Belgian Chess History

Here’s an interesting observation about pop culture in 2021: there hasn’t been a book craze in quite a while. Some twenty years ago, there was the Harry Potter of course, then the Twilight series, the Hunger games trilogy but nothing seems to have captured the public’s imagination since then.¹ One thing that did, smack dab in the Harry Potter period no less, was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci code. It has plot holes big enough to hide an aircraft carrier in and the writing ain’t great, but it was huge. Naturally, a movie was made.

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Sad news for the lovers of early music: we’re not talking about the iconic German music theorist and composers from around 1700. Instead, we are talking about a German movie from 1950 based on a play by Curt Goetz who also plays the main role. It’s about a gynaecologist. One of his patients is pregnant but unmarried which is a big problem, as this is the fifties. He decides to go see her father, comments on his well-maintained roses, gets invited in and bam! Chess!

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Shakespeare — a name to conjure with! Yes, the immortal bard is finally appearing on my blog. That he was going to appear was pretty much inevitable, because one of the most famous references to chess in all of literature occurs near the end of his career, in the final act of The tempest. In it, young lovebirds Fernando and Miranda and playing chess in the primitive abode wherein Miranda dwells with her father. It could look a little like this:

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There are very few stories that have been adapted to the big screen as often as Bram Stoker’s late nineteenth century gothic horror novel Dracula. Our subject today isn’t one of them. Instead, it picks up a century after Dracula’s demise, with a bunch of useless tweens holding a black mass to bring ol’ pointy teeth back to unlife. The official reason is that he’s Johnny Alucard, descendent of Dracula’s trusty servant, but I suspect it’s mainly to see Christopher Lee reprising his title role. Peter Cushing happens to be the grandfather of one of the tweens, so it promises to be a cosy reunion. Especially when this shows up.

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We have encountered Marcel Duchamp before on this blog, seated on a roof somewhere in Paris, playing chess with Man Ray. Today, we are dealing with him again. This time, he is director of a film, together with Hans Richter¹ and Jean Cocteau. The title of the film, 8×8: A chess sonata in 8 movements, suggests that there will be a lot of chess. This is partly a false promise, but there’s still enough to warrant a blog post. For example, there is the following strange scene:

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