This film is the most surprising film you can expect from a deeply impressionistic film maker. Philosophy is by definition not impressionistic since it has to be logical and perfectly well organized in a rational way. Yet Derek Jarman dares to make a film on a philosopher, and actually more on philosophy because the man himself seems to be in a way made secondary.

Wittgenstein was obsessed with language, but not as a tool to express some thoughts or concepts that was able to build itself and its own architecture along with the mind and the mind's architecture that carried language, both through the very use of language and the mind themselves. Language is not seen as self-made and self-making expressive tool used by discourse to enable human thought to emerge, to build itself by expressing itself in communication.

Language for him is a limitation.

He considers logic is the acme of human intelligence, not language and language does not contain the whole logic of the human mind, even if it can express it. In fact he is a visual mind and he tries to express with words a logic he can represent in his mind's eye visually. He does not see that without language logic would never have been constituted. He ignores the fact that time, space and logic are human inventions for the cosmic duration, distance and orientation, and dependent origination (as the Buddhist would say for the last dimension) and are nothing but models of what the human brain and mind can observe in the outside world.

Wuttgenstein was a friend of Bertrand Russell but apparently he did not integrate Russell's lectures on logic delivered in the USA in the 1920s. Russell spent a tremendous amount of energy to demonstrate that what we get from the outside world is nothing but sensations and that these sensations are nothing if they are not interpreted in a way or another by the brain-mind into perceptions. Russell could not know how the brain and mind did it but he knew that these perceptions in their turn should not be considered as the outside world. They were only humanly interpreted representations of the outside world and all our mental work is using these representations and not the real world.

This means that these representations are models and models are nothing but metaphors: they are or are behaving like the outside world, more or less, never entirely. And this is only possible because we have words, and syntax and sentences and discourse to express these models that could not have been built or abstracted from the magma of our sensations without words, sentences, syntax and discourse.

He sees that a dog is what a certain culture calls a dog, more or less I will add. But he misses the other side of the word dog. It is a concept that is produced by man's power to conceptualize that is developing with age and training and that is deposited in our mind, itself developing from brain work as some kind of virtual abstract complex totally human conceptualizing machine.

But in Wittgenstein's vision language becomes a cage, a prison in a way and our mind is like a parrot in a cage itself inside the cage in which we are imprisoned. Derek Jarman is quite right when he reduces Wittgenstein's thought to this image, metaphor, set of metaphors. And it is cruelly but realistically reducing Wittgenstein's thought to nothing but a set of words repeated without them being understood by the repeater. That is very sad.

Hence Wittgenstein reduced intelligence to logic and then life to direct experience of the dirt, dust and mud of the path. There is no way to articulate the real world onto the conceptualizing power of the brain- mind. Then logic is not in anyway helping us to understand man's intelligence or man's consciousness. Logic becomes an escape from real dirty and muddy life and a straight jacket, an escape into the straightjacket of what is socially acceptable and nothing else with a very limited lee way for those who are philosophers supposedly over and higher than normal simple ordinary people.

He missed Russell's basic principle that life is life (the evidence of the pudding is in me being able to eat it) and logic is a conceptualized abstraction of a model from what we capture of the world through our senses for that to be interpreted and architecturally modelized by the brain-mind.

Descartes was seeing our existence in the fact that we were able to think. Wittgenstein went further in a way in identifying language but he did not see that we are not our language. Our language is produced by us in a social context and it may appear as a limitation (grammar is fascist as is well known since 1968) though it is a tremendous power, the power of abstraction and conceptualization that makes man the only being on earth able to create models of the outside reality that give him some power over this reality. The mind is not the parrot in a cage, itself in a cage in which man is imprisoned and reduced to repeating words he has learned by heart. There is no parrot. There is no first cage. There is no second cage. There is self-creating mind in each man whose experience determines what his mind is going to be or rather to become forever because its becoming will never stop, just like the linguistic tool it uses.

