8 × 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957) is an American experimental film

Experimental film

Experimental film or experimental cinema is a type of cinema. Experimental film is an artistic practice relieving both of visual arts and cinema. Its origins can be found in European avant-garde movements of the twenties. Experimental cinema has built its history through the texts of theoreticians...

 directed by Hans Richter

Hans Richter (artist)

Hans Richter was a painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, film-experimenter and producer. He was born in Berlin into a well-to-do family and died in Minusio, near Locarno, Switzerland.-Germany:...

, Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

, and Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...

 released on March 15, 1957 in New York City. It features original music by Robert Abramson, John Gruen and Douglas Townsend

Douglas Townsend

Douglas Townsend is an American composer and musicologist who became interested in composition while a student at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, in New York City, and taught himself composition, counterpoint and orchestration...

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Described by Richter as "part Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

, part Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...

", it is a fairy tale for the subconscious based on the game of chess

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

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While living in New York, Hans Richter directed two feature films, Dreams That Money Can Buy

Dreams That Money Can Buy

Dreams That Money Can Buy is a 1947 American experimental feature color film written, produced, and directed by surrealist artist and dada film-theorist Hans Richter.The film was produced by Kenneth Macpherson and Peggy Guggenheim....

and 8x8: A Chess Sonata in collaboration with Max Ernst

Max Ernst

Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...

, Cocteau, Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles

Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator.Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris...

, Fernand Léger

Fernand Léger

Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...

, Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing mobile sculptures. In addition to mobile and stable sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry, jewelry and household objects.-Childhood:Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in Lawnton,...

, Duchamp, and others, which was partially filmed on the lawn of his summer house in Southbury, Connecticut

Southbury, Connecticut

Southbury is a town located in western New Haven County, Connecticut, USA. Southbury is located north of Oxford and Newtown; it also is east of Brookfield. Southbury's population was 18,567 at the 2000 census....

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