WITTGENSTEIN

I wonder what Ludwig Wittgenstein would have made of Derek Jarman's film? The high-brow philosopher reportedly had a low-brow taste in movies, leaning towards westerns and musicals. Jarman has spent his film career deconstructing such popular genres, flooding them with homosexual imagery and artistic self-consciousness, minimal budgets providing little constriction to his imagination. The results have always been inventive but often about as popularly palatable as Wittgenstein's theses. That is, more read about than seen for themselves.

Yet with Wittgenstein, Jarman has worked wonders, as if the demands of interpreting this most complex of thinkers has forced o the director an unusual restraint and clarity. Which is not to suggest his minimal budget has resulted in pure minimalism. Jarman may have been compelled to shoot on a single black set but he creates out of it a singularly wide world vision, journeying from Russia to Cambridge by way of Mars.

This is a cinema of dramatised ideas, lively, funny, visually inventive and (at a mere 75 minutes) refreshingly short. Jarman restricts his homosexual allusions to the notion that Wittgenstein has somehow "infected" young men with his philosophy. Already a surprise art house hit in London, Jarman's infectious enthusiasm for his subject seems like to ensure the continuing spread of his ideas.

It does not so much put the wit back into Wittgenstein, as draw it out for the first time. Since the philosopher once commented that he'd like to have written a treatise comprised entirely of jokes but was held back by his complete lack of humour, I venture he would enjoy Jarman's spirited interpretation of his work (even if he didn't find it particularly funny).