Chess Fever (1925) Synopsis: A young man who is complete obsessed with chess enjoys an international tournament of the game. He becomes so obsessed that he neglects his fiancée who has no interest in it. She becomes frustrated by the neglect from him and find that no matter what she can't escape the game. She tries to give up on him and the game all together until she runs into Capablanca, the world champion of chess. He changes her views. Seen here.
Like many other films during this time Pudovkin uses real footage in his film. They used footage from a chess tournament in Moscow. Using this footage they were able to show the intensity of real players. This helped to create more understanding for the main characters chess obsession. “The general enthusiasm for Chess is making itself felt in cinema. The comedy is pieced together as a parody of a newspaper story. Ordinary everyday matches acquire exaggerated scale: caricatures of the policeman, the cabman, of the chemist, the public at the tournament and others are wittily portrayed . . . There is much humorous incident, much movement, the material forwarded pointedly by the serial story form” (Sovetskoe kino 1. 13). For Pudovkin the shots of the film combine to build the whole work, as bricks combine to make a wall, rather than conflict with one another in dynamic suspension. Chess Fever is an appealing example of this because he uses and breaks the conventions of soviet silent film to create humor.
The style of this film connects to the Kuleshov experiment where “art grew out of joining these rigorously composed fragments into wholes” (Mast 199). The fragments were tail ends of films that were used to practice the art of storytelling. During this time the film stock was too expensive to use and create new footage. They had to use what they had left over from past news stories and films. Pudovkin was one of Kuleshov most famous students at this workshop.
Montage : Creating Geography
- Pudovkin makes an entertaining play on creative geography tested by Kuleshov. Creating geography is creating a connection of shots from different locations and editing them together so that the audience believes they are a consecutive location. This is seen early on in the film during the chess match. He creates a montage of footage from different times of the competition. The audience sees a player on the left and a player on the right. Teaming this together with shots from the audience we have an understanding of a tournament, even though they were all shot at different times.
Multiple Illusion
- He uses montage later in this scene to create the feeling of a mass amount of cats. We see a group shot of kittens on the ground. Then we see his pulling out a kitten from various items in his room like a shoe, jacket sleeve, and coat pockets. This gives us the idea that there are many cats in the apartment, hiding in every nook and cranny. This editing style continues through the rest of the film.
Conclusion:
- In the final act we see Fogel return back to the Chess championship. He has lost his love and he still hasn’t gotten over his addiction to chess. It is there that he runs back into his love Zemtsova. She looks happy and pulls him aside to inform him of her new love of the game of chess. Intercut with this action we see the chess champions from earlier in the film. Each is now looking at the camera with a sense of happiness on their face. This works to show the viewer that all is now resolved. The editing causes us to think that the champions had some sense of the love story and now are relieved as Fogel is. In the other room Zemtsova asks Fogel to show her the chess move the Sicilon Defesnse. Fogel looks very excited but his face turns to worry. The audience knows that he has previously thrown all of his chess memorabilia into the river. His face turns again as he remembers one last board that he has hanging around his neck. This, as the title card says, is “the beginning of a very happy marriage.”
Pudovkin’s unique editing style for this time creates a blend of humor and inimitability appropriate for this type of caricature. And all though the couple ends up happy at the end the question posed in the film “could love be stronger then chess?” is never really resolved. In the end it doesn’t matter. Fogel gets both and is able to continue his fanatic obsession with his girl by his side.
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