Bujalski: Computer Chess (2013)

Although mumblecore films take a world decimated and dissolved by social media as their premise and point of departure, they rarely show characters interacting with social media at any great length. In part, that’s because it’s already there in the ambient, mellifluous mumble that cocoons them, just as the very jerkiness and paucity of their images internalises the mobile screen you might be watching it on. But it’s also because mumblecore is more attuned to being off social media while knowing everyone else is on it, or at least being doomed to some backwater of social media where you can’t gain quite enough traction to hook into the flow that seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. And, with Computer Chess, Andrew Bujalski finds a way to make a mumblecore film that’s almost exclusively set across social media platforms while managing to retain that peculiar sense of loneliness – he makes the first mumblecore film set in the past. Specifically, it’s set over the course of a weekend-long chess computer conference in the 1980s, as a group of technical afficionados, many played by actual professionals from the computer industry, descend on a small hotel to share and showcase the latest innovations in online gaming. Armed with a trio of cameras that are clunkily conspicuous as the computers themselves, Bujalski uses the corporeality of this massive yet delimited system to visualise those redundant spaces of social media where so many mumblecore corners, corridors and couches are sprawled. In a very real sense, the only places in the hotel left open to the film’s narrative are those that aren’t central or critical to the primitive intranet that’s installed across it, in a prototype of the mumblecore present – and Bujalksi’s images are grainier and more impoverished than anything in the movement to date, confusing past and present in the same way that his peers confuse day and night, or real and artificial light. Far from trying to create an immersive, plausible period piece, then, it’s as much a placeholder for the present as any other mumblecore offering. And to watch it is to feel the full force of a here and now that’s imperceptibly reprogramming what’s come before, a standing wave of information history cascading through everything with alien hilarity, as if to evoke an evanescent present that’s become even more remote than the past.