most—if not all—of the
footage comes from the camera of one person, who is identified along with
many of the places and principal actors included in the original home movies.
Nothing like that appears in Wittgenstein Tractatus. Although, like Mean-
while Somewhere . . ., the footage comes from a number of different home
movies, we are not told when, where, or by whom it was shot—nor, for that
matter, why it was selected for inclusion in this particular film. Instead,
88 William C. Wees

quotations from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Culture

and Value (in the form of visual text in Hungarian and English and the
filmmaker’s voice-over in English) accompany Forgács’s selection of home-
movie footage. The absence of information about the provenance and bio-
graphical or historical relevance of the footage not only distinguishes Witt-
genstein Tractatus from the earlier works mentioned above, but also from
Meanwhile Somewhere . . .. Unanchored in specific times and places, the
home movies in Wittgenstein Tractatus remain “open texts,” without histori-
cal, political, or cultural contextualization. Internal evidence—clothes, hair
styles, home furnishings, modes of transportation, rural and urban locations,
and other material signifiers—allow us to construct provisional contexts for
the images on the screen, but our reading of the images is guess work and
always subject to revision. Forgács reminds us of that interpretive instability
when he quotes proposition 5.634 of the Tractatus: “Everything we see could
be otherwise. Everything we can describe could also be otherwise.” 7 Of
course, one could argue that the quotations from Wittgenstein supply a con-
text for the home movies, but it is a problematic context, at best. 8 Certainly,
it is not the kind of “historical contextualization” of home movies that Patri-
cia Zimmermann calls for—and Forgács assiduously provides in Meanwhile
Somewhere . . ..
If “the background for the structure of Meanwhile Somewhere . . .” is not
in the relationship of home movie footage to accompanying visual and spok-
en text in Wittgenstein Tractatus, where else might it be found? I suggest
looking at the formal devices Forgács employs to lend a sense of coherence
to the film’s disparate fragments of anonymous home-movies. With skillful
montage, he fits unrelated home-movie images into an overall structure sup-
ported by visual associations, comparisons and contrasts, and ironic juxtapo-
sitions. He sets the film in motion with a shot of the turning wheel of a farm
cart accompanied by the opening proposition of the Tractatus: “The world is
everything that is the case,” 9 he brings the film to a halt with a shot of a man
sitting down at an outdoor café table, pushing his hat back, then tipping it
forward and blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke out of the side of his mouth.
This last shot is accompanied by the Tractatus’s last and best-known propo-
sition: “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” 10 Primitive
modes of transportation at the beginning of the film—a horse-drawn cart
rolling along a muddy road, a man rowing a boat, another man rowing a
small ferry—are succeeded in later shots by trains, an airplane, and, as the
film approaches its conclusion, trams, city traffic, and sleek 1930s automo-
biles with their stylishly dressed passengers. Thus, images of rough, pre-
modern rural life open the film, and images of modern city life close it.
Within this temporal/spatial structure Forgács brings together—on a
much smaller scale than that of Meanwhile Somewhere . . .—a cross-section
of social strata and everyday life in Central Europe from (I’m guessing here)
 “How It Was Then” 89

the 1930s to the 1950s. In the process, he prompts us to recognize associa-

tions, resonances, and imaginative connections between images taken from
different home movies shot at different times and in different places. We see,
for example, well-dressed young men and women on a country outing danc-
ing in a circle and, later in the film, poorly dressed, bare-footed Gypsy
women dancing with their arms on each others’ shoulders. This “dance mo-
tif” also includes a slightly portly man in shirt and tie frenetically leaping
about in a manic ballet (which Forgács runs forward, then backward, then
forward again), as well as two young girls (in badly degraded footage) danc-
ing on a small stage (a grade school recital?), and an older and a younger
woman (sisters? mother and daughter?) valiantly attempting to do the
“twist.” On a grimmer note, we see a pig and, later, a rabbit in their death
throes, and in the film’s oddest, most arresting moment, a man in a dinner
jacket pulls a pistol out of his pocket and fires it at someone or something
off-screen. As the puff of smoke emerges from the gun’s barrel, a startled
woman seated next to him turns toward the camera with a horrified expres-
sion on her face, at which point Forgács “un-does” the event by running the
footage in reverse. He leaves it to our imaginations to create a surreal juxta-
position of this scene with the dying pig and rabbit.
In fact, with the assistance of Forgács’s structuring devices, an alert view-
er can imaginatively create meaningful contexts for most of the home-movie
footage in Wittgenstein Tractatus. That contextualization, however, will be
more poetic than historical. If the latter predominates in Meanwhile Some-
where . . ., that film’s impact depends, in large measure, on the lessons
Forgács learned while devising the structure of Wittgenstein Tractatus.

NOTES

1. Earlier, shorter versions of this essay have been presented as a paper at the annual
conference of the Film Studies Association of Canada (2006) and published in Spanish in La
casa abierta: El cine doméstia y sus reciclajes conteomporáneos, Efrén Cuevas, ed. (Madrid:
Colección Textos Documenta, Ocho y Medio, 2010), and in English in the online journal Jump
Cut 52 (Summer 2010).
2. Abigail Child, notes on The Future Is Behind You, included with a video copy of the
film.
3. Abigail Child, e-mail to the author, 5 November 2004. In the same e-mail she offers the
work of the novelist W. G. Sebald as a precedent for the merging of fiction and fact in her film.
4. Alan Berliner, Filmakers’ Cooperative Catalogue No. 7, 31.
5. As Forgács has explained (Boyle 2001, 9), this is an example of necessity being the
mother of invention. Forgács used these inserts to cover up the logo of the Warsaw Film
Archive, which occupied the same corner of the frame in the footage the archive provided for
Forgács’s use.
6. Footage from Angelos Papanastassiou’s home movies provided the material for
Forgács’s Angelos’ Film (1999).
7. This is Forgács’s English translation of proposition 5.634. The proposition is translated
in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuin-
90 William C. Wees

ness (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001) as, “Whatever we see could be other
than it is. Whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is.”
8. The same might be said of the relationship between the quotations from Wittgenstein
and Forgács’s own writing in his essay “Wittgenstein Tractatus: Personal Reflections on Home
Movies” (see note 17). Despite its title, the essay contains no specific references to his film
Wittgenstein Tractatus.
9. In Pears and McGuinness’s translation: “The world is all that is the case,” 5.
10. In Pears and McGuinness’s translation: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over
in silence,” 89.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berliner, Alan. Filmakers’ Cooperative Catalogue No. 7, 31.

Boyle, Deirdre. “Meanwhile Somewhere . . . A Discussion with Péter Forgács,” Immediacy: A
Forum for the Discussion of Media and Culture, www.nsu.newschool.edu/Immediacy/
Past%20Immediacy/public_html/memory/2001/Forgacs/forgacs.html (accessed 17 May
2006)(link discontinued).
Child, Abigail. Notes on The Future Is Behind You, included with a video copy of the film.
———. E-mail to the author, 5 November 2004.
Forgács, Péter. “Wittgenstein Tractatus: Personal Reflections on Home Movies.” Pp. 47–56 in
Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman, eds, Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in
Histories and Memories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Ishizuka, Karen L., and Patricia Zimmerman, Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histo-
ries and Memories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
MacDonald, Scott. “Péter Forgács,” A Critical Cinema 4. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuin-
ness. London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001.
Zimmermann, Patricia. “Morphing History into Histories: From Amateur Films to the Archive
of the Future.” The Moving Image 1.1 (2001).

FILMOGRAPHY

Berliner, Alan. The Family Album. USA, 1987.

Child, Abigail. The Future Is Behind You. USA, 2004.
Forgács, Péter. The Bartos Family. Hungary, 1988.
———. Wittgenstein Tractatus (co-directed with Tibor Szemző). Hungary, 1992.
———. Meanwhile Somewhere . . .. Hungary, 1994.
———. Free Fall. Hungary, 1996.
———. The Maelstrom. 1997.
 Chapter Six

Meaning through Pictures: Péter

Forgács and Ludwig Wittgenstein
Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Tractatus), with its

pithy aphorisms, dark sayings, austere logical architecture, and uncompro-
mising seriousness, has iconic status in European and North American cul-
ture and become for better or worse a subject for artistic exploration. Artists
have taken advantage of it in various ways with more than a few of its
remarks turning up in paintings and other works of art. Moreover, it has
served as the source for theater pieces, provided the libretto for a song cycle,
even an opera. And it has figured as the subject or pretext for a film or two.
Perhaps the most successful attempt to deal with the substance of Witt-
genstein’s text in film, if not any medium, is Wittgenstein Tractatus, a film
by the Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács. Forgács does not merely cite
Wittgenstein’s words or invoke them to give his work credibility. He probes
them and tries to bring out what he takes to be important aspects of Wittgen-
stein’s vision. Wittgenstein wanted his ideas to be pondered, worked
through, developed, improved on, and Forgács does just this. He does some-
thing creative of his own rather than regurgitate what Wittgenstein says and
avoids the trap, which Wittgenstein warned against, of adopting his vocabu-
lary and parroting his thoughts. Viewing his film one sees some of the
strengths and weaknesses of the Tractatus—even when Forgács gets Witt-
genstein wrong. The film sheds light on Wittgenstein’s book while raising
questions about it. And in the process it clarifies the relationship between
philosophy and film.
Before seeing Forgács’s film one might wonder what a film of the Tracta-
tus might look like and even doubt, like Alfred Nordmann (2005, 128), that
such a film could be made at all. It is not hard to envision a film about the

91
92 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

Tractatus—Derek Jarman’s imaginative fictional “biographical/historical”

attempt comes to mind. But a film of the Tractatus is another matter. But
then again there is reason to think that such a film could be made. The
Tractatus invites filmic treatment if only because it is about the nature and
limits of language, something that lends itself to being shown. Insofar as the
Tractatus focuses on the relation of language to the world and treats mean-
ingful propositions as pictures of how things are in the world, it would seem
open to treatment in film. In particular it is tempting to think that major
themes of the Tractatus—the idea that “a picture is a model of reality” (2.12)
and “in a picture the elements of the picture stand for the objects” (2.131), for
instance—should be showable. It may even seem fitting that a book in which
meaning construed as pictorial representation is made into a film embodying
a philosophy of language.

WITTGENSTEIN TRACTATUS, THE FILM

Wittgenstein Tractatus is an austere avant-garde film comprising a selection

of scenes drawn from Forgács’s archive of home movies, material he has
been collecting for many years (it comes mainly from the late 1930s through
the early 1960s). Here scenes of everyday life, some more commonplace than
others, are coupled with remarks from the Tractatus, sometimes as a counter-
point, sometimes as an illustration, sometimes as both. The found material
functions as a parallel “text,” sometimes directly keyed to Wittgenstein’s text
but most often resonating with it.
The film itself comprises seven “movements,” each associated with a
remark from the seven sections of the Tractatus. Forgács quotes the first and
last propositions of the work along with important remarks from the other
five sections. Thus the first movement pivots on the first proposition of the
Tractatus—“The world is everything that is the case.” The second on 2.02:
“The object is simple.” The third on the second sentence of 3.02: “What is
thinkable is also possible.” The fourth on 4.121: “That which mirrors itself in
language, language cannot represent.” The fifth on 5.6: “The limits of my
language mean the limits of my world.” The sixth on the second sentence of
6.5: “The riddle does not exist.” And the last on proposition 7: “Whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Besides appearing at the bottom of the screen in Hungarian and English,
as the film proceeds these seven phrases are intoned in both languages—the
English with a Hungarian accent. This serves the double purpose of structur-
ing the film and introducing Wittgenstein’s text. We find ourselves being led,
as in the book, from the nature of the world to the nature of language and
from facts to values. Moreover, along with the seven “title”-quotations,
 Meaning through Pictures 93

Forgács includes other quotations from the Tractatus, albeit sparingly, to

elaborate on or launch a related theme. Wittgenstein’s name does not appear
at the top of the screen in these “non-title” quotations. It appears only when a
new movement is announced.
While the main remarks that Forgács quotes from Wittgenstein come
from the Tractatus, he also includes, perhaps surprisingly (and disconcerting-
ly to the purist), remarks from Wittgenstein’s notebooks and private diaries
from the 1930s to the 1940s. The insertion of these quotations, which are
woven into the text or spoken (and often both), is not fortuitous. They link
the private and the personal with the philosophical as well as add substance
to the main quotations. And they contribute to the interest of the film—
Forgács includes especially striking remarks of Wittgenstein’s—while en-
hancing its richness as a work of philosophical importance.
Forgács shows that the subject is Ludwig Wittgenstein (and the Tracta-
tus) not only in his choice of title and quotations but also by including several
pictures of Wittgenstein (these come from late in his life as well as from the
period of the Tractatus, as we might expect). There is an often-reproduced
photograph of him in a plaque at the top left of the screen at the start of the
film and from time to time when the titles are being spoken. In the first
movement we catch a glimpse of a photograph of him rowing a boat, and a
bit later we are face to face with a picture of him, apparently from the 1930s,
staring intently off into the distance. In the second movement on the left hand
side of the screen there is a picture of Wittgenstein in profile looking on
while a boy in one of the home movies is playing in the backyard. In the third
movement, there is a similarly placed but somewhat elevated side shot of a
middle-aged Wittgenstein, this time looking on as skiers in another home
movie make their way down a mountain. In the fourth movement, a scene of
a young soldier embracing his mother and saying farewell is juxtaposed with
a picture of the young Wittgenstein in uniform from his time in the Austro-
Hungarian Army in the First World War. This time, as Wittgenstein is ob-
serving the farewell, his picture is placed on the right side of the screen.
(Only this picture and the one of Wittgenstein in a rowing boat come from
years during which Wittgenstein was working on material that served as the
basis of the Tractatus. The other photographs are from the “transitional”
period of the early 1930s and yet others from the late 1940s.) Finally in the
fifth movement, after scenes of violence, we are faced with a picture of the
older Wittgenstein with a wrinkled forehead and sad eyes (a photograph by
his friend Ben Richards). There are no photographs of him in movements 6
and 7.
There are also other elements worked into the film. Along with the home
movies, quotations and photographs of Wittgenstein, Forgács includes dia-
grams, sketch maps, collages, animation (pages are torn to signal the end of
one movement and the beginning of the next), a musical score, even Wittgen-
94 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

stein’s signature. All this is complemented by a remarkable score composed

by Tibor Szemző, Forgács’s longtime collaborator. Like the film itself
Szemző’s score is experimental—it is not program music or “film music” but
a significant addition. It too resonates with the moving images and provides
yet another layer of meaning. While these elements add to the power of the
film, they also bring out an important aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.
Both film and philosophy are nothing if not multi-layered, and one is re-
minded of Wittgenstein’s observation in the Preface of the Philosophical
Investigations (Investigations) about his having “to travel over a wide field
of thought criss-cross in every direction.” Forgács likewise ranges over a
large area back and forth.

