The Hastings tournament
This week, to emphasize for beginners the longevity of chess, we take a look at the famous Hastings tournament, hosted by a club in England in 1895.
Harry Nelson Pillsbury (1873 1909) was an American chess player who won Hastings 1895, the strongest tournament of its time. After 125 years, Hastings 1895 is still being talked about and it was in a time when everything was manual.
The new world champion at the time Emanuel Lasker and the exworld champ Wilhelm Steinitz were there. Siegbert Tarrasch from Germany was there, and the dreaded Joseph Blackburne represented England. Mikhail Tchigorin travelled from Russia, David Janowski from France, and William Henry Krause Pollock from Canada. They were all leading players within their respective countries. There were 22 participants at Hastings.
Pillsbury won with 16½ points, Tchigorin was second with 16 points and Lasker third with 15 ½ points. Today the column presents two games by Pillsbury from the Hastings tournament.
he encounters. The joy he takes in impishly recollecting oddities of those around him presents a perverse thrill. For David, the gentle mockery of his writing is his coping mechanism.
And, so the film seems to depend on all things being somewhat heightened. This is memory, not real life. These moments, where the narrative reflexes onto itself, drawing attention to its own fabrications are the most thrilling, both for thematic and formal reasons. There are a series of scenes where memories are projected onto surfaces where Zac Nicholson’s cinematography is at its most incisive. And there is also an earlier scene where a giant hand breaking the roof of a house turns into the angry hand of a stepfather destroying a child’s artwork. At times, Iannucci abandons the metatextual references and returns to something a bit more straightforward, but then the film rights itself when it writes its way out of reality into something more ambitiously unreal. The penultimate shot of two Davids in conversation with each other is proof of this.
And what of Iannucci’s decision to cast the film with a composite of races? Patel’s David Copperfield of Indian heritage. His mother is white. Agnes, his would-be paramour, is black. Her father is played by an actor of East Asian descent. It affects very little in the film’s narrative. There are strains of subtext in some scenes. For example, in a critical moment, Patel is flanked by four white bodies as David makes his first decisive strain towards owning his fate. But mostly, the film is deliberately ambivalent about commenting on the racial implications of the casting. Instead, it is better reflected as a chance to give different bodies a chance to enjoy the frivolity of Victorian-era joy. Iannucci understands that the idea of “blind-casting” is best considered as a way to give performers opportunities they might not have had. And Patel is more than up to the task. As good as Jairaj Varsani is as a young David (and he is very, very good), the film is at its best when it allows Patel’s unbridled emotion to push through. It is the best he’s been yet. In that climactic moment when he bellows, “My name is David Copperfield!” it feels like a benediction. It feels like the role he was born to play.