Bobby Fischer Against the World

Bobby Fischer grew up in Brooklyn. There was no father, his mother worked constantly, and the boy was left alone with chess. At fourteen he was American champion. At fifteen he was a grandmaster. His rise was fast and his behaviour strange from the start: he walked out of tournaments, objected to hall conditions and sent lists of demands. In 1972 he played Boris Spassky in Reykjavik. The match became a display of the Cold War. Fischer won. Then he disappeared and did not play for twenty years. Liz Garbus directs. Garry Kasparov, Anthony Saidy and journalists of the period speak in it. It was made for HBO. The American administration became involved during the Reykjavik match; Fischer was refusing to play and the secretary of state Henry Kissinger telephoned him. The documentary shows in detail the place the match took in the press; chess reached the front page and was broadcast live on television. The matter it treats is solitude and obsession; the film puts no diagnosis on Fischer and reports the claims made about him. It also tells his later years; the conspiracy claims, his inability to return to America and his death in Iceland. Archive footage is used widely and the match itself is described on a board. Its limit is scope; it does not enter the technique of chess and the value of the games is not described. Who it is for: anyone curious about the history of chess and the Cold War. Who it is not for: there is no technical account, the structure is conventional, and the subject heavy.