Shedding Cryptic Light on Historical Trauma

Chess doesn’t lend itself to the restless medium of action and spectacle that movies tend to have. A film that aims to dramatize chess must grapple with the question of how to make chess look exciting. Philipp Stölzl’s almost counter-intuitive solution is to suspend the game halfway through. chess storyruntime.

This adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella, set in Austria in the aftermath of Anschluss royal game Joseph Bartok (Oliver Masucci) is not a troubled genius whose only connection is the world and 64 black and white squares, but an Austrian who dismisses chess as “a game for boring Prussian generals” am.The movie opens in media resolution as he boards the steamship Ulysses He travels to the United States with a fake passport and reunites with his wife, Anna (Birgit Minihimeyer). Philipp Stölzl sets the viewer in the canonical narrative of the swamp, with the current action taking place in Joseph’s Transatlantic Journey, punctuated by flashbacks, showing the ordeal that led him to this pivotal juncture. To do. There’s even a shifting mustache metaphor to distinguish the two timelines.

But it’s a red herring. On the eve of the annexation, Nazi thugs arrest Josef and take him to a hotel, where secret police operative Franz his Josef his Böhm (Albrechtschuf) code into the bank accounts of his aristocratic clients. will try to persuade you to pass Upon letting go of the cord, Joseph, intuitively realizing that his life was worth nothing to the POWs, refused, received “special treatment,” and was allowed to stay in his hotel room without books, newspapers, or contact with the outside world. trapped in one. Boehm’s calculated strategy is to bring him to his knees. chess story‘s real concerns become apparent.

Stölzl uses the film’s time elasticity to influence the subjective “disappearance of time and space” that Böhm proudly attributes to his torture methods. As Joseph repeats the call to the Muse from his memory, the jump cut is omitted and the superimpose doubles his rhythm of passing time. OdysseyHis captors provide him with one cigarette each day, but not a lighter. We see him snap his fingers to mimic the mechanism of a lighter, pretending to smoke before putting the cigarette in a drawer. He finds himself mourning the death of a housefly. The housefly was at first a source of irritation, but he became a companion of suffering. A security guard then searched his room and discovered a drawer full of cigarettes arranged in bundles of five like tally marks. Several months have passed since Joseph’s imprisonment. Reflecting this temporary collapse, Joseph’s actions on board the ship in the current timeline become free.

On the way to the interrogation, Josef manages to keep the chess manual scheduled for the bonfire secret in his clothes. Finally, we see the game as the last resort of Joseph’s sanity and dignity, turned into a source of madness, and his world shrinking to the size of a chessboard.aboard Ulysses, Joseph’s fellow passenger engages him in a match with the mysterious Hungarian chess master Mirko Centovic (also played by Schuuf). When Böhm’s special treatment loses its effectiveness, the Nazis revert to more traditional interrogation methods, and Joseph evokes memories of Anna taking on all of her hallucinogenic powers under pressure to distract herself from the pain. Meanwhile, it becomes clear in the present action that Anna is not on the ship at all, as Joseph’s coping mechanisms have taken on a life of its own.

In a haunting shot of the graceful, mustachioed Joseph pitting himself against his naked and depraved self in a game of chess, the distinction between what Joseph imagines and what he experiences blurs. chess story Combine two timelines into one. It becomes impossible to determine whether we are dealing with a flashback or a flashforward, and which one is actually the ‘current action’, leading to a despairing and at the same time compassionate madness. It effectively solders the audience to Josef’s confused subjectivity in Chekhov’s portrayal of the descent. In this way, Stölzl deftly blends the genres of period drama and psychological thriller, but not so much to rekindle nostalgia as to cast a sobering light on the recurrence of historical trauma.