Chess is the flavour of the season in Chennai as the city hosts the 44th Chess Olympiad. With everybody from Viswanathan Anand to A.R. Rahman in town for the extravagant sporting affair, and chess enthusiasts from around the world glued in to the proceedings, now’s a good time to look at some memorable chess-themed movies and TV shows over the years.
What’s fascinating to me is the range of narrative purposes fulfilled by the chess film — obviously, because of the nature of the game itself, it has been used as a stand-in for warfare and other prerogatives of the nation state. But the game has proven to be a versatile tool in the hands of skilled filmmakers. Chess in movies has also symbolised, at various places, statecraft, ambition, decadence, upward mobility, and so on. Perhaps the best and most high-stakes chess game in cinema, of course, happened in 1957, in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, where disillusioned 14th century knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) plays a game of chess with Death himself.
