Derek Jarman's At Your Own Risk

I've written a piece about Derek Jarman's book At Your Own Risk (recently republished by the University of Minnesota along with some of the director's other writings) over at The House Next Door. The first paragraph is excerpted below; follow the link to the House to read the full article, which attempts to grapple with Jarman's views about aesthetics, sexuality, AIDS, and societal oppression.

Derek Jarman's films are, already, such a naked, passionate, intimate portrait of their creator and his ideas that one wouldn't expect that Jarman would have had much energy left over to pour into written autobiography. Nevertheless, Jarman was a prolific writer as well as a filmmaker and artist, and his creative pursuits in multiple artistic forms constitute a unified body of work; the books are every bit as essential as the films to those who wish to understand Jarman. The University of Minnesota Press has thus done a valuable service in reissuing three of these books: Chroma, Jarman's collection of writings on color, his 1989-90 diary Modern Nature, and At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament, a loose autobiographical book that traces Jarman's experiences of society's reactions to gayness.

Continue reading at the House Next Door

War Requiem

Derek Jarman's War Requiem is a potent, poetic visualization of composer Benjamin Britten's grandiose anti-war composition of the same name. Britten's epic choral music, written in 1962 and recorded with Britten as conductor in 1963, incorporates Latin texts along with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, a British soldier who served during World War I and was killed in the final week of the war. Owen's posthumously published poetry captured the experience of war with a combination of romanticism and unvarnished realism, and Jarman's film is similarly conceived. The film is entirely dialogue-free, relying on the juxtaposition of Britten's music, Owen's poetry and Jarman's ripe imagery. During the prologue, Laurence Olivier appears, in his final role before his death, as an old soldier, also in his last days, reminiscing about his long-ago wartime experiences with his nurse (Jarman regular Tilda Swinton). On the soundtrack, Olivier reads one of Owen's poems. The remainder of the film is set to the entirety of Britten's War Requiem with no other sound, which was a requirement imposed upon the film by the holders of the recording. Nevertheless, Jarman makes brilliant use of this music, setting Britten's sweeping orchestrations and vocals against a collage of images, archival war footage and semi-narrative vignettes.

Tilda Swinton reappears in the body of the film as a wartime nurse, and much of the action cuts between her tending to patients and various scenes with Wilfred Owen (Nathaniel Parker) and other frontline soldiers played by Sean Bean and Owen Teale. Jarman's dialogue-free storytelling is lyrical and haunting, capturing the feel of war, its horror and misery, both for those in the middle of it and for those waiting elsewhere for news of their loved ones. These soldiers are dirt-smeared, caked in mud and blood, lying in piles to sleep, huddled together; there's a certain homoeroticism in Jarman's depictions of soldierly comradeship, inspired by the homoerotic subtexts in the poems of the possibly gay Owen. These men, suffering together, take comfort only in each other's presences, and in the periodic letters they receive from home. In Jarman's vision, there is no meaning to war, no advances or victories or even concrete battles: he shows only the aftermath, the men bleeding and dying, the muddy survivors lounging around in their bunkers, blank-eyed and exhausted, or the wounded, shell-shocked men who fill up the beds of the hospitals.

Interspersed with these scenes are memories of pre-war happiness, shot by Jarman in his characteristic grainy, hazy super-8 to contrast against the crisp formal quality of the wartime scenes. For these men, their memories are thus rendered ephemeral and indistinct against the hyper-real present of the war, and yet the past seems even sweeter for its gauzy imprecision. These memories are often simple, just glimpses of domestic tranquility, like a soldier helping his mother fold laundry. In other scenes, children play at war, making a game of it, not understanding that one day they will see its horrors for real. In one of the film's most haunting sequences, a group of children hold a warrior's funeral for a beaten-up old stuffed teddy bear: they place the bear in a red-lined coffin with solemnity and pomp, then lay it on a pyre of burning leaves, crying as they say goodbye to their beloved toy. It is a child's memory of a ritual that would later be enacted as an adult, with friends lost and buried instead of toys.


The film also incorporates a great deal of religious imagery, making a metaphor of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. Jarman imagines Abraham (Nigel Terry) killing his son (Parker again) to the applause of corpulent businessmen in theatrical makeup, smoking fat cigars — the angel's last-minute change of plans goes unheeded in this version of the story. The film inventively recontextualizes the Biblical tale as a metaphor for war, as fathers send their sons off to war, to be killed on the basis of vague orders from above, all for the benefit of the wealthy classes, who profiteer as the blood of the young flows through the trenches. Later, the soldiers evoke another Biblical sacrificial figure, donning crowns of thorns as they carry the dead and wounded through an apocalyptic wasteland of burnt-out fields and rubble.

Jarman's imagery, without telling any particular story, nevertheless manages to capture the one larger story of war: the companionship of the men at the front, the letters home, the friends who die and are mourned. His dialogue-free storytelling and vague characters suggest that all wars have only this one story: young men suffering and dying and losing the people they care about. In the film's final half-hour, Jarman largely switches from depictions of individual soldiers to a more generalized image of war itself. Using archival footage of various conflicts, stitched together into an increasingly frantic, frenetic montage as the pace of Britten's music accelerates, Jarman moves smoothly from the suffering and death of the individual soldier to the horrors of war as a whole. He splices together images of soldiers dying all over the world, representing different nations, different races and ethnicities, different conflicts. But they're all dying or dead, all of them ripped apart, bleeding bright red, their brains exposed within their split-open scalps, as the cannons fire, different guns, new developments in warfare, all of them intended to cause more and more fiery death. This montage reaches its seeming climax with an image of the atom bomb exploding, an apex of horror, but then the collage of dead soldiers merely resumes, as though to confirm that the dropping of the bomb was not a horror to end all horrors, but merely one more especially devastating entry in the 20th Century's massive death toll.

Another of the film's most poignant sequences is more personal, a lengthy closeup on Tilda Swinton during a particularly elegiac movement of Britten's piece. The shot opens with Swinton braiding her long red hair, her eyes staring blankly off into the distance. As Jarman holds the shot, his camera gently bobbing, reframing Swinton's distinctive face, she begins swaying with the music, closing her eyes and mouthing the lyrics. It's the only moment in the film in which the images and the music are explicitly synced in this way, and it drives home the agony of those waiting at home for news of a soldier, as Swinton soulfully dances in place with the music, its melancholy tones moving her body, her graceful limbs arcing in balletic sweeps over her head as she's overcome with grief and the bittersweet smile of nostalgia. These complex emotions, the emotions of war and its aftermath, are at the heart of Jarman's intense, affecting film.

Films I Love #34: The Angelic Conversation (Derek Jarman, 1985)

Derek Jarman's The Angelic Conversation is the purest and greatest of the filmmaker's experimental works, a lyrical, abstracted visualization of the love sonnets of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's poems, long thought to have been addressed to an anonymous young man, are read aloud on the soundtrack by Judi Dench, accompanied by the expressive ambient industrial music of Jarman's collaborators in Coil, who intersperse their chiming electronic tones with sloshing water sounds and other field recordings. This music — my own introduction to the film, since as a Coil fan I owned the soundtrack long before I ever saw the film itself — is haunting and ethereal, a perfect complement to Dench's mannered readings and the ghostly beauty of Jarman's images. The film constantly suggests the outline of a story, but it is nevertheless largely non-narrative, simply following several young men meandering through desolate, rocky terrain or performing arcane rituals with fire and reflective metals. Jarman shot the footage on 8mm film stock and then blew it up to 35mm, giving everything a fuzzy, grainy, blown-out quality, with extreme contrasts between muddy shadows and blinding flashes of light and color.

The imagery is some of Jarman's most sensual and layered, gorgeous images in which nothing much is happening beyond the play of light on skin, the jittery slow motion that animates these figures, the mutations of a flickering flame played out in closeup frame by frame. The film is an ode to the sensuality and dark beauty of love, and particularly, unsurprisingly, of gay love. Torches flare and pulse in dark caves. Men walk through scorched, foggy landscapes carrying heavy burdens on their backs like Christ. Strange rituals are performed by men whose skin is turned a pale gray by Jarman's video processing; allusions to mythology and spirituality are encoded in these bizarre, stagey interludes. Violent wrestling and struggle slowly softens into caresses and embraces, hatred becoming love. This is a stunning, deeply affecting film, a masterful translation of Shakespeare's evocative sonnets into a series of abstract vignettes whose mystery and suppleness matches the evocative lyricism of the Bard's verse.

