Wittgenstein

“If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.”

A young Ludwig Wittgenstein (Clancy Chassay) is a boy in Vienna, and the film tracks him from there through the First World War to a Cambridge professorship. Derek Jarman stages each stage of his life as a short sketch in a modern theatrical style, with Karl Johnson as the adult philosopher and Michael Gough as Bertrand Russell. The ideas come first: how far language can reach, and what a proud, exacting mind cannot get it to say.