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In his 40-minute film, “Number Twelve: Variations on a Theme”, Dutch artist and filmmaker Guido van der Werve interweaves the unlikely fields of chess, astronomy, and music theory into a seamless philosophical meditation on possibility, mathematics, and infinity. Divided into three movements filmed in distinct locations, Number Twelve begins with the artist seated in a small cabin, pondering how to calculate the number of possible chess games that can ever be played. In the first movement, “the king’s gambit accepted,” van der Werve plays a chess game against his opponent, Grandmaster Leonid Yudasin, at New York’s famed Marshall Chess Club. |
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“In his 40-minute film, Number Twelve: Variations on a Theme, Dutch artist and filmmaker Guido van der Werve interweaves the unlikely fields of chess,
astronomy, and music theory into a seamless philosophical meditation on possibility, mathematics, and infinity.”
Guido van der Werve, Number Twelve: Variations on a Theme, 2009. Film Still, Duration: 40 min. Courtesy of the St. Louis Museum of Art.
Number Twelve: Variations on a Theme
Tricia Y. Paik
In his 40-minute film, “Number Twelve: Variations on a Theme”, Dutch artist and filmmaker Guido van der Werve interweaves the unlikely fields of chess, astronomy, and music theory into a seamless philosophical meditation on possibility, mathematics, and infinity. Divided into three movements filmed in distinct locations, Number Twelve begins with the artist seated in a small cabin, pondering how to calculate the number of possible chess games that can ever be played. In the first movement, “the king’s gambit accepted,” van der Werve plays a chess game against his opponent, Grandmaster Leonid Yudasin, at New York’s famed Marshall Chess Club.
Van der Werve and Yudasin play on a one-of-a-kind instrument built by the artist. The instrument combines the layout of a chessboard with the mechanics of a piano; each of the 64 squares on the board represents a musical note. As the game progresses and pieces moved, different notes are struck. Crafted especially for the film by Yudasin, the chess game opens with the King’s Gambit, an opening strategy popular in the 19th century, but rarely used today. For van der Werve, such an opening is a daring and romantic one, as it immediately exposes one’s king. While van der Werve and Yudasin play, an accompanying string ensemble performs an original score composed by the artist. The score follows the structure of a chess game—an opening, middle game, and end game.
In the second movement, “the number of stars in the sky” van der Werve, again in his cabin, considers his next challenge: how to count all the stars in existence. The chess game continues from the first movement, indicated only by notations at the bottom of the screen as well as the accompanying sounding of notes. Van der Werve can now be seen traversing the arresting landscape of Mount St. Helens. As the film continues along with the score, we see how minuscule van der Werve’s figure appears against the vastness of this locale. Such an awesome juxtaposition parallels the very impossibility of the human endeavor to count all the stars in the sky. Despite the futility of this goal, van der Werve finally perches himself atop one of the highest points in Mount St. Helens, in an attempt to count every star.
In the last movement, “and why a piano can’t be tuned and waiting for an earthquake,” van der Werve meditates on his last quandary—how to tune a piano and the variable imperfections that arise in doing so. Seated in his cabin, he then steps out. After being captured in various stances among dry, sloping hills, he returns to his cabin. The camera pans out slowly, and in a continuing nod to the 19th-century Romantic concept of the sublime, it is revealed that his cabin rests along the San Andreas Fault, another site as monumental as Mount St. Helens.
The chess game finally ends, but in a stalemate and thus never truly ends. Van der Werve offers such a conclusion to underscore the futility of his posed challenges, including a last and final one presented through an astonishing aerial view of the fault line—how long does it take to wait for an earthquake? Infinity, van der Werve answers, as his score holds onto the last note for an awkwardly long three minutes, indeed a musical eternity. Now in an age when we have gadgets to do almost all the thinking for us, van der Werve, through this film, implores us to take time to ponder, to wonder about possibility, futility, and the endless expansiveness of the natural world.
