Kurosawa's brother, Wittgenstein's world

 From Gerald Macé’s Carte de l’empire, I extract the following anecdote.

“Kurosawa’s brother committed suicide when movies became talkies, in a heroic reargard action to defend reciters, who were doomed to disappear. He himself belong to the guild of the benshi, actors who commented on the silent images.

One could well think that the ghost of his brother floated over Kurosawa’s films. Leader of a strike that failed, condemned by the birth of a new technology, the brother, laid off like one of those ronin of the past, having lost their vocation at the same time as their master, incarnated in himself that traditional Japan which put up its fists before allying with Germany before the Second World War, throwing itself into the mouth of the wolf.”

Somehow, this note reminds me that the passing of silent films was an event also witnessed, in a way, by others of that time, like Wittgenstein. I could imagine Kurosowa’s brother intoning the last numbers of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

“My propositions are explicatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. He must so to speak throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

The benti explaining to the movie goer - and the titles in the film are, likewise, dispensable aids. The world of the film, the purely visible world of faces, bodies, gestures, scenery, the picture itself – is the world rightly seen.

Wittgenstein, as is well known, began his long trek towards his second philosophy about the time that the talkies replaced the silent films.

Norman Malcolm has introduced an anecdote that has immediately achieved a place among the great anecdotes, like Samuel Johnson kicking a stone to refute Berkeley. Wittgenstein liked talking to Sraffa, the great Italian economist. At one point, after listening to Wittgenstein on propositional form and language, Sraffa made a Neapolitan gesture – putting his fingers under his chin and making a brushing motion – and asked what the propositional form of that was.

One of Wittgenstein’s commentors interpreted this anecdote to mean that Sraffa was telling Wittgenstein that the sense and the meaning of linguistic expressions are use-dependent. Use, or as Wittgenstein put it, Sraffa’s “anthropological perspective”, freed him to the Audio-visual tracks of ordinary life. Or, to put this in cinematic form, the purity of silent film was not sullied by sound – it was rather a way of joining life itself. For better or worse. The silence of the world is not the case. The silent world, perfectly universal, must be put behind us – even though strong traces remain in the way the builders, for instance, in The Philosophical Investigations seem much closer to the comedians of the silent film era, such as Buster Keaton in Cops – with the central actor at a seriously askew relationship in the world that does not prevent him from living in it with a stoic hilarity.

The purity of the world as representation comes crashing down – but it is a world now sadly tainted, as from Kurosawa’s brother’s point of view, or is it one that we wonder, in retrospect, if it ever existed at all?