Jean-Marie Drot
Marcel Duchamp: A Game of Chess
(Jeu d’échecs avec Marcel Duchamp)
This film records an in-depth interview with Duchamp which took place five years before his death, at the time of his first ever one-man show (at the Pasadena Art Museum). It records for posterity Duchamp talking about his life, his ideas on art, why he chose to continue living in America after fleeing France in 1915, and why he virtually abandoned his work as an artist in 1923. An engaging dialogue takes place between Duchamp and film-maker Jean-Marie Drot as they go around the Pasadena show, with the artist commenting on the exhibits and using them to explain the various stages of the development of his work. This is punctuated by the games of chess, which were for Duchamp a passion and a metaphor for the mental discipline he applied to his art. In this film we gain a rare glimpse of him talking with humour and insight about his ideas, and living up to the myth of the artist-philosopher that has grown up around him.
Jeu d’échecs avec Marcel Duchamp was filmed late 1963 in Pasadena and New York for the Radio Télévision Française (RTF); first broadcast on 8 June 1964 and then shown at the International Festival of Artistic Films and Films of Art (Bergamo, 19 September 1964). A videocassette was issued by Public Media, Chicago 1987 (Marcel Duchamp. A Game of Chess) and by Phaidon (2007). The English version was presented in a television broadcast in September 1964 in the ‘Art and Man’ Series.
Download (.torrent)
Format: avi (XviD ISO MPEG-4, AC3)
Size: 864MB
Language: French (embedded English subtitles)
Source: VHSrip by Grosby
Note: For the first minute-and-a-half a tracking line quickly runs over the picture producing a ‘zzt’ sound. The rest of the video plays fine, with no fuzz.
Photograph of Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz posing for the photographer Julian Wasser during the Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art, 1963 © 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
“The goal of chess is to mate. We can thus see this picture as the record of a tableau vivant of a word play. Since Freud, vulgar theorists have held that chess and art, to pick two examples, are sublimations of sex. Given Duchamp’s attitude towards wordplay versus theory, it is better to see his life long interest in chess and eroticism as a sublimation of this picture’s wordplay! Given that the double meaning of “mate” does not exist in French, at last we have a satisfactory explanation of why Duchamp had to emigrate to America. In other words: in the beginning was the word; in the center the pun.” From: A Pun Among Friends by Steven B. Gerrard
RESOURCES
Tout-Fait: Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal
BBC UK Interview with Marcel Duchamp, June 5, 1968
Re-evaluating the Art & Chess of Marcel Duchamp
UbuWeb Sound: Marcel Duchamp
UbuWeb Film: Marcel Duchamp
Interview with Eve Babitz
The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp
Duchamp’s Chess Paintings (click Suivant for more paintings)
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