The Tempest

Derek Jarman's film of The Tempest, William Shakespeare's final play, challenges the idea of the "faithful" literary adaptation. Jarman's marvelous, light-hearted, visually evocative film is, for the most part, true to the text of Shakespeare's play, but the director builds around the text in ingenious ways, creating a dense patchwork that melds his own punk sensibility with the Bard's mystical ode to romance, revenge and redemption. The film is true to the story and structure of the play, which concerns the bitter, exiled sorcerer Prospero (Heathcote Williams), whose lordly title was stolen from him by his conniving brother Antonio (Richard Warwick) and the King of Naples (Peter Bull). Sent away with his young daughter Miranda (Toyah Willcox), Prospero becomes lord of a nearly uninhabited island, where he quickly enslaves Caliban (Jack Birkett), the animalistic son of a witch, and Ariel (Karl Johnson), an elemental spirit of the air who does Prospero's bidding in the hopes of one day earning his freedom. The play opens twelve years after Prospero's exile, when he summons a storm that causes his betrayers, Antonio and the King, to shipwreck upon his island, along with the King's son Ferdinand (David Meyer) and several retainers.

Jarman not only follows this plot fairly closely, but has his characters speaking much of Shakespeare's dialogue without alteration, in all its intricate, stylized poetry. Despite this fealty to its source, The Tempest never feels like anything less than a personal expression of Jarman's vision: a mystical, erotic, visually sumptuous work in which the sensual quality of the imagery is as important to its overall effect as the language of Shakespeare. Filled with flickering candles and ornate decorations, Prospero's island stronghold has a kind of dilapidated grandeur that's matched by the ragged period costumes of the characters. Miranda especially is the film's spirit, a sprightly nymph with a mischievous smile and the dirty beauty of a street urchin. She is the proper heiress to a kingdom but has been raised in cluttered squalor amidst Prospero's dusty libraries, in rooms where elegant furniture sits in a chaos of filth and garbage. She wanders through the castle, and through the film, with her billowing gowns strewn haphazardly around her, playing at being a princess. Her playful spirit and charm animate the film. In one great scene, she practices at descending a staircase while demurely greeting imaginary guests on each side of her — halfway down, she stumbles and falls into an abrupt sitting posture on the steps, her dirty bare feet sticking out from beneath her gown at askew angles.

It's through performances like Willcox's turn as Miranda that Jarman subtly worms his way into this old, well-known material. The acting has a spirit of play and winking slyness about it, a flippant attitude that's not disrespectful towards Shakespeare's text but rather especially attuned to the comic possibilities of these characters. Caliban is an important figure in this respect, and Birkett plays the monstrous slave with leering intensity. His introduction is unforgettable, sitting in front of a fire and eating whole, uncooked eggs, spitting out the cracked shells and letting a dribble of yolk run down his face as he does so. With his blackened teeth and wide, popping eyes, he is a ridiculous figure, a grotesque caricature. Birkett's campy performance finds its match in the duo of drunken sailors who Caliban soon finds himself involved with: Stephano (Christopher Biggins) and Trinculo (Peter Turner). Together, this comic trio attempts to lead a revolt against Prospero, but instead mostly just stumble drunkenly through a series of games of dress-up: their flamboyant performances and proclivity for donning dresses and makeup brings a homoerotic component to their conspiracy.


