This commissioned film serves as an introduction to chess for beginners, an opening toward more advanced study, and, on an artistic level, a work capable of reaching a general level of interest in its evocation of a “world.” The Euwe-Keres match (1939–1940) is analyzed in it.
EN
“Edmond Bernhard has always searched out difficulty, dead ends, dead-end roads where he could lose himself ad infinitum. His labyrinthine leanings naturally led him to conceive a film about chess (Échecs). It’s an animated film. You don’t get to see the players. Just the progression and movement of the thirty-two character pieces over the course of a world championship game. The film’s originality lies in the fact that Bernhard tried to show the invisible, that is to say the game that is played in the minds of the opponents, who analyze, calculate and prepare their move before making it, which is just the result of a long reflection. These junctions, these “digressions”, these mental ramifications Bernhard has translated cinematographically by way of an ascetic mise-en-scène that avoids dramatization and psychological fictionalization. This is not a film for specialists, and you don’t have to be John Cage or Marcel Duchamp to appreciate this unconventional poem, which is more of a haiku or a zen garden than a film in the ordinary sense.
Edmond Bernhard’s chessboard probably ended his interference in cinema definitively. Everything is brought together and synthesized admirably, but also refined to its ultimate depth: the mystery of inner thought, the stroll into oblivion and indifference, the painting of nothingness, all of which was the substance of his earlier films. But in Échecs, there is no room for deserted museums, for muffled silences and decomposed skeletons. No more axe blows, no more bird flights. Nothing but black and white pieces moving through space and time. Emptiness and death. The very essence of cinema.”
Boris Lehman1
