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A collaboration between Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau, 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements is a quirky, avant-garde glimpse of a bunch of premiere artists having a lark. Shame that they didn’t invite the audience along with them. The title reveals the structure, a chessboard is arranged 8 squares high and 8 squares long, and so the film is broken into eight vignettes of surreal nonsense.
With the pedigree involved 8 x 8 has a few moments of sublime incoherence, but much of it is baffling and tiresome. The most cringe-worthy segment of the film is the score which pounds throughout, frequently clownish and overly intrusive. While the film may be a series of images that vary in interest with no uniform style, this score never marries to any of the images and undermines a few of them. Case in point, a king, queen, and knight run about the woods battling each other, and a subpar Renaissance Fair song thunders in the background.
Despite being of only mild interest as a complete work, 8 x 8 is still worth watching only for the top-shelf names attached to it. It was intended as a fairy tale for grown-ups, made up of equal parts Lewis Carroll and Sigmund Freud (according to Richter and the opening prologue), and even when it proves impenetrable it’s still intoxicating in some strange way.