WITTGENSTEIN TRACTATUS: THE SEVEN MOVEMENTS

The film starts with scenes of a horse drawing a wagon across a bridge, a
man tilling a field, another man rowing a boat, a pig being kicked by a shiny
boot, a man doing a hand-stand and walking up and down, and a group in the
countryside playing ring around the roses. These scenes are accompanied by
various remarks. Thus as the pig writhes in agony, we hear and read: “No cry
of torment can be greater than the cry of one man. Or again, no torment can
be greater than what a single human being may suffer.” (The words “one”
and “single” are italicized and in green.) Moreover, when a pair of people in
the circle is singled out, we hear: “A man is capable of infinite torment
therefore, and so too he can stand in need of infinite help” (Culture and
Value, 45). And when the camera focuses on different facial expressions of
the individual members of the group, we hear: “How hard I find it to see
what’s right in front of my eyes!” (CV 39). Finally, at the end of the chapter,
we hear again: “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”
At the start of the second movement a woman smiles as she is running
toward us. Then the same woman appears with a large, lively dog. This is
followed by scenes of a nude boy in a sandbox and a tub in the backyard of a
house, frolicking with the same large dog. Next, we see a man jumping about
and flapping his arms. Such happy scenes are suddenly upturned by a man
saying in English: “Only a very unhappy man has the right to pity someone
else” (CV 46). The same scene will be repeated later accompanied by a
woman’s voice echoing in Hungarian the word “to pity” (szánakozni). In this
part of the film more propositions of the Tractatus are woven in. First, “The
existence and non-existence of the [atomic] facts is reality” (2.06), “A picture
is a model of reality” (2.12), then, “What a picture represents is its sense”
(2.221), and then as the man with the outstretched hand dances (perhaps to
caution us not to jump to conclusions), “It can not be discovered from the
 Meaning through Pictures 95

picture alone whether it is true or false” (2.224). The movement finishes with
a woman joining hands with a man and bounding along while the voice-over
repeats: “The object is simple.”
The third movement begins with scenes of a group of friends on a ski trip.
We see them, bathed in sunlight, putting on lotion and sunbathing (they look
very strange in their sunglasses). This is followed by one skier, hamming it
up for the camera, putting a handful of snow in his mouth and eating it as the
voice-over reads out another fragment from Culture and Value: “It is impor-
tant for our view of things that someone may feel concerning certain people
that their inner life will always be a mystery to him. That he will never
understand them” (74e). A hand-drawn map is next shown superimposed on
skiers, then a scene of skiers in the distance forming a human chain. Sharply
contrasting pictures of two train stations follow. At one cheerful skiers board
a train with their equipment, at the other sad-looking people stand and wait as
uniformed guards mill about. We hear:

I just took some apples out of a paper bag where they had been lying for a long time.
I had to cut half off many of them and throw them away. Afterwards when I was
copying out a sentence I had written, the second half of which was bad, I at once
saw it as a half rotten apple. . . . Is there something feminine about this way of
thinking?” (CV 31)

We sense the movement is about to end when we see a woman in a fur coat in
the woods and hear the second sentence of proposition 3.02 of the Tractatus
again: “What is thinkable is also possible.”
The fourth movement begins with scenes of a military airplane zooming
over a field and another railway scene, one in which a soldier leaves his
mother and boards a train, which he is apparently in charge of. This scene
paves the way to an image of the backside of a woman in a bathing suit while
the voice-over informs us that “What can be shown cannot be said” (Tracta-
tus 4.1212). This in turn is followed by images of a lake and then a castle.
We see formally dressed men and women conforming to social protocol and
rituals. As they are introduced to one another and politely converse, the
voice-over comments: “Language disguises the thought; so that from the
external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they
clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite
another object than to let the form of the body be recognized” (Tractatus
4.002, second part). We next see a couple whom we recognize from the party
being driven away in a carriage. The man, a revolver in hand, fires shots at an
unseen target to the horror of the woman. “If you offer a sacrifice and are
pleased with yourself about it, both you and your sacrifice will be cursed.
The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled” (CV 26). And then the female
voice chiming in: “your sacrifice will be cursed” in Hungarian. This is per-
96 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

haps meant as a comment on the next scene, a repetition of the images of the
pig on the ground writhing in agony. This time, however, the pig is kicked
both by a polished military boot and well-worn shoes. “The horrors of hell,”
we are told, “can be experienced within a single day; that’s plenty of time”
(CV 26).
Movement five opens with the scene of a wounded hare on its stomach
flopping around in a circle with the voice-over intoning: “The limits of my
language mean the limits of my world” (Tractatus 5.6), “The world and life
are one” (5.621), “We cannot think what we cannot think; and what we
cannot think we cannot say either” (last sentence of 5.61). Then, as if ama-
teur anthropologists with cameras in hand, we visit a village of people living
in straw huts. We see a visitor entering a hut and soon afterward women,
young and old, in folk outfits, with babies and children, coming out. At first
timid, the women are coaxed by a male elder to dance. The women and the
children form a line and, with the elder male dancing solo, the women per-
form with considerable gusto a folkdance. Now the voice-over says: “I am
the world. (The microcosm)” (5.63), and continues in a melancholic tone:
“Whatever we see could be other than it is. Whatever we can describe at all
could be other than it is” (5. 634). Then, as the women whirl and twirl, the
male elder comes into the foreground, doing a dignified but simple dance,
and we hear: “Thinking too has a time for ploughing and a time for gathering
the harvest” (CV 28). Now the scene shifts. We see an attractive woman in a
white bathing suit wading and jumping with joy in the pool of what seems
like a mansion or resort. She plays to the camera as the voice declares: “The
spring which flows gently and limpidly in the Gospels seems to have froth on
it in Paul’s Epistles” (CV 30). This fragment is repeated a little later with the
female voice from before echoing in Hungarian the last words “froth on it in
Paul’s Epistles.” The refrain, “The limits of my language mean the limits of
my world” (Tractatus 5.6), brings the movement to a close and we see
firemen dousing a fire.
Movement six begins with the profile of a topless woman at a sewing
machine mending a blouse, while a man is doing leg-lifts on the floor. We
hear: “The general form of a truth-function is . . . ” (Tractatus 6). The same
man, now wearing a shirt and a cardigan, then takes a flower from a vase,
smells it, and throws up his hands as if to say: “Explain that!” This is
accompanied by a ringing declaration—“For an answer which cannot be
expressed the question too cannot be expressed” (6.5)—along with a shot of
the same middle-aged man and woman changing the bedsheets. The man
undresses, with his garments being taken one by one by the woman, and he
puts on his nightshirt and gets into bed. A newspaper is tossed on the bed and
he starts reading it while the voice-over chimes in with, “That the sun will
rise tomorrow is an hypothesis” (6. 36311) and “The sense of the world must
lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything
 Meaning through Pictures 97

happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would

be of no value” (6.41). Here yet again the harmonious female voice-over
repeats in Hungarian the final words of the remark (és akkor nem lenne
érték). A touch of quiet humor about the sex to come follows. The middle-
aged nude woman gets on top of the man and, covering her face with her
arms from the camera, moves up and down with her breasts heaving, while
the voice-over opines, “The world is independent of my will” (6.373),
“Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through” (6.4311), and “The
solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem”
(6.521). We then have a glimpse of a ping-pong match on television and, to
the amusement of the man in the cardigan, some seconds of his partner/
caretaker and her woman friend joyfully doing the twist. “There is indeed the
inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical” (6.522). The episode ends
with the refrain, “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is” (6.44).
The seventh and final movement opens with a boy and a girl taking turns
on stage. The boy is in a sailor’s uniform and the girl in a top hat. The boy
drinks a glass of juice and we hear, “As we get old, problems slip from our
fingers again, as they used to when we were young” (CV 40). This is fol-
lowed by scenes of Budapest workers doing road repairs, a bridge spanning
the Danube, and an elegant woman getting into a taxi. “You can’t build
clouds. And that’s why the future you dream of never comes true” (CV 41).
Next a man is seen rowing a boat as an official map is redrawn and we hear,
“What you are regarding as a gift is a problem for you to solve” (CV 43).
Another taxi with a “free” sign appears and the voice-over notes, “A confes-
sion has to be a part of your new life” (CV 18). This triggers a striking image
of a collapsed horse being helped up and afterward an image of a masked
man in black with a placard inscribed “The invisible man returns,” a walking
advertisement for H. G. Wells’s film. Finally, we see a man at a table of an
outside café looking appreciatively at everything, yet at nothing in particular.
He tips his hat and the voice-over repeats: “Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent.”

FORGÁCS’S FILM AS PHILOSOPHY: SOME OBJECTIONS

Forgács’s use of quotations will strike some purists as problematic. He

dodges around, citing quotations not only from the Tractatus but also from
Culture and Value, which were penned in the 1930s and 1940s. This might
lead some people to think the early and later philosophies are more of a piece
than they are. It does, however, echo Wittgenstein’s practice, which was to
think things through from scratch. By placing the personal alongside the
philosophical, Forgács reminds us that however different the letter of the
98 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

later philosophy may be from the earlier philosophy, it is importantly similar

in spirit. For Wittgenstein, it should not be forgotten, “Working in philoso-
phy—like work in architecture in many respects—is really more a working
on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s own way of seeing things.
(And what one expects of them)” (CV 16).
Some viewers will also complain about what they see as pointless repeti-
tion. For instance, in the second movement the proposition “The object is
simple” is repeated several times, as is “The limits of my language mean the
limits of my world” and “No cry of torment can be greater than the cry of one
man.” And similarly Forgács repeats images—the image of the writhing pig
for instance. But while such redundancies may seem out of keeping with the
minimalism of the Tractatus, they are not superfluous. When the proposition
“The object is simple” is repeated, each time the context is different and the
proposition itself takes on different shades of meaning: logical (the logical
structure of the world), ethical (the goal of the exercise of living), aesthetic/
ascetic (the style and mode of living and working).
What is more, Wittgenstein himself, even in the Tractatus, is hardly
averse to repetition. For example he says, “The world is the totality of
facts. . . . The world is determined by the facts” (1.1–1.11) and “Mathematics
is a logical method. . . . Mathematics is a method of logic” (6.2 and 6.234).
Such repetition, moreover, throws light on an often-forgotten Tractarian
proposition: “In philosophy the question ‘Why do we really use that word or
that proposition?’ constantly leads to valuable results” (6.211). And it antici-
pates too Wittgenstein’s later theme of meaning as use. In fact he thinks
repetition can be necessary. As he says about music, “‘The repeat is neces-
sary.’ In what respect is it necessary? Well, sing it, and you will see that it is
only the repeat that gives it its tremendous power” (CV 52). Similarly
Forgács’s use of repeats makes his blend of images and quotes more memor-
able, gives them more impact.
Some scholars prefer David Pears and Brian McGuinness’s translation of
the Tractatus and may object to Forgács’s use of the C. K. Ogden translation
for his script and voice-overs. But Forgács’s choice of the Ogden makes
good sense. Leaving aside the fact that Wittgenstein vetted it, it is arguably
aesthetically superior. The style and rhythm of the language is closer in many
respects to the original German, and we imagine Forgács would have chosen
to quote Culture and Value in the 1980 edition rather than, had it been
available to him, the revised 1998 edition. As in the case of the Tractatus he
would doubtless have preferred Peter Winch’s more poetic translation.
Some other features of the film may for different reasons also cause
concern, the voice-overs especially. The voice is a distant, melancholic male
voice, speaking in English and Hungarian, and the “philosophical” proposi-
tions of the Tractatus are read with the same inflection as the “personal”
remarks from Culture and Value. This is disturbing enough but there is also
 Meaning through Pictures 99

the fact that he utters some of the propositions in a way that distort their
meaning. Thus when reading the first crucial proposition of the Tractatus—
“The world is everything that is the case”—he reads it as two sentences
rather than as a single sentence. We hear: “The world is everything . . . that is
the case.” This is a big difference (and may well have been intentional) since
it presents Wittgenstein as both expressing a true thought about the world
and, more controversially, asserting a necessary proposition, something that
according to the Tractatus is nonsensical. In any event Forgács goes beyond
Wittgenstein’s actual words and may even be heard as anticipating a theme
of the later Wittgenstein, namely, “What has to be accepted, the given, is—so
one could say—forms of life” (Investigations, p. 192).
These objections make a crucial assumption about film and philosophy—
that a film like Wittgenstein Tractatus should inform people of the facts of
Wittgenstein’s life as well as illustrate his early philosophy. Here the thought
would be that, like a good biography, a cinematic recreation of Wittgen-
stein’s thought and times should draw us in and stimulate us to read his
works. Indeed the expectation would seem to be that Forgács’s film should
instruct as well as illustrate. On such an “instrumental” conception, films
about philosophy should function as handmaidens rather than as autonomous
works.
If we go along with this assumption about the relationship between
Forgács’s film and philosophy, it may be legitimately objected that the film-
maker has misunderstood the philosophy. Even granting that Wittgenstein is
difficult to interpret and there sometimes seems to be as many interpretations
of the Tractatus as there are interpreters, it might still be insisted that Forgács
attributes views to Wittgenstein that he never expressed, even ones he repu-
diated. One important case in point would be Forgács’s conception of “pic-
ture,” a conception that is much less subtle than Wittgenstein’s. In the Trac-
tatus pictures are understood in a very broad sense to cover things we would
not normally regard as pictures. They are not understood, as Forgács seems
to understand them, literally.
Related to this is Forgács’s apparent misunderstanding of pictures as
taking care of themselves, as self-sufficient and not requiring a background
of “use.” This is objectionable if only because in the Tractatus itself Wittgen-
stein talks about application. He takes pictures to be pictures only given an
associated use (even in Notebooks 1914–1916 we find him saying, “The way
in which language signifies is mirrored in its use” [p. 82, dated 11.9.16]).
However, Forgács is hardly alone in missing this point. It is regularly over-
looked by philosophers and it has to be said that Wittgenstein himself often
gives the impression that he thinks that pictures picture on their own (without
help from the outside). In fact Forgács may be seen as providing, perhaps
unwittingly, support for the more sophisticated account of pictures in the
Tractatus and what we find in the Investigations even as he grapples with the
100 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

earlier philosophy. Whatever Forgács’s intentions, Wittgenstein Tractatus

plays the interesting role of showing that a common view about the Tractatus
is wrong, it being possible to read pictures in various ways, the application
and context being all-important.

HOW MOVING PICTURES MEAN

Taking Forgács to be probing Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, questions

arise about the status and role of his home movies. If they speak for them-
selves, what do they tell us? What do they show? And prior to these ques-
tions, how do pictures manage to mean at all? The idea of meaning as
pictorial representation is usually understood as suggesting the sense of a
proposition is understood the moment we grasp, in one fell swoop as it were,
the presented picture. Reading the Tractatus we often get the impression that
the early Wittgenstein thinks a picture presents how things might be without
further ado. He writes: “One name stands for one thing, and another for
another thing, and they are connected together. And so the whole—like a
living picture, presents the fact [a state of affairs]” (4.0311). Once context
and background are taken into account, however, this view of how pictures
mean gives way to the view that they are open to interpretation. Wittgenstein
himself gives a nod to this in the Tractatus when he says, “What does not get
expressed in the sign is shown by its application. What the signs conceal,
their application declares” (3.262). (Also compare the passage already men-
tioned: “In philosophy the question, ‘Why do we really use that word or that
proposition?’ repeatedly leads to valuable results” [6.211].) Of course, this
theme—that use or application is crucial—is much more to the fore in the
Investigations.
Looking at Forgács’s fragments of home movies, we see the importance
of context and historical social/cultural background for meaning. Consider,
for instance, the two railway station scenes, one in which police or paramili-
tary watch over people marked with yellow stars, the other in which a mother
waves good-bye to her soldier son as he boards a train. These scenes cannot
be understood simply by inspecting the pictures. There is no way to tell from
them whether the police in the first scene are guarding people or forcing
them to leave or what sort of job in the second scene the son is engaged in—
the transportation of cargo, prisoners, or something else. What the pictures
mean, what we see in them, how they are to be understood, is not, like the
picture itself, palpably there in the foreground. They have to be situated. The
use and context conventionally provided for them are crucial for how they
are understood. They tell us, among other things, whether the home movie is
from the Nazi or Communist periods, that the Star of David signifies a Jew,
 Meaning through Pictures 101

that the military uniforms and the trains come from the 1940/1950s, and so
on.
Similarly context and background are indispensable for understanding the
scene, earlier in the film, of folk dancing. A Martian might understand the
scene as providing a repertoire of bodily movements that Earthlings are
capable of, while a person interested in the rituals and ceremonies of exotic
tribes might wonder whether they were paid or coaxed to dance, whether
they are dancing spontaneously or in celebration of some event. And the
dance of the solitary man might be read as an expression of his joie-de-vivre
or as a performance for the camera. And yet again the man who, at the end of
the film, removes his hat may be variously regarded as simply taking it off or
as saluting someone off-screen. Evidently these pictures do not line up one-
to-one with “states of affairs.” What Wittgenstein refers to all too briefly in
the Tractatus as the “projection relation” is of the essence. (Compare 3.11:
“The method of projection is the thinking of the sense of the proposition” and
3.13: “To the proposition belongs everything which belongs to the projec-
tion; but not what is projected.”) There is no understanding “the bare picture”
itself. But to suggest the method of projection includes all possible uses or
applications of the proposition, if not false, surely deserves more scrutiny.
Forgács’s images are open to interpretation because—and to the extent
that—we see them out of context. If we were members of the group being
filmed, the range of possible interpretations would be smaller, even nonexis-
tent. This is something that Forgács himself highlights, whether consciously
or not is unclear. He detaches Wittgenstein’s remarks on pictures from their
location in the Tractatus and recontextualizes them by placing the home
movie images in the foreground. The result is that both text and image are
underdetermined and are open to multiple interpretations.
It is noteworthy too that the text from the Tractatus is projected onto the
screen before the found footage selected to accompany it. What is the signifi-
cance of this way of ordering text and image? Are the words to be regarded
as projected onto the images or the images as projected onto the words? It is
almost as if the priority of the words is preserved and their incarnation in the
moving images treated as secondary. But then again it is possible that—and
perhaps more interesting if—this dichotomy is set aside and text and image
treated as standing side by side and as working in concert. In either case, by
juxtaposing these scenes, Forgács can be viewed as criticizing, in the style of
the later Wittgenstein, the doctrine of meaning as straightforward pictorial
representation. The crude view of pictures as having or conveying meaning
fails to acknowledge the expressive potential of pictures. The viewer has to
project an interpretation onto the home movies, or better still, provide a
context for them. We do not need to be reminded, as Forgács points out in an
interview, that the found footage in his film was shot when middle-Europe
102 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

was under Fascism or Communism. The scenes at the two railway stations
will, if nothing else, jog the memory.
This suggests another way Forgács’s film draws attention to the limita-
tions of the view of pictorial representation usually attributed to the author of
the Tractatus. The scratchy and scarred surface of the home movies intro-
duces a temporal element into the world of the eternal present of the Tracta-
tus. Whereas the background required to interpret these pictures makes it
evident that the past is the past and what once could have been otherwise is
unalterable, there is in the Tractatus little place for the fact that what is over
is over and cannot be changed. This shapes, indeed is fundamental to, the
film. The genocide of Jews, Romani, homosexuals, and others is hovering in
the background. It is presented, without the slightest hint of sentimentality,
with the result that the film has a grief-stricken requiem-like atmosphere, an
atmosphere that the music compliments and the pacing reinforces. Things
that cannot be said—we might say in a Tractarian mood—are passed over in
silence. They are, as they can only be, shown.
The possibility of this sort of showing, it is important to notice, depends
on a historical/social background and our having the similar feelings toward
fellow human beings. The sense of joy tinged with loss and grief that we
experience as we watch Forgács’s home movies is possible only because we
know the history—the death-camps, ghettos, and gulags—and can empathize
with the people who suffered. Our reactions are deeper the more we project
this history onto the film and respond to the idea of a “universal” family.
Forgács’s “filmic thinking” invites us to unpack rigid versions of the say/
show dichotomy. The importance and point of what we are obliged to pass
over in silence depends on the historical background. Just as we can say a lot
about Shakespeare’s plays that is shown, not said, so we can say a lot about
Forgács’s film that is shown, not said.
In the film in particular we see something of the multiplicity of language
games on which Wittgenstein lays such stress. Forgács’s pictures function
much like those friendly-to-foreigners paperbacks produced in the late
1950s, English through Pictures, which applied the “picture-theory of mean-
ing” to language learning. (Perhaps the author of these books, none other
than C. K. Ogden, was applying lessons he took to be Tractarian.) In the
Investigations Wittgenstein uses the term “language game” to bring into
prominence the fact that “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of
a life-form,” and Forgács follows suit. His home movies remind us of what
Wittgenstein dubs the multiplicity of language games (at §23 of the Investi-
gations he lists giving orders, obeying them, reporting an event, making up a
story, then reading it, play-acting, singing catches, making a joke, construct-
ing an object from a drawing or a diagram, requesting, thanking, greeting,
and praying).
 Meaning through Pictures 103