Jarman's wildly original perspective on this material is equally apparent in the visualization of the flashbacks involving Caliban and his sinister mother, Sycorax (Claire Davenport), who is depicted as a naked witch breast-feeding her adult son and living in a state of savagery. Many later critics have viewed Shakespeare's Tempest in terms of colonialism, with Prospero as the colonial conqueror who takes control of a native land, enslaving its inhabitants with his more sophisticated means, which they tend to view as magic. Jarman's interpretation acknowledges this modern, deconstructionist reading of the play in these scenes, in which Prospero describes himself as redeeming the island from its wild nature. He uses the language of a liberator but only offers a new kind of slavery, freeing the air spirit Ariel from Sycorax's imprisonment but forcing the spirit to obey a new master instead. Despite this nod to the interpretation of The Tempest as a colonialist text, Jarman's own vision of this material is much more in line with the playful sensibility of Shakespeare than with the political shadings layered over the text by subsequent interpreters. He's simply having fun, reveling in the myriad possibilities this play affords for striking imagery. Ariel's assault on the shipwrecked King and his party is in particular a visual tour de force: the spirit appears to them accompanied by a pair of midgets in drag, who claw and howl at the prisoners while the room spins, and Ariel weaves a spell around the group in the form of cobwebs clinging to a chandelier.

Even better is the film's climactic scene, in which Jarman definitively departs from Shakespeare for the staging of the grand ball where Prospero forgives his enemies and announces the impending wedding of his daughter to the King's son Ferdinand. Jarman surrounds this scene, the romantic climax of the film, with a dazzling array of homoerotic imagery, including a sped-up dance featuring a galloping troupe of sailors, exchanging partners and twirling in circles around the throne room. Finally, the singer Elisabeth Welch appears, shimmering in gold like a sun goddess, weaving through the room soulfully singing an upbeat variation on "Stormy Weather," smiling with grace and passing by everyone in turn, putting smiles on their faces with her beautiful voice.

It's a wonderful moment, Jarman's campy, irreverent replacement for Shakespeare's finale, in which Prospero, having used magic to forgive his enemies and send his daughter off into the world with a new husband, gives up his magic arts for good. Jarman elides these scenes, perhaps unwilling to give up magic. Shakespeare's finale has been widely interpreted as the playwright's farewell to the theater, so it's fitting that Jarman, so early in his career, should be unwilling to say his goodbyes to film in the same way. Instead, his film ends in the aftermath of a colorful party, in a room whose floor is littered with multicolored flower petals. It's a fitting closing to a film that celebrates the visual magic of the cinema as thoroughly as the magical arts of Prospero.

The Queen Is Dead

One usually doesn't think of a stridently avant-garde filmmaker like Derek Jarman making rock music videos, but during the late 70s and 80s the British director frequently contributed to the music video form, crafting videos for the Sex Pistols and Marianne Faithful. Jarman had a particularly fruitful collaboration with the Smiths, for whom he made the charming, funny video for their single "Ask" and the multi-song miniature masterpiece The Queen Is Dead. This gorgeous 13-minute film was accompanied by three of the Smiths' songs: "The Queen Is Dead," "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," and "Panic." The film is of a piece with the evocative collage features Jarman made during the same period, proving that this so-called "music video" is as much a part of his oeuvre as The Angelic Conversation or The Last of England.

The film is structured around its trio of songs, with each part somewhat distinct from the others. The songs flow into one another, and the first and third section mirror each other in style and techniques, but the film is unmistakeably a triptych rather than a seamless whole. The film opens with Jarman's frantic, jittery interpretation of "The Queen Is Dead," with the imagery conjuring a nightmare vision of disintegrating England to match its title sentiment. In strobing, sped-up motion, hoods spray paint slogans across crumbling stone walls, a flaming record shoots across the screen like a comet, a young man with angel wings appears to be suffering, doubled over in pain, and jeweled crowns float in the midst of layered video superimpositions. This segment is unrelentingly fast-paced, matching the steady pulse of the accompanying song.

Jarman's images are simple and iconic, and he repeats them as though spelling out a mysterious coded message in rebus form: flower petals, a girl's face, a revolving guitar, abandoned buildings. Only towards the end does the repetitive structure begin to break down, opening up for several longer shots of a girl with close-cropped hair frolicking in a courtyard surrounded by desolate buildings, throwing a British flag into the wind to flutter above her. The pace slows only slightly for these shots, and there are still interjections of layered video abstractions, but the effect of this slight slackening is exaggerated by the film's overall density and speed. These few moments of relative relaxation are stunning in context.


