McCreadyandChess

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

T.S.Elliot

After watching the documentary Room 237 recently, I felt compelled to delve further into Kubrik’s The Shining. Admittedly, its a film that I’ve never liked, having always found its intensity discomforting. However, in search of greater understanding, I also found an in-depth interview. It’s a wonderful piece of journalism, with Kubrik offering us great insight into who he is and how he works. To my surprise, chess gets more than a mention towards the end of the interview. Kubrik not only makes an interesting analogy between chess and film-making but also tells us how chess can help curb poorly made decisions away from the board. I’ve cut and paste the relevant sections and linked to the interview as well:

You [referring to Mr.Kubrik] are a chess-player and I wonder if chess-playing and its logic have parallels with what you are saying?

First of all, even the greatest International Grandmasters, however deeply they analyse a position, can seldom see to the end of the game. So their decision about each move is partly based on intuition. I was a pretty good chess-player but, of course, not in that class. Before I had anything better to do (making movies) I played in chess tournaments at the Marshall and Manhattan Chess Clubs in New York, and for money in parks and elsewhere. Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good. It trains you to think before grabbing, and to think just as objectively when you’re in trouble. When you’re making a film you have to make most of your decisions on the run, and there is a tendency to always shoot from the hip. It takes more discipline than you might imagine to think, even for thirty seconds, in the noisy, confusing, high-pressure atmosphere of a film set. But a few seconds’ thought can often prevent a serious mistake being made about something that looks good at first glance. With respect to films, chess is more useful [in] preventing you from making mistakes than giving you ideas. Ideas come spontaneously and the discipline required to evaluate and put them to use tends to be the real work.

Did you play chess on the set of The Shining as you did on Dr. Strangelove (with George C. Scott) and on 2001?

I played a few games with Tony Burton, one of the actors in the film. He’s a very good chess-player. It was very near the end of the picture and things had gotten to a fairly simple stage. I played quite a lot with George C. Scott during the making of Dr. Strangelove. George is a good player, too, but if I recall correctly he didn’t win many games from me. This gave me a certain edge with him on everything else. If you fancy yourself as a good chess-player, you have an inordinate respect for people who can beat you.

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/interview.ts.html

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

T.S.Elliot

MJM