A Film Canon

 

 

In Chess Fever, Pudovkin indulges those tendencies towards individuation and introspection that, in his more overtly political films, are always subsumed back into the life of the crowd. Nevertheless, he retains the dark realism of those films, producing a somewhat mitigated comedy, in which a young chess addict's obsession starts off as an impediment to his love life and develops into a pathological crisis. This is most memorably expressed through a figurative proliferation of chess boards - on napkins, floors, clothes and, ultimately, the city itself, summarised by a series of expansive, snowswept avenues dotted with black vehicles, horses and passers-by. In this sense, the characters move with the same mechanical determination as chess pieces, creating a kind of frenzied inevitability, epitomised by the documentary footage of actual chess games that open and close the film, in which everything seems to hinge on ticking timers. That said, the conclusion is slightly contrived - although, admittedly, that contrivance allows for a continuation, rather than cancellation, of the pathological dimension. Nevertheless, it points towards a general discomfort with apolitical narrative and characterisation within Russian cinema at this time.