![]() “Don’t ever shoot at the sun!” Visually, Computer Chess is designed to evoke mid-Sixties TV shows like Albany’s TV Tournament Time: infinite shades of softly delineated gray, split screens (employed to increasingly disorienting effect), explanatory text at the top of the screen, a 4:3 frame, strobing. “You’ll burn out the tube!!” This prompts a jerk of the camera and a cut to the man himself admonishing the off-screen operator. ![]() “Hey! You’re shooting at the sun!” screams Henderson. Henderson’s initial appearance sets the tone for what is to come. And then there’s grand master Pat Henderson, perfectly embodied by Gerry Peary, who I have the pleasure of announcing as the winner of this year’s Best Performance by a Film Critic Award. There is immediate comedy in the brutal haircuts and polyester tops, the balance between ceremony and loose convocation, the unwieldy equipment (participants sit across tables next to their enormous computers, which dictate moves that they enact on plastic boards, said moves shown on a big screen via opaque projectors). We begin in an “activity room” where an annual computer chess tournament is underway. ![]() The film was shot near Austin, Texas, but it has a distinctly Mass Turnpike/MIT vibe. A dizzying plunge into ecstatic communion in the guise of a period nerdfest, shot in black and white with a Sony AVC3260 and, for one nerve-rattling stretch, in warm color with a Bolex, Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess takes place over one weekend in the early Eighties in a drab hotel.
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