Chess books and film (and other culture)

[Christopher Kreuzer]

General thread to talk about chess culture (books, films, plays, paintings, etc.).

Stewart Reuben's list from the other thread to start things off:

The Defence by Nabokov
The Chessplayers by Frances Parkinson Keyes
The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig
The Chess Garden by Brooks Hansen
The Eight by Katherine Neville
Trotter's Bottom byTanya Jones, mothr of Gawain
Auto da Fe by Elias Canetti
Going to Jerusalem by Jerome Charyn
Black Gambit by Eric Clark
Pawn to Infinity edited by Fred Saberhagen SF stories includig chess in them
Master Prim by James Whitfield Ellison
Grandmaster by Warren Murphy and Molly Cochran
Incident at the Sicilan Dragon by Willim Kent Smith
King Kill by Thomas Gavin
Varadahary's Annotated Chess Masterpieces by Vithal Rajan
The Dragon Variation by Anthony Glyn

Some others:

The Grass Arena by John Healy
Queens Gambit by Walter Tevis
Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett
The Luneburg Variation by Paolo Maurensig

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Of course, you could go on forever with a list like this, but hopefully some of these are better than others and worth seeing/reading. Some I would add are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_at_Chess

A Game at Chess: "...a comic satirical play by Thomas Middleton, first staged in August 1624."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chess_Players

The Chess Players: "..a 1977 Indian film by Bengali director Satyajit Ray, based on Munshi Premchand's short story of the same name."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chess_ ... ainting%29

The Chess Players: "...a genre painting of 1876 by American artist Thomas Eakins."

There is a fairly long (and incomplete) list here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_in_t ... literature

Some examples are relatively trivial, others less so.

[John Moore]

Hi Chris - don't you think that you should split these into different threads. It really won't work otherwise.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Hi Chris - don't you think that you should split these into different threads. It really won't work otherwise.

You mean one for films, one for books, one for other stuff? Maybe, but sometimes you get films based on books and so on. I don't have time right now (I'm heading off for a few hours), but if you want to start separate threads, please do.

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

The Seventh Seal is on a Freeview channel, Film4, in twenty minutes (11:20pm on Saturday night). I've got it on DVD but I'm going to watch it anyway as it's great! It raises the important question: Who would you rather face in a chess game to decide your fate - Death or Jack Rudd?

[Christopher Kreuzer]

The Seventh Seal is on a Freeview channel, Film4, in twenty minutes (11:20pm on Saturday night). I've got it on DVD but I'm going to watch it anyway as it's great! It raises the important question: Who would you rather face in a chess game to decide your fate - Death or Jack Rudd?

Watching it now (have been from the start). Sadly, I think it is the sort of film you have to concentrate on to have any chance of understanding it. Though clearly more about life and death than chess.

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

Though clearly more about life and death than chess.

Same thing. I love Bergman films, though I never have any idea what's going on.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Currently some morality play/village procession in the era of the Black Death. It's quite a good film, once you get into it. Not claiming to understand it, really, though. Nice bits of humour mixed in with the philosophy. And now I know what being "marked for a petty scoundrel" means!

EDIT: Ooh! The chess board is back!

[Stewart Reuben]

I first saw the Seventh Seal when a teenager.
Those of you who have seen 'The Seventh Seal', did you notice that the board fills up during the game? At the start the board is round the right way, possibly irrelevant in the 13th Century, and changed round later. They played according to modern rules, nonsense of course for the era.
I was paid by Empire Magazine to extract what I could. I did manage to establish some positions with the help of Ray Keene. He offered the opinion that the crew probably played chess in between takes and the board used was as set up. It didn't help that the pieces were carved oddities.
In Bob Basalla's book 'Chess in the Movies' it takes up two pages with no diagrams. See the Seventh Seal. It is great art. Watching it and posting on a forum simultaneously should be a capital offence.

I must admit I thought this thread was going solely to be about written material. For films see my catalogue on the ECF website. It is the biggest in English in the world.

Another book is 'the Flanders Panel'. That too was made into a pretty awful film.
The Bishop Murder Case by SS Van Dine?