A beautiful attempt at making a film on such a subject, but it remains dry and rather cold. Even the personal life of the philosopher is reduced to very little.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

I knew nothing of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein before seeing Derek Jarman's 'biopic' of the great thinker, and after the film, felt I didn't really know much more. Wittgenstein came from Vienna, born into an aristocracy that produced many geniuses in various mediums. Although his great mind would have no doubt seen him become prodigious in whatever he chose to do, his real love was philosophy, the only subject that gave him any true satisfaction. Through his publications and teachings at Cambridge, he amassed an almost disciple-like following of those who understood his radical musings. Plagued with a psychological affliction that saw three of his brothers commit suicide, he was often ashamed with his privilege and sought refuge in the working man, who he romanticised through the literature of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Most of that knowledge I gained from internet research after watching the film, as Derek Jarman opts for a more interpretive approach - less of a timeline biopic and more of a quasi-abstract work of art. Jarman strips back all conventional cinematic methods and employs a plain black background, with the only presence on screen being the actors and few minimalistic props. He also ignores period detail, having the characters dress in costumes from various periods, often in bright, outlandish colours, using objects that had yet to be invented (similar to his excellent Caravaggio (1986)). This is successful in attempting to portray Wittgenstein's obviously haphazard look at the world, almost like being trapped between his deep ideas and reality (something that is observed by Maynard Keynes (John Quentin) later in the film),but this also makes the film so visually unappealing that it can be rather dull, like watching a small drama group enact a live play.

Yet although the film is rather un-inspirational in terms of cinematic techniques, Wittgenstein is undoubtedly intriguing, putting a fresh outlook on the tired sub-genre of the biopic. Welsh actor Karl Johnson is fine in the role of Wittgenstein, embodying the disconnection his character feels with the world. There is also fine support from Michael Gough, Jarman's muse Tilda Swinton, and Clancy Chassay, playing the narrating young Wittgenstein. His life was rich and full of incident, and Jarman's failure to really grasp the enormity of Wittgenstein makes the film ultimately a disappointment, focusing mainly on his relationship with a young philosopher called Johnny (Kevin Collins) - as though Wittgenstein's torment could have been the result of sexual repression - and only the skimming the surface of his time fighting in World War II, and the physical abuse he inflicted on his young pupils during his time as a schoolteacher. So Wittgenstein will remain somewhat an uncelebrated mystery, even though he is remembered as one of the greatest in his fields by his peers.

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I must disagree with other assessments of Jarman's "Wittgenstein." While the film is clearly not for Wittgenstein initiates (a bit of reading about the man is probably helpful before viewing),I can't class it as the rather boring, trivial exercise in biography others seem to feel it is. Jarman's films are always so contentiously received(which is a good thing),so all I can do is offer my own reception of it. First, while biographical details are somewhat slight, I think there are enough to frame at least a gist of the man Wittgenstein, and second, I must disagree that the exploration of Wittgenstein's sexuality is trivial or inconsequential. Biographically, Wittgenstein's sexuality troubled him greatly. Cinematically, I don't think it's irrelevant to follow a scene of Wittgenstein vainly attempting to explain his philosophy to students and colleagues, an effort which leaves him visibly upset and isolated, his back to the camera and his audience, with a scene of him at the movies, breaking his icy, rigid posture and his earlier-expressed desire that his companion and student, Johnny, not spoil the plot of the movie by distracting him with questions, to deliberately end his isolation and grasp Johnny's hand. Yes, Jarman's portrait of Wittgenstein is not of an attractive or really likable man, and Wittgenstein doesn't seem to have actually been one, so his abrasiveness in the film is not disagreeable for me, much as the abrasiveness of Gauguin in "Lust for Life" isn't. As for Jarman's allegedly un-daring cinematography, I'm no cinematographer, but Jarman seems to have favored dark backgrounds, long scenes and theatrical stagings in other films, and sometimes manages to produce interesting and subtle arrangements thereby. Perhaps his work on "Wittgenstein" was impacted by his encroaching blindness, though I wouldn't suggest writing off the high or low points of the film as the result of his visual impairment. Finally, "Wittgenstein" seems to me like a film deserving of a second viewing. Perhaps it's rather pretentious, perhaps it's a little harsh. Perhaps, though, it's also attempting to make some subtle and not-so-subtle commentary on what's important in a life, how that ought to be presented, and from what perspectives.