Nummer veertien, home 54’00”, diverse locations and countries, 2012
When the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin died in 1849, his body was laid to rest in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. Knowing that he would never leave France before his death, Chopin requested that his heart be buried in his home country, where it is still kept today in the Church of the Holy Cross, Warsaw. This final chapter of Chopin’s biography is the starting point for Guido van der Werve’s “Nummer veertien, home”, a creative hybrid which is an autobiographical piece, a marvelous orchestral composition, an exercise in film-making and an athletic tour de force all in one. The 56-minute artwork documents the solitary journey of the artist as he swims, runs and bikes from Warsaw to Paris in order to carry a small quantity of Polish soil from Warsaw to Chopin’s grave. This narrative is interspersed with scenes shot in Greece and Asia following the life of Alexander the Great, who, like Chopin, died in a foreign country. Accompanied by a majestic and heart-wrenching Romantic requiem in three movements written by van der Werve himself, “Nummer veertien, home” is a gorgeously melancholy and cathartic piece that probes the abstract topographies of memory, longing and death and explores what it means to never be able to return home.
Running parallel with the sad narrative of Chopin’s death is the intimate account of van der Werve’s personal Odyssey. The film opens with a scene in Warsaw’s Church, where the artist, wearing goggles and a wet suit is listening to an orchestra playing accompanied by an angelic choir. As soon as the music stops, he unobtrusively exists the church and starts running. This is the beginning of a heavily emotional journey to which the viewer is invited, in his own way, to take part. Van der Werve’s piece represents a beautifully dark poetics of absence that eludes comprehension and heralds a logic of the heart. His artistic creation is incurably and proudly Romantic; yet it is fully drenched with an unpretentious intensity of feeling that never for a second slips into the unfashionable trap of bathos. Its Romantic qualities are aptly mitigated by a touch of the absurd and tinged with skepticism as well as a stark solipsism. Characterized by a grandiose yet curiously humble sense of the sublime, “Nummer veertien, home” leaves its spectator quietly mesmerized as he is left to puzzle over the poignant reflections provoked by van der Werve’s exceptional amalgamation of images and music, history and mythology. His piece has the same effect on its recipient of a well-wrought poetic composition.
The final act of van der Werve’s requiem is entitled, as a nod to Chopin’s last words, “I don’t feel the pain anymore”. Van der Werve’s piece is incurably melancholy, yet it quietly and positively shimmers from within. The openness of its narrative makes the piece both personal and universal, as the viewer finds himself silently overcome by a cloud of memories and reflections and an initially inexplicable yet palpable sadness. W.G. Sebald, the great taboo-breaker of the dilemma of artistic expression after the Holocaust, famously described the power of art to ease one’s pain and redeem the past through melancholy:
Melancholy, the rethinking of the disaster we are in, shares nothing with the desire for death. It is a form of resistance. And this is emphatically so on the level of art, where its function is far from merely reactive or reactionary. When, with a fixed gaze, melancholy again reconsiders just how things could have gone this far, it becomes clear that the dynamic of inconsolability and of knowledge are identical in function. In the description of the disaster lies the possibility of overcoming it.
After having witnessed the quietly sensational screening of “Nummer veertien, home” and after having dared to reflect on its beauty of excess in the emotionally intoxicating atmosphere of its aftermath, the viewer can be confident of the fact that van der Werve has understood this cathartic function of art admirably. ♦
Comments