Light, glass, dust : Aesychlus meets Strindberg in Chess of The Wind* (1976) (work in progress)

This is a response (work in progress) to Chess of The Wind** (1976), streamed during London Film Festival 2020

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 October

This is a first-blush response (work in progress) to Chess of The Wind (1976),
streamed during London Film Festival 2020**, in a 4K restoration, on BFI Player

Not, as one might have predicted from the title, a re-run of Victor Sjõstrõm, but equally not nearly as Bergmanesque as seeing people's comments in passing had led one to believe :

Yes, the finery was gorgeous, and the shots of the house*** are almost too exquisitely set up, but that is only to expose a contrasting brutality in self-interest and settling scores that smacks of ancient origins in works such as The Oresteia. Thematically, Bergman did employ such primal sources, but this film does not try to reproduce either his feel for doing so, or his look - if Bergman makes things appear staged and / or unrelaxed, he does so for other purposes.


Lady Aghdas, with her cat and acquired 'flail' (a miniature ball and chain), is perhaps a little too much like a Bond villain, and Shaban, one of her stepfather's adoptive sons, seems modelled on Marcel Proust (for looks), but this is a film where two or three major characters each have a held (i.e. deliberate) moment of looking straight to camera, so it would be unrealistic to try to construe the film-making as naturalism, or in any way an unknowing enterprise. Therefore, without explicitly saying that the figures depicted have archetypal qualities or might have populated Mt Olympus, there are folkloric or fairy-tale elements (such as of djinns or Bluebeard's castle), and Chess also has us flirt with the notion of Lady Macbeth's mental lability, or of Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, cracking under investigative pressure from Porphyry.


For some, a film such as this, and the finding of the negatives and making a 4K restoration, will be wonderful in their own terms ; for others, who think it good, it may stand more as an artefact of history, not in seeming 'dated' as such, but in pointing to the work of others who may have seen it in some degraded form (or just heard tell of it) in between, and to other cinemas (The Handmaiden (2016), for example, shares ground with it - as did, before it, The Wicker Man (1973) ?)



[...]



End-notes :

* Or The Chess-Game of The Wind ?

** An artefact of the streaming, on #UCFF's set-up, was to introduce a hiccup at what seemed one-second intervals (built-in thinking time, or an involuntary Verfremdungseffekt, for a reviewer ?) :

Unfortunately, using the @BFI Player demonstrated, yesterday and to-day*, that 'blasting brilliant new cinema into your front room' won't work effectively with #UCFF's set-up.

* Although not the latest cinema, but, respectively, Chess of The Wind (1976) and The Cheaters (1929).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 14, 2020

*** Whose exterior we finally see properly at the end, before the camera lifts off, and pointedly surveys the sky-line, which is clearly contemporary to the film's being made. (Arguably, after a disappearance into the hinterground of a character in whose look A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) seems rooted, the shot could have been more effective with an elevation to take in the façade, but without the pan (less is more ?) ?)


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)