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Private Notes
Garry Kasparov is arguably the greatest chess player who has ever lived. In 1997 he played a chess match against IBM's computer Deep Blue. Kasparov lost the match. This film shows the match and the events surrounding it from Kasparov's perspective. It delves into the psychological aspects of the game, paranoia surrounding it and suspicions that have arisen around IBM's true tactics. It consists of interviews with Kasparov, his manager, chess experts, and members of the IBM Deep Blue team, as well as original footage of the match itself.
I suppose the strength of a documentary lies in its ability to make you believe its central thesis. Despite the lack of a definitive whistleblower, Vikram Jayanti's conspiracy thriller about chess legend Garry Kasparov's match against IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer does suggest something very unusual going on behind closed doors at the software firm. If the computer did what it did unassisted, then this is a triumph for science, yet IBM weren't acting like victors. Why, having developed what could have been a working prototype for an artificial intelligence, did the firm refuse to share details of its operational systems, and - a real smoking gun, this - dismantle it immediately after the last match? If they had nothing to hide, they were going a funny way about it.
Jayanti and Kasparov both point the finger at the same scenario - human intervention on the machine's side of the game. Jayanti digs up a fascinating parallel to this - the tale of 'The Turk', a creepy-looking chess-playing robot that beat Napoleon and did indeed have a human covertly guiding it. Excerpts from a fascinating silent film about The Turk are peppered throughout this film.
Even if you're not convinced, the film still has plenty of supplemental pleasures, not least in a dissection of a chess match as charged and fascinating as 'When We Were Kings' (1997)'s explanation of the Rumble in the Jungle. It also functions as a Cliff Notes guide to Kasparov's remarkable career, and the human dimension is not swept aside either. Come the third match, the contempt between Kasparov and the IBM team is palpable, and interviews with the protagonists years on show that little has changed. Kasparov, in particular, seems haunted and troubled by his experiences. His peers refer to him as a 'Super Grand Master', yet this defeat really seems to have stuck at the back of his mind. Good use of archival footage, knowledge of wider social backgrounds and excellent access to the principal players round off a very good documentary indeed.
This true, shocking, astonishing story of what the Belgians did in the Congo was forgotten for over 50 years. Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death describes Leopold II, King of the Belgium's private colony of the Congo between 1885 and 1908 as a gulag labor camp of shocking brutality. Leopold posed as the protector of Africans fleeing Arab slave-traders but, in reality, he carved out an empire based on terror to harvest rubber. Families were held as hostages, starving to death if the men failed to produce enough wild rubber. Children's hands were chopped off as punishment for late deliveries. The Belgian government has denounced this documentary as a "tendentious diatribe" for depicting King Leopold II as the moral forebear of Adolf Hitler, responsible for the death of 10 million people in his rapacious exploitation of the Congo. Yet, it is agreed today that the first Human Rights movement was spurred by what happened in the Congo.
Set to the soundtrack of Papa Wemba's extraordinary music, this outrageous, funny and eye-opening film depicts the underground world of a flamboyant African cult.
Nick Fraser (Editor)
Papa Wemba is a well-known Congolese singer. He is also a big cheese in
Le Sape, the Société des Ambianceurs et Persons Élégants, which
translated into English means a society of people who spend huge
amounts of money on designer clothes with the motive of making
themselves as conspicuously elegant as possible.
The film is a splendid evocation of Papa Wemba's music, but it is also
an unusual insight into what it means to be an immigrant in
contemporary Europe.
The sapeur have borrowed from our own culture, creating something rich
and strange and wholly Congolese. Don't miss the scene where they try
on fur coats.
