Marcel Dzama - Behind Every Curtain

By ns

This is a kind of sketchbook companion or dossier on the king of Dzama’s latest film, ‘A Game of Chess’. This work draws on the importance of chess for the early twentieth-century avant-garde (Man Ray, Duchamp, Picabia) and the game’s curious overlap with dance, in films and ballets by René Clair and - of special significance to Dzama - Oskar Schlemmer, whose 1922 Triadic Ballet included puppet-like masked figures performing on a chequered surface.

In Dzama’s film, characters based on chess pieces, clad in costumes made from papier-mâché, plaster and fibreglass, wearing elaborate masks, dance across a chequered board to engage their opponents in fatal skirmishes.