Computer Chess (2013)

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Director: Andrew Bujalski

Screenplay: Andrew Bujalski

Cast: Patrick Riester as Peter Bishton; Wiley Wiggins as Martin Beuscher; Myles Paige as Michael Papageorge; Robin Schwartz as Shelly Flintic; Gerald Peary as Pat Henderson; Gordon Kindlmann as Tom Schoesser

Synopsis: 1980. A computer chess tournament is taking place where computer programs are pitted by their creators against each other over chess games. As the games take place in a hotel, sharing space with a New Age therapy group, a series of increasingly bizarre details start to be noticed by the people there. The cats found everywhere. The strange woman in the foyer outside. That the computers, particularly one Bishton (Patrick Riester) is maintaining with his colleagues, are developing bizarre ticks and possibly even self consciousness.

Bujalski is known as one of the founders of the "mumblecore" subgenre. One that's divisive even in whether that name is even official, a nebulous title for a series of low budget dramas which emphasis improvisation and dialogue, whose processors include underground cinema and John Cassavetes¹. With a film like Computer Chess, its best to imagine it closer to those predecessors in existing in an undefined genre, that it's a series of scenarios based around one event where professional and non-professional actors work from a scenario onwards. A scenario that Bujalski was obsessed with and was finally convinced to bring to screen as an intentionally "unmarketable" project. It's one with its eyes firmly in the past of American experimental cinema as far as their own uses of now dated filming technology like video and 16mm. Computer Chess was shot, and deeply influenced, by Bujalski wanting to shot the film with vacuum-tube-based video cameras which, even if they proved to be a greater pain in the arse for the production to use as interviews suggest then to be, drastically added a necessary aesthetic dynamic to the film's lo-fi aesthetic.

From https://www.sundance.org/images/filmguide/2013/13102-1.jpg

What could be seen as for the sake of nostalgia with its captions of text having to be added in post production, usually slanted by nature of the obsolete computer tech clearly being used, is one of the first virtues of the film. Where the deliberate artistic choice has a pronounced effect for the film dramatically and for mood. Meant to replicate the early eighties where the primordial versions of computer geeks are crammed in a hotel, it adds a frank harshness to the material, particularly as part of the shots are meant to be footage being filmed from the tournament's grandmaster Henderson (Gerald Peary), a chess champion who wishes not only to document the tournament but intends to challenge the winner himself in a proto-Deep Blue scenario. The camera rarely moves, not an issue as in lieu of older American films like from Paul Morrissey the dialogue is heavy, constant and compelling to follow, the small character interactions are fascinating like a microcosm of personalities and eccentrics. Where Papageorge (Myles Paige), one of the more unconventional and openly rebellious competitors, spends most of the movie sleeping in corridors due to not having a booked room. Where there's even two drug dealers/conspiracy nuts who are there believing they will be witnesses to the beginning of the apocalypse, one believing that this is all a secret Pentagon related test for military programs, a conspiracy which for some other characters may actually turn out to be real and lurking in the background of a harmless chess tournament.

The camera used gives a archaic look, exactly that of old filmed documents on other obsolete formats like Betamax or 8mm. Materials I myself  once handled as part of a volunteer position at a media archive and as a result can attest to their strange, ethereal qualities - time capsules of a period one cannot reach in materials that drastically effect them as much. Materials which add their own fascinating hazes to lost in clear modern digital. Whilst Bujalski's work here is minimalist drama, the format choice gives the sense of the viewer having come across personal home footage, willing to take risks even with a colour segment that within a mainly black and white films comes as a sudden shock to one's perceptions. Then the camera used starts to glitch out at impromptu moments, none of which were actually deliberate on purpose but the issues arising from using the camera. Accidental moments which take place at the right times, when cracks start to appear in Computer Chess' initial tone and things get weird. Subtle oddness, meaning this is remote from the most abstract films ever made, but following on from the best of this type of low budget American cinema where Bujalski never lets himself become shackled to tropes of his genre, stepping out of them to conjure up a series of peculiar details the characters start to be as concerned about as things go along.

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The subject of computers at their infancy is a major subtext here, fears less of computers turning into Skynet from the Terminator series but their self awareness being more strange and perplexing. This is especially the case as the computer programmers here, including the sole woman Shelly (Robin Schwartz), who gets tokenised as the sole  female tech at the tournament by the men, are not the glamorised ideal of modern pop culture but a subterranean minority developing these computer systems at the dead of night. A minority working on machines which may even be throwing games in rebellious boredom, wanting to play human players instead, or asking questions back at the programmers asking them questions. Their behaviour in the tournament can already be described as weird due to programming hiccups, the introductory forum before the matches covering an infamous glitch from the tournament before that evokes less embarrassment but how the misfires of these computers can be seen as idiosyncratic quirks human beings can have.

And then there's the cats. Not just two running around the hotel corridors, not just three, but an entire hotel room full of them never explained. The new age therapy group the chess tournament have to share space in eventually break into the other's lives due to this awkward space issue, who participate in mock rebirths they include Papageorge in when they find him sleeping in the conference room. An older couple from the group even attempt to get Bishton to join them for a threesome, suggesting the limits of a chessboard as a metaphor for his closed nature only for him to inform them the numerous moments one could play on a board could take longer than most human lives to document the scope of, the two sides bleeding into each other as esoteric outsiders away from conventional normalcy. All of this feels like real incidents Bujalski could've taken from his everyday life, thus proving reality could be even weirder than an active imagination.

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He eventually add slithers of material feint of full blown sci-fi that go even further from this. The system Bishton works on becomes a character in itself, a cranky machine who loses games on purpose and even gets into supernatural horror in a flashback sequence when someone makes the unwise decision to ask it existential questions. And the final shot involving the mysterious woman in the foyer continues a trend in 2000s and 2010s American independent cinema of strange pop surrealism, the tastes of genre cinema and non-sequiturs that flash up in films with body horror stubs and flushes. Stylistically the tone is maintained throughout all this. Bujalski steers the lengthy conversations into areas that even if the subjects are strange always are interesting or funny. Bujalski's subject itself, despite being seen by himself as un-commercial, is inherently of interest, as there has always been something fascinating about the least likely of topics findings themselves the centre of films. Communities in their own worlds with their own languages which are mundane to the outside world but when allowed to breath in a feature length have a life to them. Something that Bujalski takes seriously with respect, just happening to also notice the weird what-ifs in such a world. 

Personal Opinion:

An immense surprise. With virtually no context for Andrew Bujalski in the slighted until Computer Chess, what has been viewed as his peak so far in his career is a rewarding, deliberately odd piece of cinema for me. Something entirely new for me, coming from the influences of Bujalski's other films and the area of cinema he came to be from, and utterly rewarding for the differences he brings to such material. The best kind that fluctuates genres to the point of being legitimately unclassifiable, at least in terms of detailed categorisation, but stays focused over ninety minutes to become low budget filmmaking that never becomes predictable or cookie cutter. A film instead that's funny, sincerely quirky and imaginative.

Abstract Spectrum: Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) I also admit lack of knowledge of Mumblecore, having only seen Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) as an official film in this "genre". A film that was utterly ponderous and dreadful even as someone like me who likes meandering non plots in cinema, something that felt proud of itself without much of interest and the worst in pretentious white middle class twenty year olds, it didn't exactly convince me to find other films like it. Something not to be proud of when I like Paul Morrissey's Trash (1970)  and the type of cinema Mumblecore evokes in my mind in premise.