Wittgenstein Tractatus

Hungary

1992

35 Min

Color, Black and White

English, Hungarian

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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Forgacs’ Wittgenstein Tractatus is composed of seven short video essays that refer to one of Wittgenstein’s most influential works, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, first published in 1921. Each of Forgacs’ brief essays — set in motion as a torn photograph comes together, only to break apart again — relates to one of Wittgenstein’s philosophical propositions. Black and white home movies from the early twentieth century are accompanied by voice-overs and written texts from Tracatus, in Hungarian and English, and a somber, lyrical score. Scenes of bourgeois life are haunted by forebodings of the future. Drawing upon the disjunction between language and image, Forgacs creates a symbolic illustration of Wittgenstein’s theories of logic, language, reality and representation. —greylodge.org

Director

Péter Forgács

Péter Forgács (1950) media artist and independent filmmaker, based in Budapest. Since 1978 he has made more than thirty films and several media installations. He is best known for his “Private Hungary” series of award winning films and installations often based on home movies from the 1920s-1980s, which document ordinary lives that were soon to be ruptured by an extraordinary historical trauma that occurs off screen.

Since the early 1990s Forgács’ video installations have been presented at museums and art galleries throughout Europe and America. His international debut came with The Bartos Family (1988). Since then he has received several international festival awards – in New York, Budapest, Lisbon, Marseilles, San Francisco and Berlin, where he won the Prix Europa for Free Fall film in 1997. Between 2000-2002 Forgács was artist in residence at The Getty Museum/Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, where he created The Danube Exodus: Rippling Currents of the River installation… read more