a
danger to family life
by Douglas Messerli
Nikolai Shpikovsky (writer), Vsevolod Pudovkin and
Nikolai Shpikovsky (director) Шахматная горячка
(Shakhmatnaya goryachka) (Chess Fever) / 1925

Once on the streets he passes a chess shop and, like a piece of metal to
a magnet, is lured back in space and time. Every checkerboard pattern in the
world draws him into another game.
Each of these fall of the hands unsuspecting passers-by who are equally
taken up with the game, as obsessed, apparently, as our hero! It is as if
everyone except the girl is a chess addict. So isolated from the world around
her, the woman determines to poison herself, while the hero declares he will
drown himself.
Meanwhile, the sullen hero also fails
in his attempt to commit suicide, and returning to the streets encounters a
poster announcing a new chess event in which anyone who registers may
participate. He runs to the venue to list his name, where he encounters his
former lover, now utterly enchanted with the complexity and beauty of the “game,”
as she watches with fascination Capablanca facing off with a foe. The two—our
hero and his girl—reunite, she now perfectly ready to share his passion.
Shot in the middle of Pudovkin’s filming
of his Mechanics of the Brain, Chess Fever was born out the 1925 Moscow
chess tournament. Receiving permission to make a documentary of the event,
Pudovkin and Shpikovsky filmed footage of the tournament, pretending to make
the documentary, but later reinserting it into their comic tale, a kind of
dissident act which Pudovkin would seldom take again in his long involvement
with Stalinist film-making. And one is saddened seeing this and others of his
early films for his later more overtly propagandist works, making us realize
what a potentially innovative and original filmmaker we lost.
Los Angeles, February 23, 2014
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