Chess, The Musical. A professional version is running in Aberystwyth for about 2 weeks mostly clashing with the British. I have seen so many versions of that, I could possibly write a book.
Chess the Ballet
No, this way lies madness. Stick to literature where chess plays a major part, not just a brief mention.

Stewart Reuben

[Christopher Kreuzer]

I first saw the Seventh Seal when a teenager.
Those of you who have seen 'The Seventh Seal', did you notice that the board fills up during the game? At the start the board is round the right way, possibly irrelevant in the 13th Century, and changed round later. They played according to modern rules, nonsense of course for the era.
I was paid by Empire Magazine to extract what I could. I did manage to establish some positions with the help of Ray Keene. He offered the opinion that the crew probably played chess in between takes and the board used was as set up. It didn't help that the pieces were carved oddities.
In Bob Basalla's book 'Chess in the Movies' it takes up two pages with no diagrams. See the Seventh Seal. It is great art. Watching it and posting on a forum simultaneously should be a capital offence.

Do you happen to remember the year (or even issue date) of the Empire Magazine article? I was trying to look at some of the positions as well, but from what I could see, the shots in the sequence where the Knight (White) appears to give check with a rook on the g-file are shot with a different position depending on the camera angle. i.e. continuity wasn't maintained. Pity.

[Stewart Reuben]

i'll see whether I can find it and photocopy it.
It must have been either 2009 or 2010.
It was most inconsiderate of Igmar Bergam not to take his chess seriously more 50 years ago.
One position. Black Kg8, Qe8, Ra8, f8, N c8, Bd5, P a6, d6, e7, e5, f6, h7.
White Ke1, Qd1, Ra1, h1, Ba2, Nb3, Nf3, Pa3, c2, d3, e4,f2, h2. I think Death to move. Date 1957.
Can you imagine how many technical errors there must be in films where we don't know much about the subject?
Stewart Reuben

[Geoff Chandler]

"Three days out Jay made a big hit with the Martians.
As everyone knows, those goggle-eyed, ten-tentacled , half-breathing kibitzers
have stuck harder than glue to the Solar System Chess Championship for more than two centuries.

Nobody outside of Mars will ever pry them loose. They are nuts about the game and
many's the time I've seen a bunch of them go through all the colours of the spectrum in sheer
excitement when at last somebody has moved a pawn after thity minutes of profound cogitation."

Men, Martians and Machines by Eric Frank Russell pub 1955.

The whole book has minor chess incidents that keep popping up.

In one story the men and the Martians are fighting together against a bunch of robots.
Suddenly the Martians start arguing amongst themselves over the sacrifice of a Bishop
in a game played a few days previously.

Halfway through it - excellent read. Very funny.

[Roger de Coverly]

The whole book has minor chess incidents that keep popping up.

A "Science Fiction" short story I can recall reading in a collection in the 1960s had a "Deep Blue" computer matched against thinly disguised leading players of the era. The Fischer figure ("Willie Angler") was able to exploit a hole in the computer's opening book, whilst the Botvinnik character was outplayed in one of his own systems.

Here's an article about the author

http://www.conceptualfiction.com/fritz_leiber.html

His considerable skills as a chessplayer—Leiber won the Santa Monica open in 1958—are reflected in a number of tales, perhaps most notably in “The 64 Square Madhouse,” which presents
the extraordinary concept (at least back in 1964, when it was published) of a computer entering a hess tournament.

[Reg Clucas]

The works of Peter Hammill contain numerous references to chess -
- One of the albums he made with Van der Graaf Generator was entitled "Pawn Hearts" and featured chess pieces on the cover art
- The cover art for the VdGG album "H to He..." was entitled "Checkmate", though doesn't contain any obvious chess theme.
- His first solo album was entitled "Fool's Mate", again featuring chess pieces on the cover.
- The cover of his solo album "Chameleon in the Shadow of the night" has a painting of him sat at a chess board. The position is indistinct.
- The song "The Comet, the Course, the Tail" contains the cheerful lyric -
"In the slaughterhouse all corpses smell the same,
Whether queens or pawns or innocents at the game"

[David Lettington]

"Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw" by Thomas Glavinic is a very good novel, based on the life of Carl Schlecter.

I think that Edgar Rice Burroughs also wrote "The Chessmen of Mars", but have never read it, so not sure of chess content.