THE ORDINARY AND THE EVERYDAY IN FORGÁCS AND

WITTGENSTEIN

The ordinary, the everyday, the banal, what is taken for granted, what is often
considered too trivial or obvious for words, play an important role in
Forgács’s film as well as in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Indeed, we see an
important affinity between the two. The “ordinary” is discernible in the “lan-
guage” of Forgács’s found footage both in what it pictures and how it figures
in the film. The film/language functions in an everyday way without pre-
tense, technical refinement, professional enhancement or metaphysical bag-
gage. Forgács’s home movies depict people working, family gatherings,
friends getting together for picnics, skiing trips, dances, and so on. They
show the things themselves and we are reminded of Wittgenstein’s remark
that “colloquial [everyday] language is a part of the human organism and is
not less complicated than it” (Tractatus 4.002).
Although in the Tractatus propositions of ordinary language are said to be
“just as they are . . . logically completely in order” (5.5563), Wittgenstein
also holds that ordinary language puts clothes on propositional thought with
the result that its sense is concealed. Recall: “Language disguises the
thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the
form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is
constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be
recognized” (4.002). “It was,” he adds, “Russell who performed the service
of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real
one” (4.0031). As he sees it at this time, the ambiguities that ordinary lan-
guage is riddled with are cleared up by filling out the statements, by putting
them in a logically more complete form. In the final analysis what counts as a
proposition depends on whether or not a sentence conforms to the general
form: “This is how things are in the world.” (This idea, evidently, takes a big
bite out of what is in “perfect logical order in our everyday language.”)
Since grammatical illusions lead to descriptive and communicative fail-
ures, we need to be on our guard and look beneath the surface grammar to the
depth grammar, to how the sentence would be expressed in the language of
logic. And likewise in the case of Forgács’s home movies. These are similar-
ly deceptive. They do not wear their meanings on their sleeves but require
interpretation. Ambiguities in the conventional language or picture have to
be cleared up despite the acknowledgment that our everyday language is in
perfect logical order. This is done through looking at the application of the
proposition/picture. There is no denying a role for application since “what
lies in [the] application, logic cannot anticipate” (5.557). For Wittgenstein,
then, “our problems are not abstract but perhaps the most concrete that there
are” (5.5563).
104 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

This conception of the status of “everyday language” will perhaps suffice

for the Tractatus, but it will not do for the role of “ordinary language” in the
Investigations or for the role of the everyday in Forgács’s film. A better view
is sketched in Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics where Wittgenstein
is reported as saying, “If I had to say what is the main mistake made by
philosophers of the present generation . . . I would say that it is when lan-
guage is looked at, what is looked at is a form of words and not the use made
of the form of words” (p. 2). If we are not to fall into this trap we must keep
in mind that “language is a characteristic part of a large group of activities—
talking, writing, travelling on a bus, meeting a man, etc.” With a few obvious
changes this also applies to Forgács’s film. The key question for Wittgen-
stein is: In what circumstances is the word, sentence, or picture actually
used? And the key question that arises when considering Forgács’s film is: In
what circumstances is his found footage being used?
Diagrams, map-sketches, drawings, and other visual aids to understand-
ing are referred to in both Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Philosophical Inves-
tigations. And in Forgács’s film “homely” diagrams and arrows are drawn on
“official” maps. Though easily overlooked, such insertions bear significantly
on how meaning (and picturing)—as well as on not how the ordinariness of
found footage—are to be understood. The idea of propositions or pictures as
representations has not been repudiated. It has been deepened. There is a
realization that pictures are disambiguated and clarified in light of their ap-
plication (and our own situations and needs). In this way, as the later Witt-
genstein stresses and Forgács hints at in his film, the use we put the picture or
map to is all important.
Another feature of such insertions is that they put a personal stamp on a
picture or map, thereby bringing out its everyday as opposed to its official or
technical use. In one scene in Forgács’s film lines are drawn to help us to
find our way and not get lost on a ski trip. In another, a scene of rowing,
arrows indicate the direction of the movement of the boat—one imagines the
home movie being shown to family and friends who ask about the boat’s
direction. At the end of the film, where a workhorse collapses, another dia-
gram is drawn with arrows, this time to indicate the best way to help the
horse get up and resume work. Thus the found footage shepherds home
words as well as pictures. It functions like a family album in which lines are
drawn for the guidance of others or even ourselves. As the later Wittgenstein
stresses, in special circumstances signposts and arrows can be interpreted
too, but we have been taught to follow them, all things being equal, in a
conventional fashion. “The sign-post is,” he writes, “in order—if, in normal
circumstances, it fulfils its purpose” (Investigations §86). And in Forgács’s
film too, the images are best regarded as “proto-phenomena,” as associated
with particular (i.e. given) language games and explanation or interpretation
is necessary only to avert misunderstanding.
 Meaning through Pictures 105

Forgács confronts us with paradigmatic scenes, stock examples of lan-

guage games as it were. Whereas the conventional movie is like an essay or a
book, the home movie, at least Forgács’s found footage, is more like a
reminder for a particular purpose and hence more akin to one of Wittgen-
stein’s philosophical comments. The later Wittgenstein says: “The work of
the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose”
(Investigations §127), and Forgács assembles images of experiences of joy
and grief to remind us of our shared humanity. He shows us fragments of
home movies that are usually shown to relatives who participated in an
adventure or excursion or suffered loss (or shown to curious friends). Of
course Forgács is very selective in his choice of footage. He does not show
any scene, just ones that are striking, that can be regarded as making a point,
that resonate with Wittgenstein’s thinking.
A home movie with its sketch-maps and arrows and diagrams is reminis-
cent too of something else Wittgenstein writes: “It is as though I had lost my
way and asked someone the way home. He says he will show me and walks
with me along a nice smooth path. This suddenly stops. And now my friend
tells me: ‘All you have to do now is find your way home from here’” (CV
46–47). We are putting our own stamp on the official map, a stamp that
shows us “the things themselves” and is an effective antidote to wild theoriz-
ing and romantic/philosophical nonsense. The traditional attitude to the ordi-
nary as rough and lacking precision, as better replaced by something more
refined and exact, is rejected as a prejudice. In the Investigations we are
urged to attend to what’s right in front of our eyes—to the multifarious ways
the expression is used—and Forgács can be seen as doing just the same.
So while these episodes in Forgács’s film square with the early Wittgen-
stein’s view of meaning as pictorial representation, they undermine it (there
is, arguably, a similar tension in the Tractatus itself). The pictures do not tell
us how they are being applied or used, a fact that is tempting to express in
terms of the distinction between surface and depth grammar. But if the idea
here is that the pictures conceal meaning because they have only surface and
no depth, it is open to an important objection, namely that the pictures are
edited together in such a way as to give them shape as well as depth. On the
one hand, by appropriating home movies and seemingly telling a story, the
film engenders illusion. On the other hand, by showing the methods of se-
lecting, mixing, and editing, it alerts us to the illusion. Here one is put in
mind of the standard reading of the Tractatus, which takes the book to
comprise a set of propositions that arm us with a “philosophy,” a philosophy
that we are told at the end is out-and-out nonsensical. But whatever the
merits of this interpretation for the Tractatus, it will not work for Forgács’s
film, which does not collapse into nonsense but brings us back to the ordi-
nary. When we “throw away the ladder” we are not left with nothing. (A
parallel way of reading the Tractatus is possible, namely that what we are
106 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

meant to throw away is the remarks of the book regarded as propositions, not
the remarks regarded as true thoughts.)
About the important issue of time there is yet another way in which
Forgács’s film comes close to and moves away from Wittgenstein’s philoso-
phy. The film’s otherworldly voice-over is occasionally reinforced by a
“look-over” as photographs of Wittgenstein are shown watching the home
movies as if from a great distance. The impression we get of the image of the
philosopher is that of a spectator viewing the passing scene from the vantage
point of eternity. Indeed, in the Tractatus Wittgenstein writes: “If by eternity
is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives
eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our
visual field is without limit” (6.4311). And the Tractatus itself may be re-
garded as having been written sub specie aeterni. This does not, however,
accord with the radical contingency of the scenes in Forgács’s film. His
home movies show changes in ways of living (changes that go hand in hand
with changes in language games). The sequence of the horse and carriage, for
instance, is followed by the appearance of streetcars. Indeed Forgács’s inter-
est in home movies is, he tells us, motivated to a considerable extent by his
interest in history and the past and differs from the work of avant-garde
documentary filmmakers who take found footage to illustrate something—a
sentence, a personal biography or an ideology, or for no particular reason at
all. And his work differs as well, he adds, from the work of filmmakers who
take the found footage out of its social, cultural, and psychological context
and “use it for their own self-expression.”
Forgács’s filmic practice differs from both approaches. He finds images
by themselves “empty,” leaving him feeling alone as if in a museum. For him
it is important to get behind the appearances. He writes:

For me there is something before and after in an image. There is one thing that
differentiates my work from theirs: the forbidden and prohibited past. Which means
that the suppressed ego, the suppressed feelings of a person are expressed in sponta-
neous diaries, in a country where the past was suppressed. . . . The meanings are
hidden and the quest for meaning means that you open up the trauma. . . . The
immense banal happiness that flows from these images [of found footage], this
boredom linked to pastimes, this discovery of lost moments—all this tells me more
than just to exhibit them as pictures on a wall. Such pictures are funny and nice—
and empty. And, for me, that emptiness should be recreated in a film, because it is
the scene of a crime.

How do these remarks square with the idea of “two Wittgensteins”? The
point about meanings being hidden suggests, as the received reading of the
Tractatus would have it, that you have to dig deep beneath everyday lan-
guage to find the logical form of the proposition. The idea that images have a
before and after goes better with the Investigations with its emphasis on
 Meaning through Pictures 107

context and background. Moreover Forgács’s final remark about telling a

story reminds us that the film has a beginning, a middle, and an end (even
though the scenes are not temporally ordered). And his remark about the
quest for meaning opening up “the trauma” lurks in the background of Witt-
genstein’s later work, which in contrast to the Tractatus is characterized by
an appreciation of contingency. Once again we see Forgács coming close to
the Investigations while ostensibly dealing with and trying to come to terms
with the Tractatus. While it is absurd to suppose that we learn the language
game of remembering from what it feels like to remember, Wittgenstein
mentions that “one might, perhaps, speak of a feeling ‘Long, long ago’, for
there is a tone, a gesture, which go with certain narratives of past times”
(Investigations, p. 196).
In a conversation with O. K. Bowsma about Descartes’s “Cogito, ergo
sum” Wittgenstein uses a cinematic analogy to show how important the past,
the background, is to meaning. Taking up the question of whether it is pos-
sible to make sense of an isolated present mental image without what went
on before or after, he says:

I always think of it as like the cinema. You see before you the picture on the screen,
but behind you is the operator, and he has a roll here on this side from which he is
winding and another on that side into which he is winding. The present is the picture
which is before the light, but the future is still on this roll to pass, and the past is on
that roll. It’s gone through already. There is no future roll, and no past roll. And now
further imagine what language [meaning] there could be in such a situation. One
could just gape. This! . . . or “Awareness.” . . . So there would be no past things, no
past earth, no past fire, no friends, etc. . . . and no future. Now there is nothing. . . .
But if Descartes now said anything of this sort, his words would have no meaning.
(Bowsma 1986, 13)

One lesson to draw from this, one that bears on Forgács’s project is that a
picture, like a word or a sentence, begs for a context, for a scenario, and as
the film maker recontextualizes it, the active viewer contributes multiple
meanings and associations.

WITTGENSTEIN TRACTATUS AS ART AND PHILOSOPHY

How is it that Forgács’s archival footage has artistic significance, that it is

not a humdrum record of historical or social goings-on? This question is an
instance of a more general question about found objects and depictions of
ordinary situations, which have figured prominently in the history of art. It
seems right to ask in such cases how the material transcends the forgettable,
the ordinary, the trivial. The answer is that the ordinary language of home
movies is like the ordinary language of everyday life. Forgács’s found foot-
108 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

age acquires philosophical significance in much the same way as ordinary

language acquires philosophical importance in Wittgenstein’s philosophy.
In an interview Forgács addresses this problem and sheds light on his film
and methods of work. “For me,” he says,

it all begins with the question “What is an objet trouvé?” What is finding an object,
and placing it in a different space or time; or exposing it to the viewer in its non-
original, non-conventional, non-accepted, not useful, not practical, not functional,
not familiar environment? . . . Using photographs in my work inevitably meant
drawing this space into another. . . . In fact, collecting photographs and making
collages from them is a normal practice since the early avant-garde, the Dadaists.
[For them] recycling was a normal use of images. So to me, banal home movies are
another form of objet trouvé.

This strategy—that of transforming the commonplace, the home movies, into

works of art by de-familiarizing and recontextualizing the images is an im-
portant key to the work. Moreover, the effect is heightened by the accompa-
nying text and the musical score. The images, words, and music conjure up
memories, experiences, and associations that enable us to think and feel our
way through the film and get what Forgács is driving at.
Forgács goes on to differentiate his own practice from other avant-garde
filmmakers. He writes: “[T]hey believe that, in itself, in its clear Puritanism,
the image tells you enough. So you are there with your contemplation, in the
Zen nothingness.” By contrast, for Forgács “it’s really important to tell a
story—let’s say a fictional story” and to have shown the home movies in a
distinctive manner. But what exactly is this manner? It is, he tells us, “not
anthropological or linked to some family historiography, nor was I driven, at
first, by the idea of making an archive.” Rather it is the “exciting look and the
feel” of the movies, that “there is something behind them . . . simply the idea
that there was something there, that holds our interest.” Having come “to this
material via Conceptual Art,” he adds, his perspective “differs from an
anthropologist’s or a sociologist’s or a documentary filmmaker’s view.”
The artistic/aesthetic value of Forgács’s film is not reducible to the pri-
vate/personal or, for that matter, to a public historical/sociological document.
The anthropological attitude is observational and aesthetically empty. It in-
vites the offhand response: “So that’s the way they do things over there.”
And besides if we look at archival materials as mere historical or sociological
documents, we are likely to end up entirely indifferent and aesthetically
unresponsive. On the other hand, insofar as the purely personal or biographi-
cal approach is overly self-absorbed (or family-absorbed), it runs the risk of
leaving the viewer feeling left out and “alone.” Apart from a glow of recogni-
tion—“It’s my uncle who is dancing for joy” or “It’s me who is playing with
the dog”—there is nothing of aesthetic interest that redeems the kitsch. What
is more, the personal and biographical perspective does not touch Forgács’s
 Meaning through Pictures 109

interest in “what’s behind” the home movies in his archive. Just the opposite,
they obscure “the forbidden past, the scene of the crime” and fail to engage
the way a regime can repress even memories of bourgeois family life. What
turns Forgács’s recycled home movies into art is his selection and handling
of them. In the final analysis it is this that reveals “what’s behind.”
In a notebook, Wittgenstein recorded a conversation with Paul Engel-
mann that suggests a parallel line of thinking. The entry, written in 1930,
comes from the time when Wittgenstein was still close to the Tractatus. He
writes: “Engelmann told me that when he rummages round at home in a
drawer full of his own manuscripts and letters from his dead relations, they
strike him as so splendid that he thinks it would be worth making them
available to other people. But when he imagines publishing a selection of
them, the whole business loses its charm and value, and becomes impos-
sible” (CV 4). Why is this? Why would the material look and feel different
when transferred from the private to the public sphere? In response, Wittgen-
stein compares Engelmann’s reaction with another case. He says:

Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing a man who thinks he is unobserved
performing some quite simple everyday activity. Let us imagine a theatre; the cur-
tain goes up and we see a man alone in a room, walking up and down, lighting a
cigarette, sitting down, etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from
outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; it would be like
watching a chapter of biography with our own eyes,—surely that would be uncanny
and wonderful at the same time. We should be observing something more wonderful
than anything a playwright could arrange to be acted or spoken on the stage: life
itself. But then we do see this every day without its making the slightest impression
on us! (CV 4)