This also sets up the film's much more deliberately paced second segment, based around one of the Smiths' finest songs, the morbidly romantic ballad "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out." The song apparently brings out the best in Jarman as well, for the images he pairs with this music must surely rank among the most beautiful, haunting few minutes in his entire oeuvre. His illustration of the song's maudlin lyrics — wishing for a romantic mutual death — is simple and direct, accomplished by layering several images on top of one another and fading between them, allowing the intersections of different film stocks and colors to create tactile, textural compositions. An androgynous young woman, bathed in deep blue light and lying on her stomach, sleeps in the midst of this collage, Jarman's camera moving sensuously across her body, letting the light play along her skin. She is deliberately positioned so that her gender is actually unclear — she might just as well be a feminine young man. This image is blended into black and white footage of two lovers kissing together in a field, a twinkling overlay of golden light, and footage of fiery wrecks and car crashes, sometimes in grainy black and white and sometimes emitting purplish flames.

The images are basic, and obviously constitute Jarman's illustrative response to the song's lyrics: "and if a ten ton truck/ kills the both of us/ to die by your side/ well, the pleasure and the privilege is mine." The film's beauty, however, lies in the way Jarman transforms this simple premise into something deeply emotional and moving, a sumptuous depiction of a love so powerful that it endures even through death. Jarman's use of superimposition, besides being visually striking, has always been a way of creating dense layers of emotion that could not possibly be contained within a single image otherwise. His layering of images rarely serves a narrative purpose, though in this particular instance the juxtaposition of the sleeping woman with the other images could easily be construed as a representation of dreams or memory or imagination. In fact, though, Jarman doesn't seem to be suggesting a story so much as creating an atmosphere, exploring the melodramatically romantic mood of the Smiths song. The young woman is sexualized by Jarman, but in a way independent of any gendered sex characteristics: the camera admiringly crawls across the naked upper torso and legs, fading in and out of the sea of images, capturing the way light and shadow play across the skin. Considered in the context of Jarman's gay sexual identity, this film might by read as an acknowledgment of the impossible array of social and political forces sabotaging the possibility of gay love, leaving death as the only viable option — and yet at the same time opening up other, more hopeful possibilities by layering in the pastoral image of the kissing lovers.


This second segment is a pivot point, a moment of sad but beautiful tranquility in the center of the film's rushing torrent of imagery. The final segment, Jarman's video for the Smiths' "Panic," returns to the jittery pacing and jumpy camerawork of the first section. He even reuses some of the same imagery — the flaming record, rope-jumping schoolgirls in negative, the crowns, a static shot of a British pound note — while the video for "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" utilized an entirely distinct visual palette. This brief final section essentially recycles and revisits the opening, this time centering on a young man walking around a grimy black and white London but quickly cutting away to and layering in all sorts of other images. The sensory overload is no doubt intentional on Jarman's part, suggesting an apocalyptic world about to fall apart at any moment. A hand, perpetually outstretched as though begging, shakes and blurs, propelled by the insistent beat of the music.

Though short and created as a commission — Jarman himself reportedly dismissed his collaborations with the Smiths as only a paycheck — to treat The Queen Is Dead as minor Jarman would be to ignore one of the director's most concise and beautifully realized summations of his avant-garde collage work. These evocative, poetic, multi-layered images create webs of resonance with the Smiths songs they're accompanying. The result is not only the rare music video that actually enhances and emotionally intensifies the music, but one of Jarman's great films.

Caravaggio

Derek Jarman's Caravaggio presents itself as a loose, poeticized biography of the famed Baroque painter Michelangelo de Caravaggio, but in fact Jarman appears to be using his subject as a gateway into ruminations on art, love, violence and religion. The film reflects far more of Jarman than it does of Caravaggio, even with the painter at its center and his paintings restaged in elegant, shakily static tableaux vivants. There is little trace of a conventional biopic here: the broad outlines of Caravaggio's life are visible, but the elliptical, time-jumping narrative structure Jarman has chosen, all of it filtered through his subject's deathbed memories, ensures that this is anything but a staid, objective account of a life. This is something much messier, much more chaotic, but also in its way truer — if not to the facts, then to the spirit of the rebellious painter whose wild, passionate art so shook up the conventions of his time.

