How Wittgenstein Watched Movies

After lectures, the philosopher would ask a friend, “Could you go to a flick?”

An imagined view of Wittgenstein at the cinema. (Image made with Midjourney.)

When I go to the movie theater, I like to sit in the front. Not necessarily the first row, but somewhere in the first three or four rows, dead center.

I do this for a few reasons: to avoid the lights of cell phones; to be closer to the concession stand, in case I want to get more popcorn; but most of all, to be entirely immersed in the film in a way that isn’t possible on your laptop or smartphone. As David Lynch put it:

If you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You’ll think you have experienced it, but you’ll be cheated. It’s such a sadness, that you think you’ve seen a film, on your fucking telephone.

Get real.

So when I came across an anecdote of Ludwig Wittgenstein going to the movies, his attitude was immediately familiar:

Wittgenstein was always disgusted with what he had said and with himself. Often he would rush off to a cinema immediately after the class ended. As the members of the class began to move their chairs out of the room he might look imploringly at a friend and say in a low tone, “Could you go to a flick?”

On the way to the cinema Wittgenstein would buy a bun or a cold pork pie and munch it while he watched the film. He insisted on sitting in the very first row of seats, so that the screen would occupy his entire field of vision, and his mind would be turned away from the thoughts of the lecture and his feelings of revulsion.
Once he whispered to me, “This is like a shower bath.”

His 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 and did not like his companion to do so. He wished to become totally absorbed into 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.
From Wittgenstein: A Memoir by Norman Malcolm

Wittgenstein seemed to enjoy films primarily for their immersive “cleansing” properties, for their ability to force one to focus entirely on the screen – and not ruminate on philosophical issues. Perhaps for this reason, he was a fan of films that had basic good vs. evil narratives and settings far removed from contemporary Europe – especially American Westerns.

(Note that Wittgenstein died in 1951, a decade+ earlier than many of the films we call Westerns today; e.g., those with Clint Eastwood. Wittgenstein would have been watching things like John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach.)

Going to the movies became a kind of post-work ritual for Wittgenstein. The harder he worked on philosophical problems, the more frequently he attended the cinema:

“We had a sitting room with a good coal fire & he never spent an evening there with us. He went to a cinema almost every evening, but could not remember anything about the films when asked about them the following day. He just went to relax…”

That Wittgenstein went every evening to see a film is an indication of how hard he worked at Newcastle, and how seriously he took the work. It is reminiscent of his remark to Drury:

”You think philosophy is difficult enough but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect. When I was building the house for my sister in Vienna I was so completely exhausted at the end of the day that all I could do was go to a ‘flick’ every night.”

From The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk

Indeed, Wittgenstein himself called movie-going a “ritual” and would go through a similar routine with friends and colleagues in Vienna, London, and elsewhere: eating a cheap meal and then going to the cinema.

After [Gilbert] Pattisson left Cambridge, he and Wittgenstein would meet whenever Wittgenstein passed through London (as he did frequently on his way to and from Vienna) to go through what Wittgenstein described as their ‘ritual’. This consisted of tea at Lyons followed by a film at one of the big cinemas in Leicester Square.

Before arriving in London, Wittgenstein would send Pattisson a card letting him know when he was arriving, so that Pattisson could make the necessary arrangements – i.e. search the Evening Standard for a cinema that was showing a ‘good’ film. In Wittgenstein’s sense this meant an American film, preferably a Western, or, later, a musical or a romantic comedy, but always one without any artistic or intellectual pretensions.

From The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk

Wittgenstein would also get angry when the “real world” intruded into the cinema.

It was the custom at that time to play the national anthem at the end of the film, at which point the audience was expected to rise to their feet and stand respectfully still. This was a ceremony that Wittgenstein could not abide, and he would dash out of the cinema before it could begin. He also found the movie newsreels, which used to be shown between films, unbearable. As war with Germany approached, and the newsreels became more and more patriotic and jingoistic, Wittgenstein’s anger increased. Among his papers there is a draft of a letter addressed to their makers, accusing them of being ‘master pupils of Goebbels’.

From The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk

However, Wittgenstein’s relationship to cinema might not have been simply “refreshing” his mind. Scattered throughout his notebooks and letters are comments on the aesthetics of film. He compares films to dreams:

In general . . . a film is something very similar to a dream & the thoughts of Freud are directly applicable to it.

(Wittgenstein 2003, 97)

…and suggests that films provide ideas, not merely refresh his mind:

As long as it is not frightfully bad, [a film] always provides me with food for thoughts & feelings.
(Wittgenstein 2003, 97)

Wittgenstein’s relationship with images didn’t stop there. He was particularly interested in photography, taking photos with cheap cameras purchased at Woolworth’s.

Reading his biography, it might be a surprise that Wittgenstein didn’t get involved with filmmaking at some level. After all, he worked as a schoolteacher, lab technician, hospital porter, architect, and philosophy professor. Maybe he wanted to preserve the cinema as a refuge from the constant philosophical thoughts that filled his mind.

Interestingly, Wittgenstein is also one of few philosophers to be the subject of a feature-length film, although I probably wouldn’t recommend Wittgenstein (1992) by Derek Jarman to anyone that isn’t already interested in philosophy.