Now Available for streaming on demand: vimeo.com/ondemand/hownottodo...
An animated short by Amit Dutta, 2020, 17 mins
Based on the essay by Steven Gerrard
Animation by Ayswarya S Dutta
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Legendary chess author Bruce Pandolfini on the film:
One of the strongest celebrity chess players of all time was Marcel Duchamp. The avant-garde Dadaist played on Marshall Chess Club teams, wrote a book about chess endgames, and was reputed to be of master strength. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, also a chess enthusiast, has 181 references to chess in his landmark books, including in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), the Philosophical Investigations (1953), and the Blue and Brown Books (1958).
Duchamp and Wittgenstein did not know each other, even though this new pathfinding film creates a fictional correspondence chess game between them. Acclaimed experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta features the two icons in his present offering, an animated movie constructed around the ingenious scholarship of Williams College philosopher Steven Gerrard.
Wittgenstein Plays Chess With Duchamp: Or How Not To Do Philosophy merges concepts from philosophy, linguistics, the visual arts, mathematics, geometry, psychology, and of course chess. The mesmerizing narration of animator Ayswarya Sankaranarayanan imbues a steadying flow of Gerrard text to the 17-minute kaleidoscope of photos, animated clips, highlighted quotes, and intriguing juxtapositions.
The main ideas for the animated offering were indeed adapted from Gerrard’s insightful paper (Wittgenstein Plays Chess With Duchamp), first appearing in Tout-Fait, an online journal devoted to Duchamp’s oeuvre. Both the film and Professor Gerrard’s thesis highlight contrast of perspective. For example, some artists and thinkers focus on the surface, while others try to get past the surface into its depth. With either approach, the aim is to reveal hidden meaning.
Besides Duchamp, works of Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, and Alfred Jarry appear throughout. There are plenty of formulations by Wittgenstein and Duchamp, along with metaphors and allusions to Aldous Huxley and Albert Camus (even Groucho Marx and Woody Allen, with their self-referential humor, if you freely associate enough), as well as quotes from the likes of Sophocles, Eugene Znosko-Borovsky, Lewis Carroll, Ajeeb, Sigmund Freud, and Leo Tolstoy.
An early line in the animation comes from the first sentence of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Playfully musing on the subject, we later see Wittgenstein’s take on happiness. It means “to be in agreement with the world.”
Duchamp and Ernst are especially viewed through a lens of contrasting paradigms. For Ernst’s work “The Hat Makes the Man,” we hear that “Ernst has taken a familiar side of a man, a hat, and gone beneath the surface to the unfamiliar.” For this, Ernst represents depth. Regarding Duchamp, the film tells us that he “has taken supposedly a familiar object and defamiliarized it by change of location and status.” Duchamp represents surface, or creativity by perspective and by rearranging the elements. So, both worldviews seek concealed meanings, but in unlike ways. Or as the narrator implies, surface and depth analysis are different, but they can lead to the same place.
Reinforcing the contrast is an actual chess position, the trebuchet. This mutual zugzwang was examined by Duchamp and Halberstadt in their chess book on coordinate squares, L'opposition et cases conjuguées sont réconciliées - in English, “Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled” (1932). The concept is also explored by both Gerrard and Dutta. It underscores dichotomy of outlook - having to move first or second - which touches upon the leitmotif of contrasting viewpoint and approach.
Steven Gerrard’s brilliant paper can be found at www.toutfait.com/.../articles.... For chess players, artists, philosophers, and sentient beings, it’s certainly worth a closer look. I could say more, but for now will say less, closing with the mantic words of Ludwig Wittgenstein:
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
- BRUCE PANDOLFINI