Dexter Fletcher plays the young Caravaggio, cocky and swaggering and sexually frank, somewhere in between a painter and a hustler, offering himself as an "art object" (this postmodern phrase the first of Jarman's purposeful anachronisms) as much as his paintings. Perhaps for this reason, he soon earns the attention of the prominent Church official Cardinal Del Monte (Michael Gough), who seems to appreciate him as much for his cocksure eroticism as for his equally sensual paintings. Jarman cuts fluidly between the scenes with Fletcher and the later scenes with Nigel Terry as the mature painter. With his hard, flashing eyes and chiseled face, Terry is an electrifying presence, delivering a performance that consistently hints at and develops the depths of Caravaggio's turbulent character. The film is about art as looking, art codified in the gaze, and Terry's gaze has an impossible intensity and ferocity.

The scenes of Caravaggio at work are crisply edited, built around exchanges of glances: Caravaggio works in this film by arranging tableaux of living models who perfectly hold the poses of his paintings while he stares at them. The painter spends more time looking, observing, than he does actually putting brush to canvas — so much so that in one scene, after Caravaggio has spent seemingly endless minutes looking at the scene he's arranged, Del Monte bursts out laughing when the painter finally, tentatively, touches his brush to the painting to adjust a minor detail. Jarman, one of the most visual of filmmakers, clearly possesses this same painterly sensibility: the instinct to look, to stare intently, to soak up every detail of a scene before finally attempting to capture its essence. In the scenes of Caravaggio painting, Jarman cuts methodically between the painter and the models, who sometimes meet his gaze, sometimes look away as dictated by their pose. Implicit in this exchange of looks is also the painter's eroticizing of his subjects, a homoerotic desire that shows through even in paintings where Caravaggio has transformed a worldly young man into a pouty, cherubic angel or warrior saint. Jarman aligns himself with the painter in this by populating his film with pretty young men who are as much subjects of the filmmaker's appreciative gaze as they are of the painter's brush: it is one more way in which Jarman seems to be telling his own story as much as Caravaggio's.


Among Caravaggio's models, none are more special to him than the rough-and-tumble boxer and hoodlum Ranuccio (Sean Bean), who Caravaggio makes a frequent subject in his work. Soon enough, painter and model are involved in a complicated love triangle along with Ranuccio's lover Lena (Tilda Swinton), whom both men love and desire as much as they do each other. In some of the film's most extraordinary and erotically charged scenes, Lena first watches as Caravaggio, painting Ranuccio, seduces the model with his unyielding gaze. The scene is soon enough reversed when Lena tenderly kisses the painter while Ranuccio watches from the background, his expression controlled only with apparent effort; it's hard to tell who he's more jealous of. This was Swinton's first film, and her first of many for Jarman, and she delivers a typically nuanced and effective performance, with her dirty ruffian's face and bold manner. Lena is a ragged, filthy but sensual street woman, with a tremendous shock of golden hair hidden beneath her rags as though waiting for someone to acknowledge her hidden nobility and beauty.

This is a lush, sumptuous film, preoccupied with the sensuous qualities of naked flesh, the thick folds of expensive fabric, and vibrant color. Each of Jarman's frames is as carefully composed as one of Caravaggio's paintings, still life images in which the barely perceptible quivering of the model-actors' bodies betrays the life within these tableaux. Jarman approaches Caravaggio's life not as an historian or biographer, but as a poet, extracting the essence of the painter's art and times: the homoeroticism of his paintings of young men; the violence and criminality of his life; his clean, clear treatment of color, so closely aligned with Jarman's own aesthetic.