Wittgenstein’s solution to the problem of how something can shift from the
remarkable to the impossible involves the idea of an aesthetic attitude. He
declares that “only an artist can so represent an individual thing as to make it
appear to us like a work of art” and adds that “it is right that those manu-
scripts should lose their value when looked at singly and especially when
looked at disinterestedly, i.e., by someone who doesn’t feel enthusiastic
about them in advance.” The crucial point is that “a work of art forces us—as
one might say—to see it in the right perspective but, in the absence of art, the
object is just a fragment of nature like any other; we may exalt it through our
enthusiasm but that does not give anyone else the right to confront us with it”
(CV 4). (We might add in passing that in the Tractatus at 6.421 Wittgenstein
says: “It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.
Ethics and aesthetics are one,” and at 6.45 he alludes to the “disinterested
gaze” when he says, “To contemplate the world sub specie aeterni is its
contemplation as a limited whole.”)
110 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

These thoughts seem to apply to Forgács’s film, as does Wittgenstein’s

following parenthetical remark in Culture and Value (“I keep thinking of one
of those insipid snapshots of a piece of scenery which is of interest for the
man who took it because he was there himself and experienced something;
but someone else will quite justifiably look at it coldly, in so far as it is ever
justifiable to look at something coldly” [5]). Forgács’s home movies of ordi-
nary scenes do not collapse into sentimental snapshots because Forgács
forces us to see them “in the right perspective.” His representations of these
scenes mean that even though we were not present and have no personal
interest before viewing them, we sense the special mood, the aura of felt
expression that they create in the context of the film. If on seeing the film
someone says, “It is like watching the paint dry on the wall,” the correct
response would not be: “You had to be there” (that treats the film as “a
fragment of nature like any other”). It would be: “You are robbing the film of
aesthetic value. You are missing how Forgács works the material, how he
treats it, in particular how the pictures, text and music are woven together.”
Moreover, given Wittgenstein’s remarks, it is tempting to invoke the appara-
tus of the theory of the aesthetic attitude and regard Forgács as putting his
home movies in the right perspective by “disinterestedly” looking at them.
This is not to suggest that he is uninterested in the found material itself but
rather that he filters out “feeling enthusiastic in advance,” that is, eliminates
personal bias, economic investment, ulterior motives and political posturing.
It is to say that the first person point of view drops out since the material is
presented and contemplated sub specie aeterni.
Though not without merit, this line of interpretation fails to do justice
either to Wittgenstein or to Forgács. When Wittgenstein speaks of “the right
perspective” he is not proposing a theory of aesthetic distance or attitude,
reminiscent of Arthur Schopenhauer’s or Edward Bullough’s theory; indeed
he is not proposing a theory at all. He dissolves the problem and suggests
that, instead of giving philosophical weight to the “right perspective,” this
notion be construed in a down-to-earth way. He is noting that the objet trouvé
when looked at as “a piece of nature like any other” and without artistic
treatment loses its value. His thought is that we need the artist if we are not to
look at or hear things in a cold, “distanced” way. Also it should be remem-
bered that in his later writings Wittgenstein cautioned against looking beyond
(transcendence) as well as against theory construction in the arts no less than
in philosophy. Theorizing and looking beyond, he would have us appreciate,
distract us from what’s right in front of our eyes and intrude on the job of
carefully attending to the details. (Thus he writes in the Investigations §109:
“And we may not advance any kind of theory. We must do away with all
explanation, and description alone must take its place.”) So, the God’s eye
point of view is de-mythologized, and the idea that the aesthetic attitude is
essentially disinterested is gone. What remains is a sympathetic, sometimes
 Meaning through Pictures 111

passionate, attention to and contemplation of the object and its features for
their own sake. (This is not to deny that a hint of “theory” and the “transcen-
dental” still lingers in the Engelmann passage.)
Since Forgács’s home movies—and Engelmann’s private manuscripts—
remain the same when transferred to the public sphere, what change accounts
for the loss of charm and value? Wittgenstein notes that Engelmann is “en-
thusiastic in advance” about his letters and manuscripts because of “vested
interests”—his personal connections to relatives and so on—and when he
imagines the letters and manuscripts in the public sphere, he imagines view-
ers who do not share his enthusiasm, viewers for whom they are nothing
special. And the same can be said of Forgács’s home movies as viewed by
the people who made them. For viewers to appreciate them, as for Engel-
mann’s manuscripts, they have to be transformed. The objets trouvés have to
be shown in such a way that they can be seen for and in themselves without
the crutch of personal experience and knowledge of their original surround-
ings and context. In Forgács’s film we see what Wittgenstein’s dismantling
of the traditional, sharp, dichotomy between “a fragment of nature” and “a
work of art” comes to in practice. The perspective that Forgács supplies turns
“a fragment of nature” into a work of art. This is somewhat like solving a
philosophical problem, the solution of which, Wittgenstein thinks, “can be
compared with a gift in a fairy tale: in the magic castle it appears enchanted
and if you look at it outside in daylight it is nothing but an ordinary bit of iron
(or something of the sort)” (CV 11).
To fill this out a little, Forgács’s footage acquires significance partly
because of his choice of material, partly because of the way in which he sews
it together into a kind of opera expressing something more than appears on
the surface. The focal point of his use of archival footage is the human face
and the human body—that is, the human being expressing joy, suffering,
pleasure, grief. One is reminded of Wittgenstein’s observations that “the
human being is the best picture of the human soul” (CV 49) and “the face is
the soul of the body” (CV 23). The human beings in Wittgenstein Tractatus
that appear in the foreground—what we mainly see—are isolated and cry out
for a background, demand interpretation and our supplying human value. The
home-made footage of everyday life is “framed” by being removed from its
normal surroundings as family entertainment or reportage. Once provoked,
our filmic imagination directs us back to the “rough ground” of our everyday
practices (Investigations §107). Here once again, whatever he intended,
Forgács is more in tune with the Investigations than the Tractatus.
Besides turning the home movies into art, Forgács does something similar
with the Tractatus itself. Employing a strategy of “disinterestedness” com-
parable to the strategy employed by the later Wittgenstein, he forces us to see
the book “in the right perspective.” In the film the significance of the selected
fragments of the philosophical text, originally penned to make things explic-
112 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

it, is suspended and the viewer has to supply an interpretation, even as the
image, text, and musical score work with and against one another. Forgács, it
might be said, turns Wittgenstein’s book into art by bringing out and exploit-
ing the “magic of the ordinary.” If this is right, then it further confirms the
point that, despite its title and texts, Forgács’s film and its methods are closer
to the Wittgenstein of the Investigations than to the Wittgenstein of the
Tractatus. There is in fact a striking resemblance in the way Forgács and
Wittgenstein draw our attention to things, arrange and place them side by
side to get us to see them with new eyes. All aesthetics does, Wittgenstein
once remarked, is “draw your attention to a thing, to place things side by
side,” make another person “see what you see” (G. E. Moore, “Wittgen-
stein’s Lectures 1930–1933,” in Klagge and Nordmann 1993, 106).
Wittgenstein’s reminders about ordinary language—his sketches of what
we say when and where—acquire philosophical importance because of the
background of “the problems which trouble us.” And Forgács’s film like-
wise. Even if Wittgenstein stresses “what’s in the work” and Forgács stresses
“what’s behind the work,” their strategies are similar. Forgács’s home mo-
vies play an important role—one could almost say an important philosophi-
cal role—because of the problems (broadly understood) that trouble us. In-
deed, the difference between the two is less than it may seem since Wittgen-
stein also regards “what’s behind” as important. In the Investigations he says
of philosophical description that it “gets its light, that is to say its purpose,
from the philosophical problems” (§109). What is behind Wittgenstein’s
observations and Forgács’s images is a suppressed desire to misunderstand—
in the one case to misunderstand the workings of language, in the other case
to misunderstand the past. As Wittgenstein somewhat paradoxically puts it in
two closely positioned remarks in the Investigations: “What is hidden . . . is
of no interest to us” (§126) and “The aspects of things that are most impor-
tant for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” (§129).
At the end of the conversation with Engelmann, Wittgenstein returns to
philosophy, almost as an afterthought. He writes: “But it seems to me that
there is a way of capturing the world sub specie aeterni other than through
the work of the artist. Thought has such a way—so I believe—it is as though
it flies above the world and leaves it as it is—observing it from above, in
flight” (CV 5). Here we can see aspects of the relationship of Forgács’s film
to philosophy itself, and especially so when we notice an echo in Wittgen-
stein’s remarks of Kant’s disparaging comparison of the philosopher who
aims to get beyond the mundane world with a dove that “cleaving the air in
her free flight, and feeling its resistance, [imagines] that its flight would be
still easier in empty space” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A5/B9). In the
spirit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Forgács sets things in front of us—with-
out any mediating theoretical veil. The dove analogy reminds us of the fool-
ishness of looking beyond, of hoping for something great other than the real
 Meaning through Pictures 113

life in front of us—as seen from “the right perspective.” The heart of
Forgács’s achievement.

MUSICAL RESONANCES: TIBOR SZEMZŐ’S SCORE

A major component of Forgács’s film, so far only mentioned in passing, is

the contribution of Tibor Szemző’s music, a contribution that enhances the
distancing Forgács creates by his choice and organization of visual material.
It is no exaggeration to say the musical score is essential to the film. Indeed,
Forgács tells us that he “always edit[s] on music” since it is the music that
“compels the big question: what is the rhythm, what comes here and there?”
As Forgács sees it, the mixture of text, image, and music “constitutes a
language,” one that elicits associations, imagination, memories, and prompts
us to get behind the image to the “forbidden and prohibited past.” In particu-
lar he regards Szemző’s music as giving voice “to the unconscious level of
the film. Sometimes to the main actor, sometimes to the event behind; and
sometimes it just alienates us from the event and creates a kind of contempla-
tive distance. Sometimes it pulls you in, sometimes it shows what’s to come.
So the sensuality, the deep undercurrent, is figured in the orchestration in a
specific way. That’s why we don’t need dialogues, for example, because you
read the picture and the music. You read it and understand it in a very
complex way. Without his music, the whole thing wouldn’t be what it is.”
However, he adds, for the music, the image, and the text of Wittgenstein
Tractatus to constitute “a language,” the viewer has to supply an imagined
context, to provide scenarios from the “forbidden, prohibited past,” “the
scene of the crime.” What the crime itself is is not spelled out, in fact
something Forgács has no interest in spelling out.
The general issue of the relation between film and music is approached by
Wittgenstein when he says, “In the days of silent films all kinds of classical
works were played as accompaniments, but not Brahms or Wagner. Not
Brahms, because he is too abstract. I can imagine an exciting scene in a film
accompanied by Beethoven’s or Schubert’s music and might gain some sort
of understanding of the music from the film. But this would not help me to
understand Brahms’s music. Bruckner on the other hand would go with a
film” (CV 25). The idea here is that showing (moving) pictures may shed
light on the music but only if the music has sufficient content, and thus is not
abstract. There must be an appropriate match between music and image.
(One wonders what Wittgenstein would have made of the striking, perhaps
ironic, use of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries to accompany a helicopter
attack on a Vietnamese village in Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.) As
Forgács’s comments on Szemző’s music make clear, however, what goes on
114 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

in his film is different from matching, something that Wittgenstein would

regard as deeper. Namely it helps us to get an intuitive grip on the visual
material. In Wittgenstein Tractatus the music does not merely accompany the
imagery. It resonates with it.
How does Szemző’s music, an original, experimental, and minimalist
score, resonate with the images and help forge the “language” Forgács al-
ludes to? Like the (edited) home movies in the film, the main theme of
Szemző’s musical score is also a “found object,” a Hungarian children’s ditty
that adults use to humor kids and test their wit. In the beginning segment of
the film where “furniture of the world” is shown, we hear sounds of a cart’s
wheel turning, then muffled humming of the ditty—this serves, one might
say, to get the film moving. (Sounds associated with other incidents are also
introduced in the film, e.g., when a bomber flies over people on the ground.)
And when scenes shift and different people appear, the ditty’s words are
chanted untranslated (in Hungarian). The only exception is in movement 6,
which treats the ethical/mystical. Here the humming recurs—as if ethics,
aesthetics and religion are propositionally mute—that is, cannot be ex-
pressed, only shown. At moments of celebration and joy, moreover, the
contemplative chant reinforced by percussion is intensified, suggesting an
intensified experience. At yet another point, a lyrical piano unexpectedly
kicks in for a few moments as if concluding a movement.
Elsewhere in the film, we sense Szemző is contrasting the empirical with
the transcendental, the lumber-house of the world with the domain of value.
A calm, plaintive monotone, reminiscent of a Gregorian chant or Buddhist
mantra, which describes the lumber, is more than once interrupted by a high-
pitched sound, a note in a different key, which suggests a different level, the
level of the transcendental, the higher plane of the ethical/mystical, to what
cannot be linguistically expressed. “Value is not in this world; if it were, it
would not be value,” says Wittgenstein in the Tractatus.
There is something in the music as well as in the found footage that
encourages this sense of going beyond, one that brings us back to the Lecture
on Ethics, where Wittgenstein writes, “All I wanted to do with [ethical lan-
guage] was just to go beyond the world . . . beyond significant language . . .
to run up against the boundaries of language” (44). Both the music and the
found footage are in this sense transcendental for Szemző/Forgács, who in-
itially seem to accord considerable weight to the transcendental, only to
surprise us later by including a folksong for children and showing scenes of
ordinary life. Our tendency of going beyond, says Wittgenstein, is a “docu-
ment of the human mind.” But there is, he also insists, no going beyond—the
very thought is nonsensical. And likewise for Szemző/Forgács. They intend
that we hear the music and see the footage as expressions of a mood, of
aspects of human forms of life. As in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, this
has no metaphysical significance. Rather it signals that we are in a different
 Meaning through Pictures 115

region of the linguistic landscape, that we are playing a different language

game. Here too Szemző/Forgács are closer to the later Wittgenstein. What is
deemed inexpressible (and transcendental in the Tractatus) is transformed
into something devoid of otherworldly metaphysics: “Perhaps what is inex-
pressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the back-
ground against which whatever I could express has meaning” (CV 16).
In fact the theme of the deceptiveness of ordinary language is inscribed in
the musical score by Szemző. When Wittgenstein’s remark about language
clothing itself and concealing thought is spoken, a children’s puzzle is
chanted, one familiar to Hungarians. The puzzle starts with what sounds like
a greeting “Hello, junior,” then poses a problem in arithmetic: “How many
people do five Turks and five Greeks add up to?” (Szervusz, öccse, öt Török,
öt Görög, hány ember?). The obvious answer, “Ten,” is wrong since what
sounds like a greeting is part of the arithmetical challenge. We get the addi-
tion wrong because the Hungarian expressions Szervusz (“Hello”) and Szerb
Husz (“Twenty Serbs”) and Öccse (“junior”) and Öt Cseh (“five Czechs”) are
homophones. Whence the right answer is: “Thirty-five” (that being what
twenty Serbs, five Czechs, five Turks, and five Greeks add up to). That this
deception is noticeable only to Magyar speakers, indeed noticeable only to
those who are paying close attention, only reinforces how easy it is to be
taken in by grammar.
Nor is this just a Tractarian point. Even though the later Wittgenstein
remarks that “ordinary language is all right,” he also stresses that when we
philosophize we are engaged in a struggle with language, that “philosophy is
a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our lan-
guage” (Investigations §109). (Wittgenstein leaves it open whether we are
bewitched by language or the battle is conducted by language—both readings
work.) The difference is that whereas in the Tractatus we are to eliminate
ambiguities in ordinary language by rephrasing the offending propositions in
a logically perspicuous form, in the Investigations we are to resist the pull of
grammatical pictures that mislead us about the uses and functions of lan-
guage—about the variety of the language games played. So while the picture
may be all right—may even demand respect if it is at the root of our thinking
(CV 83)—we must attend to how the picture is applied. That’s what provides
understanding of the meaning of pictures in particular contexts. And once
again we are brought back to Szemző’s music. It too would have us attend to
the context, the background of common knowledge.
The salient challenge of the puzzle in the children’s folksong is a problem
of addition and, being in the forefront of our minds, this keeps us captive.
The friendly greeting—greeting is one of Wittgenstein’s language games—is
taken at face value and unless it is carefully revisited we do not see that it
conceals another layer of meaning (in fact that another language game is
being simultaneously played). This children’s puzzle neatly parallels Witt-
116 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

genstein’s diagnosis of the sources of philosophical error and clarifies what

Wittgenstein has in mind when he compares the depth of a philosophical
problem to the depth of a joke. The music, images, and text run in parallel
channels—in counterpoint. They do not explain one another, and in this way
the later Wittgenstein is again unwittingly exemplified.

