Jim West On Chess: "Requiem for Bobby Fischer"

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

"Requiem for Bobby Fischer"

Opelo za Bobija Fisera
(Requiem for Bobby Fischer)

Directed by Igor Stevanovic
(64m, Serbia)
Documentary (G)

"Requiem for Bobby Fischer" is a documentary movie about one of the most controversial players in chess history: Bobby Fischer. His portrait is painted through the eyes of his Serbian friends. The movie reveals various aspects of his personality: from a public exponent of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, to his private fears, obsessions and genius. Rejected by his homeland, the United States, Bobby Fischer felt welcome in Yugoslavia where he found one of his closest friends: chess grandmaster Svetozar Gligoric. Besides the chess grandmasters, some 'ordinary' people who had a chance to meet Fischer make an appearance in the movie: a journalist, a doctor, a barber, and a pickpocket. The film incorporates rarely-seen archival footage, from Fischer' s early matches to his retirement from chess and bizarre death in Iceland.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov