McCreadyandChess

With Carlsen yet to become world champion, Fischer is still the only role-model for chess that the west has produced in modern times. For this and other reasons, he is still an attraction for film and documentary makers around the world. The latest one to come out is  ‘Bobby Fisher against the World’.

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1083808793/

So what’s it like? Well, not too bad though there are one or two serious question marks concerning its approach. I used to think that there’s no such thing as a bad documentary on chess -using the maxim there’s no such thing as bad publicity as my rationale- but that was before I saw ‘My Brilliant Brain’, the woeful account of Susan Polgar’s rise in chess. Fortunately our blushes were spared this time; the difficulty with our latest chess-doc, though, lies in establishing not its success in the detail -or lack thereof- but in its approach towards chess.

Bobby Fischer against the World is a documentary for non-chess players not chess players, the reason being that it concentrates on his life rather his chess. That is not necessarily a bad thing, as lives/stories can be retold interestingly if the documentary maker is knowledgeable enough, but the problem is that Fischer warns against trying to separate himself from chess early on in the doc, so we are left to wonder why the director has ignored such an important caveat.

As I watched it, I began to wonder whether the director actually knew anything about chess at all and perhaps decided it was best to avoid it as much as possible rather than explore our beautiful game. There are parts of the documentary which are directionless and unresolved, for example, the celebrated match of 72 in Iceland, which though featured, is glossed over. Though during the coverage of the match it does veer towards analysis in one or two places, annoyingly, it then quickly pulls away, making it impossible to follow; the best example of which being the celebrated blunder in game 1, in which we are offered some quick-fire analysis of one side-line but that’s all. You are left with the feeling that the director feels obliged to head towards something she always wants to pull away from through lack of understanding. If I am right, that is a serious and critical mistake, one which devalues the documentary enormously. This is perhaps shown in the problems Fischer faced, and the presentation of them: we aren’t really shown any of the solutions because for the most part, they can be found manifest within his chess and in his approach to the game itself. Victory in chess and solutions to issues off the board correlate inseparably in Fischer. But his approach to chess is presented anecdotally, we learn that he was besieged by personal problems which haunted him his whole life but we are never really shown how his game evolved through them, which brings us back to Fischer’s caveat. Fischer and chess cannot be separated. I think this story of the unprepared and somewhat forlorn genius doesn’t really wash with someone who became the greatest in history at what he did in his time. Such a sympathetic story would have worked better with someone who tried their hand at chess and failed miserably, since greatness does not beget sympathy. To conclude let us turn to Edward Winter’s on-line Chess Notes:

‘Graced with some exceptionally rich archive material, Liz Garbus’ 2011 documentary film Bobby Fischer Against the World is disgraced with some exceptionally poor interviewees. A particular low point, with some of the talking heads less concerned about being truthful than noticed, is the dense sequence which seizes on the issue of insanity:

Anthony Saidy: ‘Victor Korchnoi claimed to have played a match with a dead man and he even provided the moves.’

Asa Hoffmann: ‘Rubinstein jumped out of the window because the fly was after him.’

Anthony Saidy: ‘Steinitz in late life thought he was playing chess by wireless with God Almighty – and had the better of God Almighty.’

Asa Hoffmann: ‘Carlos Torre took all his clothes off on a bus.’

To highlight only the Steinitz versus God yarn, no scrap of serious substantiation is available. Once again we witness the magnetic pull of malignant anecdotitis. And since the theme is insanity, an uncomfortable question arises: can such groundless public denigration of Steinitz and others be considered the conduct of a rational human being?’