Individual scenes are conceived, for the most part, not to advance the story but to suggest the themes and ideas at its heart. Thus Jarman's camera lingers on a long silent scene in which one of Caravaggio's models, growing bored with posing, performs limber gymnastics, stretching and doing splits and nimbly pirouetting. In the corner of the frame, looking on with a mysterious smile, is a painting of a nude cherub that this model had just finished posing for: the wings mounted on the wall provide a background to these calisthenics. A costume ball where Caravaggio unveils several of his paintings is equally evocative, providing an excuse for Jarman to fill the screen with grotesqueries and lavish details. Even when Caravaggio meets the Pope (Jack Birkett) for a private audience, His Holiness winds up being a fey, sneering monster whose eyes roll in different directions as he casually drawls about manipulation and control. The film is playful and often surprisingly funny, but also hypnotic and dreamlike, a fantasy about the relationships between art, desire and power rather than an accurate document of Caravaggio's reality — a fact that Jarman not-so-subtly suggests with his bold anachronisms, peppering the film with modern calculators, electric lights and typewriters as though scrawling his signature messily across a period masterpiece. These discontinuities confirm that the film is not simply a story about a long ago painter, but explicitly an attempt to look back and evaluate Caravaggio from a modern perspective.

Wittgenstein

In his penultimate film, Wittgenstein, Derek Jarman attempts to grapple with the life and ideas of the brilliant, tortured philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, applying to the great man's life a framework that can only be described as the mingling of avant-garde theater with the aesthetics of a children's TV show. Most biographical and historical films attempt to rigorously capture a sense of the subject's life and times, to place the subject in context, to recreate his surroundings. Jarman rejects this historical realism out of hand, setting his film on an empty sound stage with a black curtain in the background, blotting out all extraneous detail. The sets are correspondingly meager and simple, usually consisting of a single prop that is needed for the scene at hand — a chair, a bed, a table, a piano, only occasionally a more complete range of furniture at Wittgenstein's seminars, where students are ranged around his blackboard in chairs. Furthermore, the wardrobe is defiantly ahistorical, ranging from Wittgenstein's plausible and conservative suits to the single-color sweatsuits favored by his sometime lover Johnny (Kevin Collins), to the brightly colored garments worn by much of the rest of the cast. Primary colors abound, vibrant hues that serve to separate Wittgenstein from those around him, and the film as a whole from the historical story it purports to tell — the ridiculous costuming of the cast would be most at home in an 80s dance club maybe, or else a surreal children's show. This is a film that dresses up the philosopher Bertrand Russell (Michael Gough) in a bright purple bow-tie and primary-red robes, seemingly just because it can. These philosophers and great thinkers look like they'd be more at home on Sesame Street than a Cambridge lecture hall. There's also no sense of real time or narrative, only a sequence of incidents and idiosyncratic ruminations on Wittgenstein's ever-changing thinking about the nature of the world and the way language is related to it. This elimination of context puts the focus completely on Wittgenstein himself, his relationships, his thoughts, and his internal dramas.

Wittgenstein himself is played by two actors: Clancy Chassay, who plays the philosopher as a young boy and provides bemused narration and interludes, and Karl Johnson, who plays the older Wittgenstein. The former is responsible for many of the film's more playful touches, and he opens the film by introducing himself, his bourgeoisie family, and the many tutors who are enlisted to teach him as a boy. He also engages in philosophical dialogues with a deformed Martian (the disabled actor Nabil Shaban) in a luminescent green costume, who questions him about basic concepts: how he knows the earth exists, whether he has ten toes, and what he thinks it means to say he is "a human." These scenes establish, through this ludicrous pairing, the way in which philosophy attempts to question even basic concepts, to start from no assumptions and work outwards from that empty space. The alien, who should really not exist, sets the film's tone: nothing can be assumed, an axiom that's driven home by Wittgenstein later in the film when he poses the old question about the sun going around the earth versus the earth going around the sun. Everyone used to assume the former, simply because that was the way it looked, but what, he asks, would it look like if it were the latter? From the perspective of the earth, of course, either model for the solar system looks the same. Nothing can be assumed, not even the evidence of the senses, a condition that leads Wittgenstein through the most tremendous self-doubt and internal strife in his pursuit of a comprehensive philosophy.

