Wittgenstein, cinema and immediate experience

Abstract

In principle, the relationship between Wittgenstein and cinema does not seem the most direct. This is because his thought is canonically linked to topics such as language or logic. When the literature analyzes his interest in the arts, it has been privileged to talk about literature, music, or architecture, almost entirely omitting his reflections about cinema. For this reason, in the following article, we propose to expose Wittgenstein’s remarks regarding cinema, located in the intermediate stage of his philosophical work. During this period, Wittgenstein showed great interest in the problem of immediate experience and the linguistic-conceptual means we have to try to represent it in the most reliable way possible, what he called phenomenological
language. Within this problem, Wittgenstein uses cinema to clarify conceptual differences between physical time and memory time or phenomenological time. The Viennese philosopher proposes that physical time is analogous to the film strip projected in a movie theater, while memory time is analogous to the images projected on the screen. Our article is divided into three parts: in the first, we show state of the art regarding film studies and Wittgenstein; in the second section, we develop the
problem of direct experience and phenomenological language since this problem is the base that sustains the observations on cinema elaborated by Wittgenstein; and in the last part, we expose some reflections of Wittgenstein on the cinema, in particular those that refer to time.