Chess
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Chess is often depicted in the arts; significant works where chess plays a key role range from Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess to Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, to Vladimir Nabokov's The Defense, to The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig. Chess is featured in films like Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal." --Sholem Stein |
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Chess is a two-player strategy board game played on a chessboard, a checkered gameboard with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide.
Artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Vladimir Nabokov and Raymond Roussel have been chess enthusiasts. Hans Richter and Jean Cocteau dedicated a surrealist film to it called 8 × 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements .
Chess in the arts
Films
- A Chess Dispute (1903), a one-minute comedy by British film pioneer Robert W. Paul. Earliest known film with a chess theme.
- Entr'acte (1924), a short Dadaist film by René Clair
- Chess Fever (1925), a short Soviet comedy film featuring a cameo appearance by Jose Raoul Capablanca.
- Casablanca (1942), Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), analyzes a game
- The Seventh Seal (1957), centered on a game of chess between a medieval knight and the personification of Death
- No Name on the Bullet (1959), a Western movie with chess scenes that symbolize how the main characters are trying to outsmart each other
- From Russia with Love (1963), based on the Ian Fleming novel of the same name, as mentioned above
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), features a game of chess played between the HAL 9000 computer an astronaut, Frank Poole (see Poole – HAL 9000)
- Grossmeister (1972), Soviet film about the rise of a young grandmaster
- The Chess Players (1977), one of the subplots tells the story of two men obsessed with shatranj
- Black and White Like Day and Night (1978), German Television film directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Bruno Ganz as a deranged chess player challenging the Soviet World Champion
- Mystery of Chessboxing (1979)
- Blade Runner (1982), the replicant Roy Batty and his creator Eldon Tyrell play a game of chess (based on the Immortal Game)
- Dangerous Moves (1984), about two men competing in the World Chess Championship Games
- Mighty Pawns (1987)
- Knight Moves (1992), about a chess grandmaster who is accused of several murders
- Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), based on the life of Joshua Waitzkin
- Fresh (1994)
- The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
- Independence Day (1996), features one of the main characters, David Levinson, playing chess with his father in New York City; later, David realizes that the aliens have set their ships across the world like that in chess and plan to attack
- Geri's Game (1997), an animated short film about a man who adopts two personalities to play chess with himself
- The Luzhin Defence (2000), based on the Nabokov's book The Defense mentioned above
- X-Men (2000), X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), X-Men: First Class (2011), and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) Charles Xavier and Magneto both have a passion for chess and play it in many of their scenes together.
- Harry Potter (2001), the sorcerer's stone, has magical chess game
- The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) briefly features prison guards playing chess against mercenaries, using live ammunition for pieces
- Knights of the South Bronx (2005), about a teacher who helps students at a tough inner-city school to succeed by teaching them to play chess
- Revolver (2005)
- Queen to Play (2009)
- Bobby Fischer Against the World (2011) An HBO original documentary directed by Liz Garbus premiered on June 6, 2011. The ninety-minute documentary explores the complex life of the troubled genius.<ref>hbo.com</ref>
- Life of a King (2013), an ex-con teaches chess to inner city high school kids
- The Dark Horse (2014), about a bipolar man who helps at-risk youth by teaching them chess
- Pawn Sacrifice (2014), a dramatised account of Bobby Fischer's 1972 match with Boris Spassky
- Wicked Blood (2014), about a teenage girl trying to escape a criminal family, with a chess poem interwoven among the plot shifts - one of her uncle's was once the state champ
- Chess Poem (2016), a short film adaptation of J.L. Borges poem "Ajedrez." Narrated in Chinese, features Wei Yi "immortal game"
See also
- New In Chess
- List of Jewish chess players
- Female chess
- Chess boxing
- Chess Records
- Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz playing chess, a photo by Julian Wasser of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a Eve Babitz
- Human–computer chess matches
- Wheat and chessboard problem
- The Royal Game, a novella by Austrian author Stefan Zweig