Jarman dramatizes this struggle almost in a vacuum. Incidents from Wittgenstein's life appear, disconnected from the whole: he leaves home, goes to war, writes his master treatise the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, becomes a rural elementary school teacher, and finally settles in at Cambridge as a professor, continuing to think all the while. It's a film, essentially, about thinking, a problem for a visual medium that Jarman solves by stripping down the surroundings and infusing the simple sets and costumes with as much color and vibrancy as he can muster. There are flashes of inexplicable visual bravado, like the scene where the society lady Ottoline Morrell (Tilda Swinton) is made up with yellow and blue patterns painted on her face. In the rest of the film, the character is made up more prosaically but no less completely, her face a pasty white mask with devilish red lips, while her clothes are among the brightest and frilliest in the cast. Why? Who knows, but this visual extravagance sets off her privileged world from the stubbornly proletariat Wittgenstein, whose greatest ambition is to abandon philosophy and become a manual laborer.


These kinds of disjunctions show up again and again within the film. In one scene, Wittgenstein dons a pair of white wings, attempting to fly as he holds a pair of lawn sprinklers in front of him, their twirling heads sending out circular sprays of water that flow into one another and form hypnotic patterns in the air, the droplets illuminated by hidden lights. It's strangely beautiful, but again, why is it here at all? Many of Jarman's interjections into the story of Wittgenstein are puzzling in the extreme, devoid of context as the whole film is. His visual sensibility seems calculated to be off-putting and unsettling, with its queasy mishmash of tastelessly combined colors and clothes, and the occasional detours into surrealist imagery that seem totally unrelated to the film's central story. Visually, the film might be described as an attempt to find the sublime within the ugly and tacky, a feat that Jarman sporadically accomplishes. His set and costume design frequently verge into absurd beauty, as in the scene where the economist Maynard Keynes (John Quentin), dressed in a ridiculous electric blue suit, meets with his aging ballerina wife (Lynn Seymour) whose graceful movements in a frilly blue costume turn the scene into a dance in sympathetic colors.

In addition to its engagement with Wittgenstein's ideas, the film also deals with the philosopher's conflicted sexuality, which seems to have caused him as much anguish as his considerations of philosophical problems. The film suggests that this was a man who brought the same laser-like logical intellect to bear on every aspect of his life — when designing a house for his sister, he planned it down to details as small as hinges and doorknobs. His sexuality, then, is given equally intense scrutiny, and he struggles with the conflicting pleasure and guilt he feels over his homosexual affairs, unsure of whether he's doing wrong or not. The film's other characters seem to have less trouble with such basic problems, and in some ways the film questions the importance of philosophy at all, much as Wittgenstein did at various points in his life. In one scene, Keynes and Johnny, who are also lovers, share a kiss, which Johnny laments cannot be explained by philosophy. Keynes is less perturbed, declaring that it's not meant to be explained, implying that some parts of human experience are beyond the realm of understanding. Wittgenstein cannot so easily accept this, cannot tolerate aspects of the world being roped off from analysis and explication, and the film's unanswered central question is whether Wittgenstein or Keynes is right on this point.

This is obviously a very complex and fascinating film, all the more so for the way in which it leaves such crucial questions unresolved. Wittgenstein's philosophy is presented in his own fumbling, often contradictory words, taking shape throughout the film as he postulates and then rejects new theories and new ways of understanding the world. The final scene visualizes this mental process in terms of the conflict between a rigorous, totally logical understanding of the world (a world of pure ice as represented by a giant snowman) and a more rough-edged, realistic view of the world with all its complications intact. This latter view, clearly the one favored by Jarman, is represented by the only point in the film in which the black curtain of the backdrop is peeled back. The young Wittgenstein, that mischievous philosopher-child, throws back the curtain to reveal a painted sunset, an icon for the beauty of the world. It's also a symbol of the film's endless cycle of explanations and thinking, a process that moves ever closer to the world without quite reaching it. Even here, the curtain is pushed aside but an equally artificial backdrop lies underneath. As a metaphor for the strivings of philosophy, always seeking to fully understand the world and always coming up against illusions and barriers, it's a nearly perfect way to end the film.