Man vs Machine: Andrew Bujalski on Computer Chess

Andrew Bujalski’s name might not be on every film fan's lips, but it is likely to live on in future cinema history textbooks. Not necessarily for his films (Mutual Appreciation, Beeswax), although they are wonderful, but for the ramshackle, lo-fi film-movement they heralded: mumblecore. It’s a much maligned sub-genre, mocked for its cardigan-wearing protagonists and their first world problems (dating disasters, post-graduate malaise, rent control), but in the sure hands of a director as sensitive to the complexities of the human condition as Bujalski you have films with an elegant emotional register that are as far removed from their closest mainstream equivalents, romantic comedies, as their budgets are from Hollywood’s multi-million-dollar coffers.

“I never thought of it as an artistic movement,” says the Boston-born filmmaker down the line from his Austin home when I sheepishly bring up the m-word. (Quite rightly, Bujalski and his peers have never been keen on the clumsy moniker.) Movement or not, Bujalski’s films have been influential, and not just on the bona fide mumblecore directors, like Lynn Shelton (Your Sister’s Sister) and Aaron Katz (Quiet City), who followed in his low-key wake. Their loose structures and organic rhythms have begun to bleed into the wider film culture. It’s difficult to imagine the rise of Lena Dunam without Bujalski, for example, or the recent success of Frances Ha without its near namesake Funny Ha Ha (Bujalski’s 2002 debut). “For my own sake, you know, I wish that now, retroactively, Funny Ha Ha were commercial and I could go make a million dollars off of it,” he says wistfully, “but I don’t think it works that way.”

Does he ever anticipate making films that make it to the multiplex? “I’m probably not going to change, but lord knows I’m trying to learn to get my head in a place where I could conceive of something that would be a little more financially viable.”

He’s certainly trying something new with his latest movie, which takes him, for the first time, from the contemporary world of inarticulate twenty-somethings, their poky apartments, their hipster parties and their unmade beds, into the realm of science fiction. Set in the early 1980s, Computer Chess plunges us into the not so high-octane world of competitive computer chess programming. “I didn’t sit down and consciously think, ‘What’s a good topic for my next movie? Oh, I know: computer chess pioneers,’” he says, regarding the film’s peculiar premise. “None of this was too consciously constructed. A lot of the heavy lifting of building this happened in my subconscious and I wasn’t actually privy to what I was thinking.”

For Bujalski, form came first; the spark for what would become Computer Chess grew out of the director’s desire to work on the old Sony AVC-3260, a 60s video camera so obsolete that the only place you’re able to find any is in junk shops filed next to Betamax players and Stereo 8s. “I came upon some footage from old cameras and really fell in love with it,” he says, but he was also attracted to the challenge of using them: “How could we tell a story in those kind of images? And what would that story be, I don’t know. There’s so much about this project that’s not rational, just from the practical standpoint of filmmaking, and that was, of course, part of the joy of it.”

Initially Computer Chess, with its spot-on period detail and grainy image, seems to take the form of mockumentary. We’re invited to giggle at these terribly dressed nerds as they schlep their wardrobe-sized hardware to a drab hotel for a weekend of pitting their chess playing software against each other’s in a round-robin tournament. The film, though, soon shifts to something more subtle, philosophical and humane.

“Ultimately I think it is a very human endeavour,” explains Bujalski with regards to his characters’ aim to create a machine that will trounce a human in a tactical battle of wits. “You don’t try to create an artificial intelligence unless, on some level, you’re trying to understand something about your own organic intelligence. It always points back to the great philosophical questions, How do humans think? How do we play chess? Why do we play chess? You have to be asking that question somewhat if you’re programming a computer to do it, and so I could identify with all that.”

As these questions begin to be asked, the film’s high-concept narrative spirals off from the chess competition to much more freaky territory. One computer refuses to play against its peers: at one point the opponent’s queen is up for grabs and the glitching machine merely nestles its rook up beside her. It’s only when it takes on a real human challenger that it perks up its game, that it becomes more aggressive. It begins to dawn on Peter (Patrick Riester), the gangly junior programmer trying to debug the erratic software, that it has somehow become sentient – it has a soul. Think of the film, then, as a genteel prequel to James Cameron’s Terminator.

“I feel like Terminator was something that everyone got back in 1984, and still basically everybody gets and makes sense of it now,” suggests Bujalski. It’s transmuted a little bit, though, he admits. It may not take the form of a cyborg that looks like Arnie, but the filmmaker reckons there’s still plenty of reason to be wary of our laptops: “Now the biggest threat that computers pose to us on a daily basis is that they just suck all the time out of our lives – someone who has spent all day on Facebook has, in some sense, been thoroughly defeated by their computer.”

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“Someone who has spent all day on Facebook has, in some sense, been thoroughly defeated by their computer” – Andrew Bujalski

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With his love for 16mm film and the grainy black and white images he captured using the Sony AVC-3260 for Computer Chess, it would be fair to class Bujalski as a technosceptic. As we speak I picture him at the other end of the line speaking into a wall-mounted candlestick-style telephone. “It’s more like a 1990s phone – nothing special,” he laughs. “But yeah, of course, I like old technology. As I’m speaking to you I’m looking at my poor, ignored Steenbeck editing machine – I don’t know if I’ll ever get to use it again. This is not a novel idea, but with every technology we adopt there are things that are gained and there are things that are lost, and of course I mourn the things that are lost and I do have a real affection for the technology that I grew up with.”

Why does he think that is? “Maybe that was the last time I felt comfortable with technology, when I felt I was the master in that relationship. Now I certainly don’t.”

He says this, but Computer Chess is also another first for Bujalski: it’s his first dalliance with digital filmmaking. “There’s a lot of power in CGI,” he tells me. “You feel like George Lucas and you say, ‘Wow, I can do anything I want to this image.’ It’s really remarkable and exciting what technology is able to do. Now, very clearly, if you look at what that’s produced in our culture: has that greater power over the image given us better movies? Absolutely fucking not.”

Bujalski didn’t get drunk on this technology, though. The CGI in Computer Chess is used primarily to tweak and accentuate the natural flaws in the Sony AVC-3260’s cinematography: light floods the lens, images ghost across the screen as the camera and characters move – at one point the image inexplicably becomes a photo negative. “They are a lot of little glitches in the movie,” he explains. “Some that we tweaked for what felt like narrative purposes. Most of them are really just oddities that are camera produced, and that’s part of the joy of shooting on these old analogue video cameras: they were unpredictable.”

You could almost say they’d a mind of their own...

“Yeah, that irony didn’t escape me,” he deadpans. “Ultimately I came to feel the same way about the camera as I tend to about actors, which is that they are not entirely under my control. You can give them direction, you can try and get them to do something like what you envisioned, but they’re always going to bring something of their own, and that is really exciting. That became part of the fun of this camera. And it wasn’t always good: sometimes it would glitch out in a way that we couldn’t use, but sometimes it would glitch out in ways I just thought was glorious.”