THE MYSTICAL IN FORGÁCS AND WITTGENSTEIN

Forgács comes closest to the Tractatus—it could have been what attracted
him to the work in the first place—regarding the “sacred” and the “unseen.”
While Forgács differs in some respects about this from Wittgenstein, he takes
him at his word and ends up illuminating his thinking more than many
commentators (and emphasizing the importance of the 6.4s and 6.5s of the
Tractatus, remarks often ignored or discounted). Forgács assumes there is
“the sacred” or “unseen” and this is something that can be set alongside what
Wittgenstein says in this part of the book—propositions like: “The sense of
the world must lie outside the world” (6.41); “And so it is impossible for
there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing higher”
(6.42); “It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcenden-
tal” (6. 421); “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the
mystical” (6.522). Forgács’s notions of the “sacred” and “unseen” are also
allied with the notion of the “mystical” in the Lecture on Ethics, where
Wittgenstein speaks of the sense of wonder at the existence of the world, the
sense that I am absolutely safe whatever happens, and ethics as being a
matter of intrinsic/absolute value (41–42).
We encounter an immediate difficulty when we attempt to articulate these
sorts of experience, and it is interesting to see how Forgács negotiates this
difficulty. The problem, as Wittgenstein recognized, is that while there can
be no denying that we have such experiences—and they are in some measure
and in some sense true—the moment we speak about them we realize that
what we say is nonsensical. We feel that we should be able to describe these
experiences but once we try the whole thing seems silly or jejune. It loses its
charm, as Wittgenstein might say. Thus in the Lecture on Ethics he notes that
“we cannot express what we want to express” and says: “If a man could write
a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an
explosion, destroy all the other books in the world” (40). More strikingly
still, he is reported to have said in conversations in December 1929 with
Moritz Schlick and Friedrich Waismann: “To be sure, I can imagine what
Heidegger means by being and anxiety. Man feels the urge to run up against
the limits of language”—Wittgenstein calls this “ethics” (Wittgenstein and
the Vienna Circle, 68). But thinking this “inclination, the running up against
 Meaning through Pictures 117

something, indicates something,” Wittgenstein also thinks that “it is definite-

ly important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics.” In other words,
while Heidegger’s remarks about generalized objectless anxiety and being-
in-the-world are out-and-out nonsense, they are not to be sneezed at, dis-
missed out of hand as comparable to the ravings of the mad.
How does Forgács deal with this problem? For him, it would seem, expe-
riences of the sort Wittgenstein mentions in the Lecture on Ethics constitute
“the sacred” or “the unseen.” Thus when the family ski trip is shown and
Wittgenstein’s portrait is inserted into the scene looking on, one senses the
world is being seen as “a limited whole.” In the scene in which a man smells
the scent of a flower and throws up his hands, the suggestion is that language
cannot do justice to the scent of the flower, that you have to smell it for
yourself. And likewise in the scene of a man dancing, jumping with joy,
reaching upward, in the scene of suffering and sadness in the facial expres-
sions of the people at the railway station, and in the final scene of a man
silently tipping his hat, expressing his respect and reverence. Here absolute
value is propositionally mute, the words we use in an attempt to “express it”
being inevitably nonsensical. This is not, Wittgenstein emphasizes, because
we have not found adequate words for what we want to express. The reason
is that “their nonsensicality [is] their very essence,” the aim being “to go
beyond the world,” which is to say “beyond significant language.” We run up
against the walls of our linguistic cage insofar as our words gesture toward
intrinsic value—and lapse into nonsense, a lapse that Wittgenstein “personal-
ly cannot help respecting deeply and . . . would not for [his] life ridicule”
(Lecture on Ethics, 44).
This line of thought, however, leaves something to be desired not least
because it suggests that the sacred is either other worldly or confined to a
privileged cluster of special experiences set apart from everyday life, which
is hardly Forgács’s intention. While the Tractatus, with its reference to the
“mystical,” is friendly to “the sacred” (and Wittgenstein is plausibly regarded
as treating them as two sides of the same coin), Forgács has a much more
secular conception of the “holy.” He sees himself as “using the ordinary
language of photography and film to find in banality, the sacred.” He says:
“Essentially, making these films [based on private movies] and the research
they require constitute my terrain.” “I try to see the unseen, to de- and
reconstruct the human past through ephemeral private movies” (Forgács
2008, 47). These remarks about how he sees his method and purpose, argu-
ably, square more with the Investigations than with the Tractatus—the work
under the shadow of which Forgács’s film ostensibly stands. The stress on
the ordinary and the “banal” in Forgács’s remarks and the idea of the sacred
(or value) manifest in the ordinary go much better with the later Wittgen-
stein’s concern with what is “before one’s eyes” and his conception of “the
best picture of the human soul [being] the human body.”
118 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

Forgács’s way of portraying the “secular holy” in his images of joyful

“holiday moments” hinting at oncoming suffering, for instance, is surely
better described, at least in the final analysis, in the later Wittgenstein’s
“deflated” terms (one would like to say “disinflated” terms). In the Investiga-
tions the supposedly inexpressible experiences are in and of themselves noth-
ing special, indeed are the most normal in the world. In this work Wittgen-
stein no longer speaks of language as limited and asks why if we don’t have a
word, we don’t invent one. He writes in a passage we fancy Forgács would
find congenial:

Describe the aroma of coffee.—Why can’t it be done? Do we lack the words? And
for what are words lacking?—But how do we get the idea that such a description
must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack of such a description? Have
you tried to describe the aroma and not succeeded? (I should like to say: “These
notes say something glorious, but I do not know what.” These notes are a powerful
gesture, but I cannot put anything side by side with it that will serve as an explana-
tion. A grave nod. James: ‘Our vocabulary is inadequate.’ Then why don’t we
introduce a new one? What would have to be the case for us to be able to?) (Investi-
gations §610)

Still it would be wrong to forget what Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus

about what can only be shown and think Wittgenstein Tractatus would have
been better titled Wittgenstein Investigations. When viewing Forgács’s film
it is wise to keep in mind what Wittgenstein wrote in letters to two readers he
especially wanted to understand the Tractatus. In the first, to Russell, he
wrote: “Now I’m afraid you haven’t really got hold of my main contention,
to which the whole business of logical propositions is only a corollary. The
main point is the theory of what can be said by propositions—i.e. by lan-
guage—(and, which comes to the same thing, what can be thought) and what
cannot be said by propositions, but only shown; which, I believe, is the
cardinal problem of philosophy” (Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, 71,
August 1919) And in the second letter, to Ludwig von Ficker, editor of the
literary journal Brenner, he makes the same point, relating it to ethics: “The
sense of the book is an ethical one. At one time I wanted to put a sentence
into the preface, which in fact is not in it, but which I will write for you now,
hoping it will serve for you as a kind of key. I wanted, in fact, to write that
my work consists of two parts: That presented here, and all that I have not
written. And it is the second part that is really important. The ethical is, as it
were, delineated by my book from the inside. And I am convinced that is the
only way it can be strictly delineated” (Letter to Ludwig von Ficker). Perhaps
what Forgács does with the Tractatus is not Wittgenstein but it is not not
Wittgenstein either. The way Forgács works with the say/show distinction in
the film generates a similar tension. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein says:
“What can be shown cannot be said,” and what Forgács shows in Wittgen-
 Meaning through Pictures 119

stein Tractatus cannot sensibly be said, without destroying the magic of the
film.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bowsma, O. K. Wittgenstein Conversations. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986.

Burns, Steven. “If a Lion Could Speak.” Wittgenstein Studien 1 (1994).
Davis, Whitney. “The World Rewound.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2002).
Forgács, Péter. “Wittgenstein Tractatus: Personal Reflections on Home Movies.” Pp. 47–56 in
Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, edited by Karen Ishizuka
and Patricia Zimmerman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008., 2008.
Habib, André. “It’s Just a Waste of Time to Walk and Play Tennis: An Interview with Péter
Forgács.” Rouge 12 (2008). www.rouge.com.au/12forgacs.html.
Ishizuka, Karen, and Patricia Zimmerman, eds. Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histo-
ries and Memories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Klagge, James, and Alfred Nordmann, eds. Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951. Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.
———, trans. and eds. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.
Lugg, Andrew. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 1–133: A Guide and Interpreta-
tion. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
———. “True Thoughts and Nonsensical Propositions.” Philosophical Investigations 26, no. 4
(2003): 332–47.
———. “Wittgenstein and Photography.” Unpublished manuscript.
Moore, G. E. “Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33.” Pp. 46–113 in Philosophical Occasions
1912–1951, edited by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Indianapolis: Hackett Publish-
ing Company, 1993.
Nordmann, Alfred. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press
2005.
Stern, David G. Wittgenstein on Mind and Language. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1995.
Szabados, Béla. Ludwig Wittgenstein on Race, Gender, and Cultural Identity: Philosophy as a
Personal Endeavour. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010.
———. Philosophical Investigations. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees, translat-
ed by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. Second edition, 1958; revised second
edition, 2001. (All quotations from the Investigations are from the 2001 edition.)
———. Notebooks 1914–1916. Edited and translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1961.
———. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961.
———. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Edited by
Cyril Barrett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
———. Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore. New York: Cornell University Press, 1974.
———. Letters to Ludwig von Ficker. Pp. 82–98 in Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives,
edited by C. Grant Luckhardt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979.
———. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann.
Translated by Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979.
———. Culture and Value. Translated by Peter Winch and edited by G. H. von Wright.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. Revised second edition of the text by Alois Pichler, 1998.
(All quotations from Culture and Value are from the 1980 edition.)
———. Lecture on Ethics. Pp. 37–44, reprinted in Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, edited
by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.
120 Béla Szabados and Andrew Lugg

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden. London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922. Second edition, 1933. (All quotations from the Tractatus
are from the C. K. Ogden translation.)

FILMOGRAPHY

Coppola, Francis Ford. Apocalypse Now. USA, 1979.

Forgács, Péter. Wittgenstein Tractatus (co-directed with Tibor Szemző). Hungary, 1992.
Jarman, Derek. Wittgenstein. UK, 1993.
 Chapter Seven

Beyond Text and Image: Péter Forgács

and his Wittgenstein Tractatus
Christina Stojanova

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them; poets, musicians, etc., to
give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them—that does not
occur to them.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

PREAMBLE

Cinematic engagements with Wittgenstein’s life and philosophy, although

preciously rare, are conspicuously original. The most famous thus far re-
mains Wittgenstein (1993), Derek Jarman’s eccentrically fresh take on Witt-
genstein’s biography. And while film theory—apart from Stanley Cavell’s
bold ventures into the world of film from a philosopher’s point of view—has
lately made some cautious inroads in incorporating Wittgenstein’s concepts
and paradigms in meta-theoretical works like Edward Branigan’s Projecting
a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory (Branigan 2006), the influence
of his thought on our post-modern sensibilities in literature and film are
undeniable, although not so easily pinned down.
Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville, a Strange Adventure of Lemmy
Caution (Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution) is the only
fiction film so far 1 which, to my mind, is profoundly Wittgensteinian in
spirit, if not in letter, since it could be read as a dystopian allegory of his
Proposition 5.6, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” The
film tells the story of Lemmy Caution, an American private eye, and his trip
to Alphaville, a city of the future from another galaxy. Alphaville is ruled by

121
122 Christina Stojanova

Alpha 60, an all-mighty computer, programmed to outlaw all human activ-

ities, which cannot be computed. In this eerily familiar world—the film is
shot entirely on location in Paris, in and around coldly functionalist, con-
crete-glass buildings from the 1960s—involvement in anything “whereof we
cannot speak,” whether ethics or human feelings, is punishable by death—
like the man who “behaved illogically” by grieving over the passing of his
wife, or the one who keeps repeating on his death-bed, “Conscience, con-
science . . . ” And when Lenny insists that he is a “free man,” he is told that
his “reply is meaningless. . . . We know nothing . . . we record . . . we
calculate . . . and we draw conclusions. . . . Your replies are difficult to code
and sometimes impossible.” For the very mention of words from the illegal
language of romantic love, faith and tenderness, are enough to bring Alpha
60 to a standstill, and ultimately—to self-destruction. This futuristic night-
mare is significantly heralded by traffic signs, “Alphaville. Science. Logic.
Safety. Prudence,” getting even closer to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus from an unexpectedly prophetic perspective. If we are to agree
with Northrop Frye’s argument that “philosophy begins in proverbs and axi-
oms . . . producing the dialectic dialogue of Plato . . . the question-objection-
answer of St. Thomas, the quasi-mathematical arrangements of . . . Spinoza,
the aphorisms of Bacon . . . and, in our day, the numbered propositions of
Wittgenstein Tractatus . . .[which are] in part endeavours to purify verbal
communication of the emotional content of rhetoric,” then Wittgenstein’s
propositions expose in a mercilessly adequate manner—austere and cold—
the mechanics of our post-modern moment (Frye 1990, 329). Alphaville
invites us to a world where the rejuvenating powers of language are continu-
ously lost to an ever shrinking, computerized newspeak, which reduces hu-
man interactions to a limited number of signs one could text or twitter with.
And where attempts to expand our language into the realm of the unspeak-
able are rife with dangers, thus posing insurmountable limitations to our
world.
In his subsequent film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3
choses que je sais d’elle, 1967), according to Robert MacLean, Godard re-
turns to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, but in a more superficial way, by having
his heroine define language to her son as “the house in which man lives,”
speak of “the ABC of existence,” and to repeatedly declare “I am the world”
(MacLean 1977–78, 46). Stanley Cavell’s discussion of Hail Mary (‘Je vous
salue, Marie’), Godard’s 1985 contemporary rendition of the Virgin Mary’s
immaculate conception and her relationship with God the Father and Joseph,
her husband, engages Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations[§ 118]:
“Where does our investigation take its importance from since it seems only
to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important?” in
order to interpret their story as one of “psychic trauma and of scepticism”
(quoted in Cavell 1993, xvii).
 Beyond Text and Image 123

On the backdrop of the scantly populated Wittgensteinian cinematic

world, Péter Forgács’ Wittgenstein Tractatus—an experimental film by a
director and media artist, whom I have been increasingly interested in over
the last few years or so and even traveled to Hungary to be able to see some
of his latest works 2—occupies a unique place. It was made in 1992, during
an exceptionally prolific period for the director, as by that time he had com-
pleted twenty films in various experimental genres. Nonetheless, this thirty-
two-minute gem of a film stands out as a quintessential expression of
Forgács’s probes into the abilities of language—spoken and written—to
interact with the image and thus express abstract notions. Experiments com-
menced with Spinoza Ruekwertz, his short (five-minute) attempt at imaging
Spinoza’s “infinite world” on video in 1985, and successfully carried over to
Private Hungary. Arguably his most famous series of experimental docu-
mentaries, Private Hungary features fifteen installments so far, based on
footage amassed during the vibrant Hungarian amateur film movement from
the 1920s through the 1960s, acquired and preserved by Forgács himself as a
result of an open call by the Private Film and Photo Archives he founded in
1983.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth installments of the series—Bibó Reader
(2001), a film about the most famous Hungarian political thinker of the
twentieth century, István Bibó, and The Bishop’s Garden (2002), featuring
the Calvinist church bishop László Ravasz, who never left his home (and
garden) since 1950s, “when Communist dictator Rákosi sent him into inner
exile, to break the independence and backbone of the church”—the director
tackles the written text by directly etching on the processed found footage
quotes from the musings of those prominent Hungarians (Forgács, web-
source).
The usage of found footage in Wittgenstein Tractatus—and in Bourgeois
Dictionaries, for that matter, an experimental film made also in 1992 and
discussed briefly below—is quite unique. While in his other works from the
Private Hungary series Forgács scrupulously identifies the source of the
amateur footage as well as its historical context, the images used for his takes
on Wittgenstein’s seven major propositions remain anonymous, although it is
fairly obvious that they originate from the same archives of the Hungarian
amateur movie movement. The Tractatus film, however, transcends
Forgács’s experiments with text and image bracketing by creating a mesmer-
izing palimpsest of meanings not only far greater but also different from the
sum of its components, and produces multiple spectatorial positions and
interpretations. Indeed, as Christian Metz—one of the few film theoreticians
to be thoroughly preoccupied with the analogy between linguistics and film
as a language—has said, “to ‘speak’ a language is to use it, but to ‘speak a
cinematographic language means to a great extent to invent it.” And while
the language speakers are a “group of users,” the filmmakers are creators,
124 Christina Stojanova

with the viewers not merely users, but also co-creators (Metz quoted in
Braudy and Cohen, 73).

