MIT’s List Projects: Narrative Color is a selection of five films, curated for their precise use of color. These films engage audiences through nonlinear and complex narrative, using color as an integral explanatory component. Color, as a visual element with emotive qualities allows filmmakers to elicit intrinsic sensation from audiences. Stemming from this unconscious sensation, color can also serve as a symbolic function, a vehicle for less abstract meanings and associations. Thematically, the exhibition is a broad effort, featuring films within a forty year period (1970-2014) and from a variety of cultural contexts.
Visitors I observed tended to experience the exhibition one of two ways. Some relied on the curatorial purpose of the exhibition and contribution viewed the films piecewise and and without narrative context, to understand color’s stylistic contribution to each. Others tended to take in the entirety of one or two of the films, undoubtedly influenced by the exhibition’s focus. Though either method has its merits, I chose the latter,spending most of my time on Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein (1993, 35mm to DVD, 69 minutes).
Shot against a black soundstage, the film is an exploration of the usefulness of erudition and theory, loosely following the life of Austrian-born philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The film is a tableau on the loneliness and pointlessness of philosophical genius, tragic, though almost overwhelmingly whimsical. We are introduced to young Wittgenstein in a scene of particularly dark pageantry, our precocious narrator presiding over his wealthy family’s storied history. This scene is soon followed by technicolor credits. Stylistically, the film trots out its story in psychedelic color and ornate wardrobes, undercut with a pointed sense of humor.
In an introduction to the deadpan bizarrity of the film, a young Wittgenstein postulates to a martian that humans definitively have ten toes. Philosophers, accordingly, must have ten toes. Our martian asks, facetiously or not, if martians, having fewer than ten toes, might be able to call themselves philosophers.
These lines of logic and linguistic turns enrage and impassion our protagonist as we follow the chronology of his life, his failure to embrace more tangible, practical means of living, and the evolution of philosophical thought. Along the way, we meet thinkers and members of Cambridge’s intellectual society: Bertrand Russell, Lady Ottoline Morrell and John Maynard Keynes.
Following the curated purpose of the film in the exhibition, a considerable amount of my attention was diverted to the film’s costuming. Unlike most of the cast, our title character is seldom dressed unusually . His fellow intellectuals and students, clad in lurid purples, greens and reds are flippant in their dismissal of adult Wittgenstein’s inability to separate philosophical frustration with his everyday, emotive self. He is a plain-clothed ascetic compared to his bedecked peers, a self-deprived seeker of refined thought. Wittgenstein is nauseated by bright, potpourri “intellectualism”, full of cruelty and banality. Color serves to represent the ugliness of what Wittgenstein perceives to be a privileged and self-indulgent mode of living. However, the film and its characters aren’t presented this way so that viewers are meant to fully agree with Wittgenstein’s desire for authenticity, rural living, and disgust with the urban intelligentsia. We are left to wonder if Wittgenstein’s obsession with manual labor is a kind of craven ressentiment, a frustration with his own inability to find an uncomplicated struggle to triumph over.
Color in this film is menacing to the the purity of Wittgenstein’s ideas in that it represents bourgeois, uninspired academic thinking and its echo chambers of related pontification. But we also see it as a motif of childlike fascination, the stain of an impossibly blue popsicle, the shades of 3-D glasses at the cinema. The film provides a deconstruction of philosophy, using color and its playfulness as a foil to the weightiness of metaphysical thought. However it is unclear where salvation lies: We are meant to understand that even Wittgenstein, for all his genius, could never quite figure out if there was any value to genius at all. Color allows us to draw a contrast between the continually frustrated Wittgenstein, and the relative lightness of his surrounding world.
The exhibition’s aesthetic focus was a helpful point of view from which to take in a decidedly avant-garde film, an element that can be translated into meaning through a variety of intuitive channels.
List Projects: Narrative Color is curated by Alise Upitis, Assistant Curator, Public Art and Exhibitions, MIT List Visual Arts Center. The exhibition runs until May 22, 2016. More information on gallery hours, tours, and future exhibitions can be found here.
Photos: Derek Jarman, Wittgenstein, 1993 UK, 35mm transferred to DVD, color, 69 min. Courtesy Zeitgeist Films. Installation view: List Projects: Narrative Color, MIT List Visual Arts Center, April 19-May 22, 2016 Photo: Timothy Llyod,
