Chess, humour and Art!

Trying to integrate a new feature into this blog. Chess-humour and/or chess-art in film and commercials. Thanks to YouTube, Vimeo and other sources–and especially to VIBBY (that allows for splicing said videos), it is a really interesting feature with considerable potential. ENJOY!

Chess humour and Art

Director Patrick K.H A surreal, nonsense animation based on Montpelier street posters. Great stuff! Tommy ‘D’ series (chess)

Really classy Campari add using chess

WOW! Maya Deren (born Eleanora Derenkowskaia)  1917-1961,was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s.

Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer. The function of film, Deren believed, like most art forms, was to create an experience…

Here in her 1944 film At Land, I really liked how she used chess. Readers might recognize the game (at the end) between some beautiful women at the beach as the IMMORTAL GAME (Anderssen–Kieseritzky, London 1851)…Maya steals the mating piece and delivers it back to the dinner scene at the beginning. 

Maya was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947 and travelled in circles inhabited by the likes of Marcel Duchamps, Anais Ninn and John Cage. Her work developed a large and loyal following, but she married three times indicating a personal loneliness that was difficult to satisfy.

Maya died young, and tragically, before her time. She was just 44 when a hemorrage brought on by extreme malnutrition struck. Wiki writes ” Her condition may have also been weakened by her long term dependence on amphetamines and sleeping pills prescribed by Dr. Max Jacobson , an arts scene doctor notorious for his liberal prescription of drugs,who later became famous as one of President Kennedy‘s physicians. Her father suffered from hypertension, which she may also have had. Her ashes were scattered in Japan at Mount Fuji.”

Chess or Sex? Depends on your tastes…