THE POETICS OF AMBIGUITY

The problem with ambiguity as a philosophical category in general, and with

Wittgenstein’s philosophy in particular, is a complex one, which I am not
prepared to tackle here. In a somewhat cavalier manner, however, in his
essay “In Praise of Ambiguity” John D. Caputo claims that “the case
against . . . the gift of ambiguity among the philosophers—who have long
preferred unity to multiplicity, simplicity to complexity, univocity to pluri-
vocity, the one to many—is formidable and long standing” (Caputo 2005,
18). Yet he remains silent about the intrinsic polysemy of philosophical texts
as linguistic creations. What Ray Monk—Wittgenstein’s thorough biogra-
pher and versatile interpreter—says with regard to Tractatus Logico-Philo-
sophicus—namely that “there is no consensus on how that book . . . should be
interpreted,” is a reliable starting point in justifying Forgács’s open-ended,
poetic approach to Wittgensteinian pronouncements (Monk 2005, 1). Indeed,
to put it somewhat bluntly, if one wants an authentic Wittgenstein, one has to
make the book suffice (and in its original German at that), as its interpretative
transposition into another medium is inevitably brought to bear on its origi-
nal meaning. As another distinguished Hungarian film director István Szabó
is credited with saying, good books rarely make good films as they have
already reached their state of completeness. So in order to create a good film,
based on a good book, the filmmaker should find a point of entry, which is
usually by following the most open to interpretation link into the world of the
original. In Szabó’s case, it was Gustaf Gründgens, the protagonist of Klaus
Mann’s novel Mephisto (1936), whose undeveloped tragic potential gave the
director the needed point of entry for creating his powerful allegory on the
Artist crushed by the absolute Power of Nazism he was trying to seduce, the
Oscar-winning film Mephisto (1981).
Obviously, it is even more arduous to make a good experimental film out
of a celebrated (and difficult) philosophical text, meant “to be the last word
on philosophical problems and bring philosophy to an end” (Monk 2005, 16-
17). Forgács’s ingenuous point of entry into the Tractatus is that he went
beyond Wittgenstein’s rigorous propositions, meant to disclose that old phil-
osophical questions “were ill-informed and arose from . . . ‘the misunder-
standing of the logic of our language,’” and saw them as leads to the world of
the “inexpressible” and the “mystical,” that is, to the realms of “things, that
‘show themselves’ . . . ethics, religion, the meaning of life, logic and philoso-
phy” (Monk 2005, 17–21). Unlike Frye’s contention, quoted above, the Trac-
 Beyond Text and Image 125

tatus propositions for Forgács were far from “purified of . . . emotional

content,” but open to the interpretation of poetic pronouncements, pretty
much in the spirit of the late Wittgenstein, who placed an emphasis “on the
need for sensitive perception,” or on what he called the need of “‘outward
criteria for the inner process’ in all their imponderability” (Monk 2005, 102).
A particular kind of sensitivity which, in Monk’s view, could only be found
in the works of “great artists, musicians, and novelists” (Monk 2005, 102).
Or, as Wittgenstein has himself formulated it beautifully in Culture and
Value, “People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them; poets,
musicians, etc., to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to
teach them—that does not occur to them” (Wittgenstein 1998, 36).
Seen in this light, the film Wittgenstein Tractatus allows for some surpris-
ing revelations about the problematic coexistence of text and visuals in a
medium, which since its inception has privileged the latter over the former,
whether written or pronounced. Historians of film aesthetics consider late
silent films like Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and especially Carl
Theodor Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Jeanne
D’Arc, 1928)—two magnificent ventures into the mystical worlds of ethics
and religion, of that which “cannot be said”—as the ultimate achievements of
cinematic art mostly on the basis of their powerfully visualized narratives
and sparingly used laconic intertitles.
Wittgenstein’s quotes appear in the film both in audio (spoken) and in
visual (written) form, featuring the seven Tractatus propositions in English
and Hungarian as running from right to left on the screen, sometimes over
blank frames and other times over found-footage images. The few comple-
mentary passages from Culture and Value, on the other hand, flicker almost
subliminally briefly as intertitles (again in both languages). In addition, the
written quotes are also pronounced, and often repeated, by a detached male
voice in depersonalized British English, sustaining the extant solemnity of
the prevailing mood.
Comments inspired by the most immediate form of ambiguity discernible
in Forgács’s Tractatus—the poetic, meditative, and even prayer-like nature
of Wittgenstein quotes—recur in most theoretical takes on the film. In one of
the first online publications, included until a year or so ago in Forgács’s
website bibliography, the Wittgenstein specialist Alfred Nordmann compares
the Wittgenstein pronouncements—due to “their brevity and similarity of
structure”—to “prayers or meditations [italics mine] . . . on Wittgenstein’s
picture theory by a maker of moving pictures” (Alfred Nordmann, unpub-
lished). In their article in this volume, Wittgenstein scholars Béla Szabados
and Andrew Lugg explain the preferences for the English translation of the
excerpts used in the film because of their expressively poetic bent. Thus, they
say, the “Ogden” translation of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—while “less
accurate philosophically . . . than some newer ones” is “more poetic and thus
126 Christina Stojanova

more in keeping with the style in the original German.” On the other hand,
Szabados and Lugg define unequivocally Peter Winch’s translation of Cul-
ture and Value as a “strikingly poetic . . . effort” (italics mine). The poetic
nature of the film as a whole comes through as a pivotal characteristic in
Tyrus Miller’s essay “The Poetics of ‘What Is the Case’: Péter Forgács’s
Wittgenstein Tractatus and the Documentary Fact.” He writes:

Wittgenstein Tractatus is neither a wittily artful biographical fiction like Derek

Jarman’s very different Wittgenstein, nor a typical documentary presentation of
Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Instead, it might be characterized as a poetic montage
[italics mine] of verbal and visual documents. (Miller 2001)

Further, Miller suggests that Forgács’s Tractatus comes closest to what “Er-
nest Gellner characterized as a poem to solitude [italics mine], a poetic as-
semblage of austere propositions that poignantly bespeak the solipsistic iso-
lation of the early Wittgenstein” (Miller 2001). In his view, Wittgenstein
Tractatus could be understood not only as “metapoetics of the Private Hun-
gary documentary project,” but above all as a metapoetics of Forgács’s
found-footage-based oeuvre as a whole, including experimental and docu-
mentary films, as well as video installations [italics mine](Miller 2001).
The poetic nature of Forgács’s engagement with Wittgenstein’s text is
emphatically foregrounded in the essay Wittgenstein Tractatus: Personal Re-
flections on Home Movies—Forgács’s latest English-language publication.
There, the twenty Wittgenstein quotes from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
and Culture and Value, made familiar by the Tractatus film—predictably
starting with “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” and
ending with “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”—play
an important structural as well as (meta) poetic role as mottoes to Forgács’s
nineteen short “personal reflections” on various creative aspects of his
“seventeen video films, based on private movies” (Forgács 2008, 47–56).
The essay, however, does not refer even in passim to the Tractatus film, and
mentions its title only in the captions to three prominent images from the
film, used as illustrations. An omission which could be interpreted as a subtle
indication of the film’s tenuous place in Forgács’s personal ranking, and as a
way of emphatically playing up Wittgenstein’s text at the expense of the film
itself, inviting us to do the same. Yet as is the case with talented works of art,
the Wittgenstein Tractatus has taken on a life of its own, independent and
maybe even contradictory to its creator’s designs, thanks mostly to the poet-
ic, philosophic, and ethical ambiguities generated on a formal level by
Forgács’s unorthodox juxtaposition of the visuals and Wittgenstein’s text.
 Beyond Text and Image 127

TEXT VERSUS IMAGE

Experiments in innovative combinations of sound/text and image with the

purpose of creating a new, third meaning (or tertium quid) that changes and
sometimes even subverts the individual meanings of its parts, are not new
(Eisenstein 1994, 234). At the dawn of the sound era, the classics of the
Soviet cinematic montage, the theoreticians-directors Eisenstein, Pudovkin,
and Alexandrov, worried that the literalness of sound would destroy the
power of the image, emphatically insisted in their “Statement on Sound” on
the contrapuntal—or dialectical—usage of music, sound effects, voice and
the visuals, in the name of orchestrating a “rich harmony of cinematic mean-
ings” (Eisenstein 1994, 234). Unfortunately, the Soviet classics were only
paying lip service to the “rich harmony of cinematic meanings,” while re-
maining awry of free-floating interpretations lest the nascent tertium quid
betrays the propagandist purpose of their art. 3
Forgács’s Tractatus, however, does employ an Eisensteinian principle of
dialectical montage—that of montage of attractions, in which “arbitrarily
chosen” found-footage images are presented not in “chronological sequence
but in whatever way [they] would create the maximum psychological im-
pact” or “shock,” with the “aim of . . . placing the viewer in the spiritual state
or psychological situation” that would “maximize” the impact of Wittgen-
stein’s propositions (Eisenstein 1995, 88–89). With one major difference:
Forgács, unlike the Soviet classics, is not interested in pursuing “the precise
aim of specific final thematic effect”—that is, the singular dirige meaning of
the montage sequences—but in maximizing the effect of the text (and play-
ing up its poetic autonomy) by destabilizing the grounding weight of the
images and obscuring their meaning, thus opening the tertium quid to a
practically limitless number of interpretations (Eisenstein 1995, 88–89). In
the process, however, he has underestimated the power of documentary foot-
age to attract undue attention to missing spatial and temporal coordinates,
and thus challenge the privileged position of the Wittgenstein pronounce-
ments. 4 The ingenious resolution of this impasse by the director—whether
purposely or accidentally—has made the Tractatus film one of Forgács’s
most intriguing works (and one that has enjoyed a surprising longevity). The
discussion which follows seeks to examine the adroit mechanism (or artistic
gamble, if you will) which has worked so well for the Tractatus film, but has
failed spectacularly in his Bourgeois Dictionaries, 5 made also in 1992 as
installment number 7 in the Private Hungary series.
128 Christina Stojanova

WITTGENSTEINIAN MONTAGE OF PROPOSITIONS

This segment of my paper focuses on the techniques Forgács has deliberately

chosen to destabilize the factual meaning of the found-footage images and
their context, thanks to which, in the words of Johanna Richardson, the film
“[acquires] an ontological dimension, turning [it] into a reflection on the
nature of memory, the construction of history, and the phenomenology of
(documentary) film-making itself” (quoted in Miller 2001). The director’s
editing proficiency allows the resultant montage sequences to be interpreted
on a structural level in light of the Tractatus propositions, which is arguably
Forgács’s most remarkable contribution to Wittgenstein’s world of ideas,
made in the spirit of his work, and not in its letter like the deliberate superim-
position of the philosopher’s drawings and sketches.
The sequences are organized around “picture” motifs, related to either
pleasure or suffering which, for Wittgenstein, do not fall within the logical
form of the world and hence remain unspeakable. The first involves serene
scenes from what, judging by the clothing of the beautifully dressed men and
women, seems to be inter-war urban bourgeois life: taking the dog out,
skiing, entering a pool, playing with a gun at what looks like a high society
dinner party, simply frolicking for the camera or happily oblivious to it like
the bare-breasted young woman at the sewing machine or the naked child
playing with a dog.
The next group of images, more difficult to pin down time-wise, features
less refined, but equally serene rural life, and delights in the green—dancing
and picnicking. It includes the title shot of a horse cart plodding through a
muddy dirt road, used as a backdrop of the very first proposition, thus be-
coming the “pictorial form” of “The world is all that is the case.”
Then there are images obviously taken in the 1960s, where the inhabitants
of a crammed communal household (typical of the Communist housing cri-
sis) and entertained by chain-smoking, watching TV, and dancing the twist.
And while the peaceful motif of family- and work-centered life dominates
the visuals, they are punctured by the increasingly troubling scenes where the
sinister “public history,” or what Forgács calls Grande histoire, makes its
cruel presence known directly or metaphorically (Spieker 2002). Disturbing
images of soldiers boarding a military train and smiling uneasily for the
camera, or of obviously distressed people, waiting at a railway station, culmi-
nate in those of a brutally tortured pig (repeated twice); a rabbit with a
broken back, writhing in circles, a fallen horse. The image of a tall man
disguised as Death, roaming the streets of a big city advertising a movie,
emphasizes the uncompromising, and ultimately disruptive intrusion of that
Grande Histoire (and its Culture) into the life of ordinary people.
 Beyond Text and Image 129

Along with conveying a serene mood, the message of most of the “happy”
visuals is further destabilized by slowing down or speeding up the pace of
movement through step-printing, or by being shown on a loop, or in reverse:
is this woman coming toward us and going into the pool or coming out of it?
Has the man in the black tie playfully fired the gun once or twice or not at
all? Has the man clumsily frolicking in front of a nondescript house done this
once or over and over again? Left on their own, these could be likened to
what Monk calls “overexposed” Wittgensteinian tautological or pseudo-
propositions: the woman either goes in the pool or she does not; the man has
either shot his gun or has not, and so on, which tells us nothing about their
world. Pseudo-propositions might lack “sense” because they are always true,
but as Monk has it, “are legitimate parts of our sign-language just as the
numeral for zero” (Monk 2005, 50).

TEXT, IMAGE, AND MEMORY

What creates the “sense” in this flow of seemingly random “models of real-
ity” is that, for the most part, they transcend the limitations of the proposi-
tions they are bound to—even when “expressed perceptibly through the
senses” (Wittgenstein 3.1, quoted in Monk 2005, 41). Yet, by engaging origi-
nal technical means and editing style to turn the found-footage excerpts into
abstract, dream-like visions, Forgács has unwittingly moved dangerously
close to the shifting sands of ethical ambiguity and to accusations, voiced by
his detractors, of exploiting his anonymous home-movie subjects (which is a
major issue in contemporary usage of documentary material), and even of
manipulating his viewers. His attempts to render the edited found-footage
scenes into allegories of universal emotional states—cruelty, suffering, se-
renity, not unlike their medieval representation in the visual arts—could also
be read as means for instigating similar states in the viewers, promptly trig-
gering their emotions: whether of indignation against senseless cruelty, pro-
voked at the sight of the wounded hare and of a pig being kicked by a
leathered boot; or of commiseration with soldiers mounting military trains,
and especially with the women seeing them off; of anxiety in the face of
some imminent historical drama, whose unequivocal symbols are railway
stations populated by somber looking people and military personnel; or of
serenity and joy, produced at the sight of a middle-aged man frolicking
before the camera; or someone walking the dog . . .
Paradoxically, what pulls the film out of the morass of ethical ambiguity
is its aesthetic ambiguity, understood in the light of Temenuga Trifonova’s
discussion of Sigfried Kracauer’s attempts, espoused in Theory of Film, at
“aestheticizing and thus redeeming the negative aspects of modernity” by
130 Christina Stojanova

turning them into “aesthetic qualities essential to film’s realism.” Thus the
negativity of “moral/existential relativism and groundlessness” is aestheti-
cized as “ambiguity and indeterminacy” (Trifonova 2009, 274).
From the early experiments of the French avant-garde in the 1910s and
1920s, through the high modernity of the post–World War II European art
cinema, the pundits of cinematic modernism have enthusiastically embraced
ambiguity as its foremost aesthetic component on all levels of cinematic
meaning-production. For them, “ambiguity, either of tale or telling” became
“central,” as David Bordwell has put it, for the “art film . . . holds a relativis-
tic notion of truth . . . soliciting not only denotative comprehension, but
connotative reading, a higher-level interpretation” (Bordwell 1985, 212).
Gilles Deleuze’s contemporary film theory and his concept of time-image
is a good way of looking at the Tractatus film in light of post–World War II
European modernism, or more specifically, in light of its economy of ambi-
guity, allowing for a greater freedom for the viewer’s active participation in
the spontaneous meaning-making process in (post) modern cinema. Homolo-
gizing what Deleuze calls the “direct image of time,” or time-image, to
Bordwell’s “art cinema” (and, conversely, Bordwellian Classical Hollywood
Cinema to Deleuzian movement-image), helps explain Deleuze’s insistence
that “modern cinema . . . is governed by non-chronological temporal rela-
tions . . . of time as duration in which the past, present, and future co-exist
and intermingle” (quoted in Turvey 2009, 105). In other words, by reducing
the banal, but otherwise coherent home-movie stories to ambiguous frag-
ments, serving as metaphorical, even mythical symbols of universal human
states and feelings, the filmmaker’s approach uncannily replicates the work-
ings of what Bergson calls “unsolicited memoirs,” considered tantamount to
Deleuze’s time-image (quoted in Gross 1999).
Thus home-movie images, seen in light of Wittgensteinian pseudo-propo-
sitions, tautologies and contradictions—the man has either shot the gun or
not or he has and he has not shot the gun—mimic the unreliable work of
memory and question the missing link between them and Wittgenstein’s
present tense real propositions, voiced-over or scripted on the screen. In a
way, no cinematic visuals can ever constitute a “real” picture of the world as
they reflect facts that are not in the present and, strictly speaking are not facts
at all. Besides, is not cinema itself, by the very nature of the medium, a
pseudo- proposition as it simultaneously is and is not; it is both presence (the
woman is sewing now) and absence (she is not sewing now, as she was
filmed decades ago)? This is a phenomenon which has been discussed at
length in Freud-based film theory and in semiotics, but has been actually
inspired by André Bazin’s concise definition of film as being “in fact a
middle stage between presence and absence . . . a mirror with a delayed
reflection” (Bazin 1967, 97).
 Beyond Text and Image 131

IMAGE VERSUS TEXT

The paradoxical discovery of meaning in apparent absences—or in present-

ing the story elliptically—mobilizes the viewer’s sensitivity and attention.
Contrary to Eisenstein’s insistence on the priority of the ideological message,
achieved efficiently through the techniques of montage and a tightly con-
trolled third meaning, which should act upon the viewer by eliminating any
other accidental interpretations—or what we tend to call “readings against
the grain”—André Bazin, Eisenstein’s ideological nemesis, takes the oppo-
site stance and, in his discussion of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country
Priest (Le Journal d’un curé de campagne, 1951), a high modernist attempt
at redeeming the literary text, emphasizes the importance of “permanent
narrational gaps” in the meaning-production process (Bordwell 1985, 212).
Thus, Bazin believes that

the most moving moments of the film are those in which the text and image are
saying the same thing, each however in its own way. . . . It is here at the edge that the
event reveals its true significance. It is because the film is entirely structured on this
relationship that, towards the end, the image takes on such emotional power. It
would be in vain to look for its devastating beauty simply in what is explicit. I doubt
if the individual frames in any other film, taken separately, are so deceptive. (Bazin
1967, 140)

Bazin’s discussion amounts to one of the most eloquent anthems to modern-

ist cinematic ambiguity, and provides yet another fruitful way of looking at
the spontaneous resolution of the potentially uneasy relations of text and
image in the Tractatus film. Yet in a fiction film the narration gaps are
intentionally designed by the filmmaker, and engendered either through frus-
trating the logical narrative flow of cause and effect, or its spatial and tempo-
ral coordinates, or both. The gaps in Forgács’s film, on the other hand, are
attained mechanically by splicing bits and pieces from once coherent home-
movie narratives, unrelated in meaning, time, or space. Therefore the ambi-
guities they beget on a formal level remain problematic, unruly, so to speak,
and liable to trigger unpredictable associations. And the “deceptiveness of
the individual frames” Bazin speaks about frustrates further attempts to see
the visuals as some kind of illustrations or comments to the Wittgenstein
pronouncements, as they foreground the “devastating beauty” of that which
remains hidden, inexplicit, or as Wittgenstein would have it, “unsaid,” and
hit the viewer with a tremendous “emotional power.”
132 Christina Stojanova

IN LIEU OF CONCLUSION: THE DIALECTICS OF AMBIGUITY

Walter Benjamin’s idea of dialectical image, espoused in The Arcades Pro-

ject, seems to have acquired a new currency when juxtaposed with Deleuze’s
concept of time-image, and its rich associative layering of past and present.
Without a doubt it is a daunting task for a film theorist and historian to bridge
the ideas of Benjamin (and those of Eisenstein, for that matter), rooted in the
Marxist dialectical tradition, with those of Deleuze, whose inspiration comes
from the French philosopher Henri Bergson, criticized (by Max Horkheimer
among others) as a metaphysical idealist. In any case, Benjamin’s dialectical
image provides an unexplored—and to my mind fruitful way—of examining
the dynamics of the signification process in the Tractatus film from a view-
er’s perspective. In Benjamin’s view, “It is not that what is past casts its light
on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is
wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a
constellation. In other words: image is dialectics in a standstill” (Benjamin
1999, 462–63).
The movement from the presentness of the “purely temporal” Wittgen-
stein’s text (as actualized at the moment of its visual and audio perception) to
the pastness of the found-footage images of “what-has-been,” and then back
again to the “now” of the viewer’s perception is, as described by Benjamin,
indeed “dialectical: not temporal in nature, but figural” (Benjamin 1999,
462–63). All the more, Benjamin goes on to say that “only dialectical images
are genuinely historical . . . images” (Benjamin 1999, 462–63). Yet again,
while the meaning-making mechanism, entailed in the dialectical image,
serves well the analytical purpose at hand, what Benjamin had in mind were
inherently abstract literary images, much more fluent and open to interpreta-
tion—“the place where one encounters them is language”—and not moving
images, albeit lately the concept has been creatively adapted to film theory
by Rosalind Galt in her book The New European Cinema.
The indexical nature of the cinematic image has always attracted the
attention of film theorists, and it is enough to mention the preoccupations of
Siegfried Krakauer and Bazin with the “redemption of the physical reality” in
fiction film, and their specific interest in the sudden encounters with real-
ness—or with the auratic aspect of the pro-filmic reality—as a particular
“moment” in the cinematic text, which “ruptures or short-circuits representa-
tion . . . producing an affect of pure temporal distance, of materiality and its
loss” (Galt 2006, 73). Bazin calls this phenomenon an “aesthetic catalyst”
when describing the effect of the “concrete forest” alongside the contrived
artificial settings in Fritz Lang’s Die Niebelungen (1924). In his view, no
amount of artistry could match “the trembling of just one branch in the wind,
 Beyond Text and Image 133

and the sunlight . . . enough to conjure up all the forests in the world” (Bazin
1967, 111)
The found footage in the Tractatus film, regardless of it’s a priori claim
on the real, is apt to produce a similar kind of rupture, creating a powerful
“affect of pure temporal distance, of materiality and its loss,” amounting to
what Roland Barthes called punctum in Camera Lucida, his very private
musings on family photographs of his late mother (Barthes 1981). Unlike its
twin concept of studium, entailing the social and cultural signification of a
photograph, punctum denotes that extra value of the photographic image, of
its realness and aura, if you will, which could be linked neither to the photog-
rapher nor to the object of her lens, but to an unfathomable detail, which
establishes an emotional connection of the spectator to the photographed
reality, traumatic or otherwise.
Barthes, however, insists that punctum is an affect made possible only in
contemplation of a still image, and Forgács corroborates his claim by vehe-
mently opposing the term, declaring that the still “photo is a tombstone,”
while the moving image is eternally vital thanks to “the fluxes of life” pre-
served on film (Spieker 2002). In his discussion of Forgács’s work, Ernst van
Alphen clarifies somewhat this conceptual deadlock by citing an unrefer-
enced essay by Kaja Silverman:

Forgács’s archival footage keeps insisting on the private and affective dimensions of
images [which are] first of all achieved through the many direct looks with which
people face the camera. When actors face the camera in a fiction movie, this kind of
look is self-reflexive . . . it short-circuits the fictionality of the film by establishing
direct contact with the viewer. In home movies the frequent looking into the camera
is of a completely different order. For here, there is no clear distinction between the
camera and the person behind the camera . . . people in home footage do not just
convey Roland Barthes’ idea of “this has been” (“ça a été”), but “I love you.” (van
Alphen 2004)

One way or another, punctum remains an excellent way of explaining the

nascent process of emotional interaction between spectators and home-movie
fragments, carefully selected by Forgács since they encapsulate the spontane-
ity of moments of joy and relaxation or—albeit rarely—of ultimate stress and
even bouts of cruelty, captured by amateur filmmakers. Undeniably, the
home-movie images are a strictly private affair, revealing people at their
most relaxed or unguarded even when conscious of or posing for the camera,
doing so for love and infinite trust in the person behind it, as Silverman has
elegantly noted. And although in the Tractatus case these people are bound
to remain completely unknown—and unknowable—their palpable vulner-
ability produces a powerful effect on the viewer, quite comparable to the
affective punctum. And one of the greatest achievements of Forgács’s crea-
134 Christina Stojanova

tive intuition is to have harnessed the energy of home-movie fragments with

such an amazing punctum potential.
The spectators find themselves therefore challenged to make their own
choices in the battle for meaning between Wittgensteinian rigorous Logos,
and the unyielding and messy physical Reality of human tragedies, dramas
and comedies, implied in the home-movies fragments. Since that Reality is
identified within the context of the tragic twentieth-century Central European
history (or what Forgács calls the Grande Histoire), lurking behind the
found-footage snippets, most interpretations of the Tractatus film under-
standably focus on its historical implications. In any case, such would be its
privileged reading according to Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image,
whose “main result” is the “possibility of a radicalized relationship to histo-
ry, in which the present as much as the past can be re-imagined, re-experi-
enced, and critiqued” (quoted in Galt 2006, 73).
And yet again, the surfeit punctum effect tends to resist any hard and fast
signification process, and, by attaching itself to the highly stylized Wittgen-
stein text, elicits from it the poetics of mediative haiku incantations which, in
their turn, inspire diverse and even contradictory readings of the visuals, thus
overwhelming the viewer with feelings of nostalgia, suffering, anger and joy.
This process, while strongly remindful of the modus operandi of Benjamin’s
dialectical image, described above, remains outside its historical determi-
nism, and opens itself to what Caputo calls, summoning Derrida, St. Augus-
tine and Paul Tillich, “the deepest ambiguity of all . . . that goes to the heart
of the human condition . . . the irreducible ambiguity of the essential secret
that there is no secret truth, [which is bound to stir up] a disquieting . . . but
productive unrest” (Caputo 2005, 33). Thus, through the ingenuous amalga-
mation of visual and audio motifs, organized around Wittgenstein’s quotes as
an “outward criteria for the inner processes” of the human emotional and
spiritual life, implied by the home-movie fragments, Forgács transcends the
limits of both image and language. Furthermore, by moving beyond Wittgen-
stein’s prominent—seventh and last—proposition that “whereof one cannot
speak, one must remain silent,” it creates a picture of the world whose philo-
sophical, ethical and aesthetic value is commensurate with the viewers’ abil-
ity (or desire) to penetrate “the deepest ambiguity” either within or outside of
the Grande Histoire.

NOTES

1. The film The Garden (Záhrada, Slovakia, 1995), a serenely beautiful saga of a Slovak
intellectual, who leaves the grim realities of his post-communist urban existence for the bucolic
garden he has inherited, features his brief imaginary encounter with Wittgenstein as a role
model of Central European intellectual recluse.
 Beyond Text and Image 135

2. In February 2008, during the annual Hungarian Film Week, I saw about nine films by
Péter Forgács, including his latest at that time, Own Death (2007), and Miss Universe 1929:
Lisl Goldarbeiter, a Queen in Wien (2006).
3. Well known to film historians is Vsevolod Pudovkin’s “ideological” failure in incorpo-
rating sound in his film Deserter (1933), devoted to the struggles of the international proletari-
at, as well as the fact that he was chastised by the authorities for not synchronizing sound and
image. Moreover, the combined effect of powerful visuals and sounds of Eisenstein’s biopic
Alexander Nevsky (1938), for example, is dominated by one unequivocal propaganda message,
propounded mostly by the visuals—that of the heroic victory of the medieval Russian prince
Nevsky against foreign occupants of his motherland—the knights of the ominous Teutonic
order—a thinly veiled metaphor of the stand-off between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
Ushered in on the eve of the Great Patriotic War, the film’s message subdued any and all
ambiguity of Sergei Prokofiev’s powerfully dramatic score, while the poor sound recording
reduced it further to a piece of incidental music. Fortunately, Prokofiev’s cantata “Alexander
Nevsky” outlived the film thanks to its a priori potential for multiple interpretations, and has
enjoyed since a much rewarding fate on its own.
4. In his short essay, for example, Nordmann succumbs to the guessing game by limiting
the time period of “most of the pictures we see” to “primarily the 1930s and 40s,” and vaguely
generalizes that the images feature “memorable, yet banal, and often happy moments in the
lives of people who have mostly died by now, many of them perishing in concentration camps,
on the battle-field, in their cities and homes” (Nordmann, unpublished). According to Miller,
the images “resonate with the historical pathos of the Central European, bourgeois, Jewish life-
world that Wittgenstein shared with the filmed subjects of Forgács found footage,” albeit
almost half of the visuals feature impoverished rural life (gypsies?) as well as life in pre-fab
communist high-rises, most likely from the late 1950s and ’60s, consistent with the initial goal
of the Private Archives to preserve amateur works, made from the 1920s through the 1960s
(Miller 2001).
5. According to Miller, the Dictionaries “also explores ‘linguistic’ and quasi-mathematical
frameworks for presenting the images,” and allows him to insist on the otherwise tenuous
thematic and conceptual interrelatedness between the two films. He writes that “in this film
Forgács moves through a series of topically organized images linked to a set of words alphabet-
ically marked. These range from “jeweller” to “life” to “annexation” and “amnesia.” Together
they illustrate, in this index-like form, the drift of Hungarian society toward collaboration and
Nazi occupation, with its connotations of both bureaucratic classification and racial exclusion.
In one particularly moving sequence, Forgács edits together a series of images of a Jewish man
in a number of different scenes, in which his appearance is captioned with the logical variable
“x.” Throughout the sequence, the man is referred to simply as “X ur” (Mr. X). Mr. X is seen in
a variety of settings, from domestic to business to ceremonial occasions. Toward the end of the
sequence, however, Forgács interpolates one of the more standard “dictionary entries” of the
rest of the film—“Jewish labor service,” “train”—which suggests Mr. X’s ultimate fate as a
victim of Nazi racial policy. Here Forgács’s historical “fact” becomes truly representative, a
picture of a world in which “what was the case” could have been otherwise, but in the historical
case we know, thousands of people stood in the factual place of “Mr. X” (Miller 2001).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alphen, Ernst van. “Towards a New Historiography: Péter Forgács and the Aesthetics of
Temporality,” 2004, at www.forgacspeter.hu/english/bibliography (10 Oct. 2010).
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang Press, 1981.
Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1985.
136 Christina Stojanova

Branigan, Edward. Projecting a Camera: Language Games in Film Theory. London: Rout-
ledge, 2006.
Caputo, John D. “In Praise of Ambiguity.” In Ambiguity in the Western Mind. Edited by Craig
J. N. DePaulo, Patrick Messina, Marc Stier. New York: Peter Lang Press, 2005.
Cavell, Stanley. “Foreword.” In Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary: Women and the Sacred in
Film. Edited by Maryel Locke, Charles Warren, Jean Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.
Eisenstein, Sergei. “Montage of Attractions” (1923). In Twentieth Century Theatre: A Source
Book. Edited by Richard Grain. London: Routledge, 1995.
Eisenstein, Sergei, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov. “Statement on Sound” (1928).
In The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939. Edited by
Richard Taylor and Ian Christie. London: Routledge, 1994.
Forgács, Peter. Bibliography, 2005. www.forgacspeter.hu/english/bibliography (10 Oct. 2010).
———. “Wittgenstein Tractatus: Personal Reflections on Home Movies.” In Mining the Home
Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Edited by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R.
Zimmerman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1990.
Galt, Rosalind. The New European Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Gross, David. “Bergson, Proust, and the Revaluation of Memory.” International Philosophical
Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1985).
MacLean, Robert. “Opening the Private Eye: Wittgenstein and Godard.” Sight and Sound 47,
no. 1 (1977–1978).
Metz, Christian. “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film” (1968). In Film Theory and
Criticism, sixth edition. Edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2004.
Miller, Tyrus. “The Poetics of “What Is the Case”: Péter Forgács’ Wittgenstein Tractatus and
the Documentary Fact.” In How2 1, no. 6 (2001), at www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/
how2journal/archive/online_archive/v1_6_2001/ (20 Sept. 2010).
Monk, Ray. How to Read Wittgenstein. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.
Nordmann, Alfred. “Notes on Forgács’ Tractatus,” unpublished, circa 2000.
Richardson, Johanna. “Est-ethics of Counter-Documentary.” In ArtMargins: Contemporary
Central and East European Visual Cultures, 2000, at www.artmargins.com/index.php/2-
articles/421 (20 Sept 2010).
Spieker. Sven. “At the Center of Mitteleuropa: A Conversation with Peter Forgács.” In Art-
Margins: Contemporary Central and East European Visual Cultures, 2002, at
www.artmargins.com/index.php/archive/354 (20 Sept. 2010).
Szabados, Béla, and Andrew Lugg. “Meaning through Pictures: Péter Forgács and Ludwig
Wittgenstein.” In Wittgenstein at the Movies. Edited by Béla Szabados and Christina Stoja-
nova. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011.
Trifonova, Temenuga. “From Distraction to Indeterminacy to Distraction: Kracauer and Con-
temporary Realist Discourse.” In European Film Theory. Edited by Temenuga Trifonova.
London: Routledge, 2009.
Turvey, Malcolm. “Epstein, Bergson, and Vision.” In European Film Theory. Edited by Teme-
nuga Trifonova. London: Routledge, 2009.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Edited by G. H. von Wright and translated by Peter
Winch. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

FILMOGRAPHY

Alexander Nevsky / Aleksandr Nevskiy (Sergei Eisenstein). USSR, 1938.

Alphaville, a Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution / Alphaville, une étrange aventure de
Lemmy Caution (Jean-Luc Godard). France/Italy, 1965.
Bibo Reader / Bibó Breviárium (Péter Forgács). Hungary, 2001.
 Beyond Text and Image 137

Bourgeois Dictionaries / Polgár Szótár (Péter Forgács). Hungary, 1992.

