The Book and the Movie: The Royal Game / Schachnovelle | Stefan Zweig / Brainwashed, 1960 d. Gerd Oswald

“From my own experience I was well aware of the mysterious attraction of the ‘royal game,’ which, alone among the games devised by man, regally eschews the tyranny of chance and awards its palms of victory only to the intellect, or rather to a certain type of intellectual gift. But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad’s coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? Where does it begin, where does it end?”

Stefan Sweig, Chess Story, 1942

Also:

The Book & the Movie: Letter from an Unknown Woman / Stefan Zweig (1922) | Max Ophüls (1948)