Deserter/Dezertir (Vsevolod Pudovkin). USSR, 1933.
Diary of a Country Priest / Le Journal d’un curé de campagne (Robert Bresson). France, 1951.
Die Niebelungen (Fritz Lang). Germany, 1924.
Greed (Erich von Stroheim). USA, 1924.
Hail Mary / ‘Je vous salue, Marie’ (Jean-Luc Godard). France/Switzerland/UK, 1985.
La passion de Jeanne d’Arc / The Passion of Jeanne D’Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer). France,
1928.
Mephisto (István Szabó). Hungary, 1981.
Miss Universe 1929: Lisl Goldarbeiter, a Queen in Wien / Miss Universe 1929—Lisl Goldar-
beiter—a Szépség útja (Péter Forgács). Hungary, 2006.
Own Death / Saját halál (Péter Forgács). Hungary, 2007.
The Bishop’s Garden / A Püspök Kertje (Péter Forgács). Hungary, 2002.
The Garden/Záhrada (Martin Sulík). Slovakia, 1995.
Two or Three Things I Know About Her / 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Jean-Luc Godard).
France 1967.
Wittgenstein (Derek Jarman). Japan/UK, 1993.
Wittgenstein Tractatus—7 video paragraphs / Wittgenstein Tractatus—7 videó etüd (Péter
Forgács). Hungary, 1992.
 Index

activism, 60, 72 Bach, J. S., 6

Adorno, Theodor W., 50 Baker, G. P., 54
aesthetics: ambiguity, 129; ethics and, xiv Balcon, Jill, 25
Agamben, Giorgio, 54 bare picture, 101
Alexander Nevsky, 135n3 Barthes, Roland, 133
Ali, Tariq, 25 The Bartos Family, 80, 87
alienation, 43 Bauhaus style utility furniture, 19
Alphaville, 39, 121 Bayley, John, 2
ambiguity: aesthetic, 129; dialectics of, Bazin, André, xviii, 131
132–134; ethics, 129; as philosophical Benjamin, Walter, xviii, 132
category, 124; poetics of, 124–129; of Bergson, Henri, 132
reality, 30 Berliner, Alan, 80
analogical logic, 56 Bibó, István, 123
analogy of the cave, 55 Bibó Reader, 123
Analytical Commentary (Baker, Hacker), The Bishop’s Garden, 123
54 black image, 45
analytical philosophy, xv black and white film, 39, 44
analytic-synthetic camera, 60 Bloomsbury Group, xii, 26
Anti-Private-Language-Argument, 45 Blue, 25
Apfelthaler father, 85 blue at a place at a time, 38
Apocalypse Now, 113 Bordwellian Classical Hollywood Cinema,
The Arcades Project (Benjamin), 132 130
architecture, 97 Bourgeois Dictionaries, 123, 127
Aristotle, 51 Bowsma, O. K., 107
art: conceptual, 108; confrontation and, Brahms, Johannes, 62, 113
109; Wittgenstein Tractatus as, Branigan, Edward, 121
107–112 Breslauer, Rudolf, 84
atomic pictures, 36 Bresson, Robert, 131
austerity, 92 Bullough, Edward, 110
avant-garde documentary filmmakers, 106 Burns, Steven, xv, xvi

139
140
Caputo, John D., 124
Caravaggio, 25
Cavell, Stanley, xvi, 34, 39, 49, 122
Central Europe, 88
Cerisuelo, Marc, 61
Che Cos’é un paradigma (Agamben), 54
cheating, 21
chronological sequence, 127
cinema: Bordwellian Classical Hollywood,
130; cosmos as, 61; philosophy and,
xiii; post-war British, 25; quotation,
18–23; universal, 61
Clarinet concerto in A Major, 19
class sexual exploitation, 27
colors: complexity of, 44; film, adopted by,
39; of Jarman, 33, 43, 46; vision, 41; of
Wittgenstein, 38, 41; of Wittgenstein,
33
Communism, 101
comparative morphology, 58
conceptual art, 108
conscience, 121
Cook, Roger, 25
Coppola, Francis Ford, 113
Critique of Judgment (Kant), 56
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 112
Culture and Value (Wittgenstein), 87, 95,
124
Dadaists, 108
Darling, 2
death, 96; of Jarman, Derek, 26; in
Wittgenstein, 43; Wittgenstein on, 96
Deleuze, Gilles, xviii, 130
despair, 62
diagrams, 104
dialecticians, 58
dialectics, 57; of ambiguity, 132–134;
image, 134; irreducible, 58; montage,
127; of philosophy, 12; Plato’s, xvi, 50,
55, 57, 58; in standstill, 132
The Diary of Mr. N, 87
Die Niebelungen, 132
disinteredness, 111
drama, 39
Drugman family, 85
Eagleton, Terry, xiii, 25, 27; on class
sexual exploitation, 27; Wittgenstein
Index
and, 46n1; on Wittgenstein the
academic, 27
Edward II, 72
eidos, 51
Eisenstein, Sergei, xviii
Either-Or, 87
energia, 51
Engelmann, Paul, 109
English through Pictures, 102
ethical ambiguity, 129
ethical language, 114
ethics: aesthetics and, xiv; ambiguity, 129;
inexpression of, 109; mystical worlds
of, 125; natural world and, 37;
propositions of, 116; as transcendental,
109, 116
everyday language, 104
everyday reality, 43
Eyes Wide Shut, 2
The Family Album, 80
Fascism, 101
film: approach to Wittgenstein, 3–4;
audience for Wittgenstein, 18; black
and white, 44; color adopted by, 39; of
Forgács, 106; methods of, xi; old, x; for
a philosopher’s work, 2; philosophy,
difficulty with, 12; reality and, 53;
watching, x; white, 45; Wittgenstein
comparisons, xiv; Wittgenstein on
watching, x. See also cinema
filmic thinking, 102
flute, 52
Flynn, Errol, 39
folk dancing, 101
Forgács, Péter, xi, 34, 79, 80, 123; filmic
practice of, 106; home movies and, 80,
106, 110; memories conjured by, 108;
montage used by, 86; personal
reflections, 126; Philosophical
Investigations and, 106
Form of the Good, 52
forms, 52; immanent, 51, 52; phenomena,
53; philosophy, 26; postulating, 52
found objects, 114
Free Fall, 80
Frye, Northrop, 121
The Future Is Behind You, 80
 Index 141

Galt, Rosalind, 132 infinite regress, 71

The Garden, 134n1 instrumental conception, 99
Gellner, Ernest, 126 interpretation, 49; high-level, 130;
Girard, François, 6 psychological, 62
Godard, Jean Luc, 39, 121 Iris, 2
god’s eye, 110 irreducible dialectic, 58
Goebbels, Joseph, 84
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 58, 74n44 Jarman, Derek, xi, 25, 33, 40, 60, 91; AIDS
Goldberg Variations, 6 and, 40; cage for Wittgenstein in film
good, 52, 55 of, 63; colors of, 33, 43, 46; death of,
Gough, Michael, 25 26; sexuality of, xii; on Wittgenstein,
Gould, Glenn, 6 59
Govaert family, 85 Johnson, Karl, xii, 25
grammar, 54; of expressions, 54; reality Joint Session of the Mind and Aristotelian
and, 69; surface/depth of, 103, 105 Societies, 38
grammatical illusions, 103 Joyce, James, 28
Grande histoire, 128 Jubilee, 25
Greed, 125
Kant, Immanuel, 56, 112
Hacker, M. S., 54 Keynes, John Maynard, xii, 26, 35;
Hail Mary, 122 monologue of, 30; parroting
happy visuals, 129 Wittgenstein, 64; wit of, 43
Harrison, Bernard, 71 Klein, Yves, 62
high-level interpretation, 130 Krakauer, Siegried, 132
historical contextualization, 86, 87 Kubisková, Marie Olga, 83
Hitchcock, Alfred, 39 Küppers, Andreas, 61
holiday moments, 118
home movies, 80, 106, 110; images, 130; Lang, Fritz, 132
in Philosophical Investigations, 112 language: actual use of, 104; ambiguities
Homo Sacer, Remnants of Auschwitz of, 115; assumptions in, 70; ethical,
(Agamben), 54 114; everyday, 104; games, 102, 104,
homosexuality, 41 105; inadequacy of, 118; limits of, 36;
Hornby, Nick, 1 of logic, 36; material words, 69;
Hose, Paul, 83 ordinary, 68, 112; phenomenological,
Hubble telescope, 60 68; philosophy of, 91; physical, 66;
human convention, 69 physicalist, 68; presuppositionless
human soul, 111 phenomenological, 72; primary, 68;
Hutton, Betty, ix reality and, 71; reel, 68; thought
hypothesis proper, 57 disguised by, 103
The Last of England, 29, 60
ideological message, 131 laterna magica image, 67
images: black, 45; dialectics, 134; home Lecture on Ethics (Wittgenstein), 116
movies, 130; laterna magica, 67; Letter to Ludwig von Ficker
philosophy, 26 (Wittgenstein), 118
immanent forms, 51, 52 logic: analogical, 56; body of, 69; exterior,
immediate phenomena, 51 62; of language, 36; linear, 64; method
imponderability, 124 of, 98; need for body, 69; paradigmatic
inconclusiveness, 62 example, 56; philosophy of, 69; pure,
infinite help, 94 30; sentences and, 69
142 Index

Logos, 134 nothing, 105

Lugg, Andrew, xvii, 125
Lyons, William, xv, 7–8 observation, 109
O’Connor, Tony, 7
MacCabe, Colin, 25 Ogden, C. K., 102
MacDonald, Scott, 87 old films, x
MacLean, Robert, 122 On Certainty (Wittgenstein), 26, 43
The Maelstrom, 80 On Directing Film (Mamet), 6
Magnificat, 18 ontology, 57
Malcolm, Norman, 19, 22, 46n6 O’Pray, Michael, xv
Mamet, David, 6 ordinary language, 68, 112
Mann, Klaus, 124 orthography, 56
martian, 27, 35 ousia, 51
material words, 69 Oxbridge Establishment, 28
mathematics, 98
McGuinness, Brian, 98 paintings, 54
Meanwhile Somewhere . . ., 79, 81 Papanastassiou, Angelos, 85
mediation, 73n6 paradeigmatology, 55
meditative haiku incantation, 134 paradigmatic totality, 56
memory camera, 68 paradigms: intelligibility of, 57;
mental phenomena, 45 ontological character, 57; phenomena
Mephisto (Mann), 124 as, 50; practical, 71
Metaphysics, Concepts, and Problems Parmenides (Plato), 51, 52
(Adorno), 50 Passenger, 11
Metz, Christian, 123 La passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 125
microcosms, 96 Pathosformel Nymphe, 57
Miller, Tyrus, 125 Peake, Tony, 25
Miranda, Carmen, ix Pears, David, 98
Mnemosyne project, 57 Penner, Terry, 52, 53, 73n7
models of reality, 129 Personal Terms (Raphael), 2
Monk, Ray, 124 phenomena: constellations formed by, 53;
montage, 127; dialectics, 127; Forgács use immediate, 51; mental, 45; paradigms
of, 86; Soviet cinematic, 127 as, 50; proto, 104; sensible, 55
Moore, G. E., 12, 26 phenomenological language, 68
moral integrity, 42 phenomenological space, 68
moralising, 62 Philosophical Investigations
Morrell, Ottoline, 27, 28, 40, 63 (Wittgenstein), xii, 4, 33, 45, 50, 51, 53,
Moulin Rouge, 83 54, 62, 66, 99, 100, 105, 122; home
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 18 movies in, 112; instruction from, 64
Murdoch, Iris, 2 philosophical propositions, 98
mysticism, 117 Philosophical Remarks (Wittgenstein), 66,
67, 70
natural inclination, 50 philosophy, 56; ambiguity as, 124;
natural world, 37 analytical, xv; architecture as, 97; as a
Nazis, concentration camp of, 84 battle, 115; cinema and, xiii; concepts
The New European Cinema (Galt), 132 of, 47n19; definition of, 54; of
Night and Fog, 84 dialectics, 12; film, difficulty with, 12;
nonsense, 21 as a form of making images, 26;
Nordmann, Alfred, 91, 125, 135n4 fundamental nature of, 38; of language,
 Index 143

91; of logic, 69; nature of, xiv; purpose repetition, 98

of, 63; second order, 56; in Republic (Plato), 55
Wittgenstein: Tractatus, 97, 107–112 resistance, 54
photography, 49 Resnais, Alain, 84
physicalist language, 68 Richards, Ben, 93
physical language, 66 Ride of the Valkyries, 113
physical reality, 132 Robin Hood, 39
pictures: atomic, 36; bare, 101; Rohmer, Eric, 18
representation of, 94; Tractatus, 99 Russell, Bertrand, xii, 12, 26, 40
Picture Theory of Meaning, 36
Plato, 51, 52, 56; dialectics of, xvi, 50, 55, salient grammatical features, 54
57, 58 Schlick, Moritz, 116
poetics, 124–129 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 110
postulating the forms, 52 second order philosophy, 56
post-war British cinema, 25 secular holy, 118
Powell, Sandy, 25 sense impressions, 66
practical paradigm, 71 sensible phenomena, 55
present reality, 39 sepia, 34
presuppositionless phenomenological sexuality, xii, 64, 72. See also
language, 72 homosexuality
prima philosophia, 53 Seymour, Lynn, 25
primary language, 68 Seyss-Inquart, Arthur, 80
primitives, 36 signs, 100
Private Hungary, 123, 127 Silverman, Kaja, 133
Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in sketches, 54
Film Theory (Branigan), 121 soul, 111
projection relation, 101 Soulez, Antonia, 61
proto-phenomena, 104 soundtrack music, 18
psychological interpretation, 62 Soviet cinematic montage, 127
Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 135n3 spatio-temporal nature, 67
punctum, 133, 134 Spinoza Ruekwertz, 123
pure logic, 30 state of affairs, 36
“Statement on Sound,” 127
queer iconography, 40 Steuer, Daniel, xv, xvi
Quentin, John, 25 Stewart, James, 47n12
Stojanova, Christina, xviii
Ramsay, Frank, 41 Strauss, Richard, 18
Raphael, Frederic, 1, 2, 11 Stroheim, Erich von, 125
Rátz, László, 82 studium, 133
reality: of ambiguity, 30; appearance and, subject-object mediation, 57
68; continuity of, 72; everyday, 43; film sub specie aeterni, 112
and, 53; grammar and, 69; language suicidal tendencies, 31
and, 71; models of, 129; nature, 52; Swinton, Tilda, 25, 28
physical, 132; present, 39 Szabados, Béla, xvii
Red Desert, 39 Szemző, Tibor, 82, 86; musical resonances
reel language, 68 of, 113; scores of, 93
The Religion of Man (Tagore), 22
Remarks on Color (Wittgenstein), 33, 43, tertium quid, 127
45
144 Index

Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn white glass, 45

Gould, 6 Winch, Peter, 26, 125
thoughts: language disguising, 103; Wittgenstein, xi, 25, 33, 121; colors of, 33;
proceeding in natural order, 50; death in, 43; dialogue pruned away in,
Wittgenstein on, 34 64; Martian in, 27, 35; Ottoline in, 63
totality, 51 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ix, 46, 62, 65;
Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus approaches to filming life of, 3–4;
(Wittgenstein), xii, 4, 28, 33, 36, 37, 49, audience for film of, 18; biography of,
87, 91; conclusions of, 15; mysticism 4; on color, 38; on color perception, 41;
of, 117; pictures, 99; primitives in, 36; on death, 96; dissolving problems, 41;
repetition in, 98; structure of, 6; duplicity of, 106; dysfunctional family
temporal element of, 102; text of, 14 of, 29; Eagleton on, 27; fame of, 16;
Trifonova, Temenuga, 129 film comparison of, xiv; homosexuality
Two for the Road, 2 of, 41; on human soul, 111;
Two or Three Things I Know About Her, investigation of, 50; Jarman on, 59;
122 Keynes parroting, 64; legacy of, xiv; on
old films, x; on ordinary language, 112;
Ulysses (Joyce), 28 perfection and, 30; prose of, 65; sense
Universal Cinema, 61 impressions of, 66; sexuality of, xii;
universal concept, 51 subject of, 93; on thought, 34; turmoil
“The Unknown War,” 81 of, 31; in war, 4; on watching film, x;
Urphänomen, 58 working on oneself, 23; in World War I,
9
Vertigo, 39 Wittgenstein: Tractatus, xi, xiii, 34, 87, 89,
vested interests, 111 99, 126; as art/philosophy, 107–112;
visual drama, 39 austerity, 92; content of, 93; human
visual field, specks in, 37 beings in, 111; movements of, 92, 93;
visual space, 70 philosophy in, 97; seven movements of,
viva voce sequence, 15 94–97
The Wizard of Oz, 39
Wagner, Richard, 113 World War I, 4, 9
Waismann, Friedrich, 116 World War II, 4
Warburg, Aby, 57
Wees, William C., xv, xvii Zimmermann, Patricia, 79, 85, 87
Wells, H. G., 97 Zuiderzee, 81
white film, 45
 About the Contributors

Steven Burns has retired from the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie

University but continues to teach as professor of contemporary studies at the
University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He received his PhD
from the University of London, where he studied with the late Peter Winch.
His publications include articles on Wittgenstein, Weininger, Wagner, and
Weil. Also he has translated, annotated, and introduced Otto Weininger’s
posthumous work On Last Things (2001).

Andrew Lugg is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Otta-

wa and has published articles on both the Tractatus and the Philosophical
Investigations and other works of Wittgenstein. He is the author of Wittgen-
stein’s Philosophical Investigations 1–133: A Guide and Interpretation
(2000), now in paperback. Presently he is completing a book titled Wittgen-
stein on Colour.

William Lyons is professor emeritus at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. He

is the author of a number of philosophical texts, including Emotion (1980),
The Disappearance of Introspection (1986), and Matters of the Mind (2001).
He has also written some “Theatre of Thought” plays, including The Crooked
Roads of Genius (winner of the START Chapbooks drama competition in
2005) and The Fir Tree and the Ivy (winner of the Eamon Keane Full Length
Play Competition in 2006). At present he is working on a film script about
the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Michael O’Pray is professor in film at the School of Architecture and Visual

Arts at the University of East London. His books include Avant-Garde Film:
Forms, Themes and Passions (2003), Derek Jarman: Dreams of England

145
146 About the Contributors

(1996), as well as Film, Form and Phantasy: Adrian Stokes and Film Aes-
thetics (2004).

Daniel Steuer is senior lecturer in German at the University of Sussex. His

publications include books and articles on Goethe, Wittgenstein, Thomas
Bernhard, and others. He is coeditor of Metaphor and Rational Discourse
(1997),and he has edited (with Laura Marcus), as well as written the intro-
duction for, the first unabridged edition of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Charac-
ter (2005).

Christina Stojanova is assistant professor in film studies at the University

of Regina. Among her major publications in Canada, the United States, and
the United Kingdom are chapters in Making It Like a Man: Canadian Mascu-
linities (2010), European Nightmares (2009), and The Cinema of Eastern
Europe (2005). Her book on Romanian cinema will be published by Edin-
burgh University Press in 2011.

Béla Szabados is professor of philosophy at the University of Regina and a

past president of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics. He is the author of
Ludwig Wittgenstein on Race, Gender and Cultural Identity: Philosophy as a
Personal Endeavour (2010) and an editor (with David Stern) of Wittgenstein
Reads Weininger (2004).

William C. Wees is professor emeritus of English at McGill University. He

was editor of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies from 1997 to 2008. His
writings on film have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is
also the author of Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (1972), Light
Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film
(1992), and Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films
(1993).