Parky at the Pictures (DVD 15/9/2011)

Little has changed where catering for nationwide audiences is concerned and the assumption of the defunct Film Council's role in doling out funding for new British movies will stymie any hopes of the BFI establishing a digital television channel along the lines of Cinemoi or Film4. But, in the midst of this rampant capital-centricism, the DVD department has gone from strength to strength, with the splendid Flipside strand being complemented by numerous relishable collections from the documentary archive. The latest, The Soviet Influence: From Turksib to Night Mail, is one of the best yet and suggests a new direction in film studies aids designed to prompt viewers into reassessing cine-truisms in much the same manner as Mark Cousins's muddled, egotistical, but nonetheless laudably original and ambitious 15-part series, The Story of Film: An Odyssey.

Historians have long referred to the inspiration that the British Documentary Movement drew from the montage masterpieces produced in the decade following the Bolshevik Revolution and this considered selection makes the case with more eloquence than any lecture or text. Taking Victor Turin's majestic 1929 featurette Turksib as its exemplar, this 163-minute survey not only reveals the visual debt that John Grierson and his acolytes owed to their Soviet counterparts, but also the extent to which they toned down the dialectical zeal of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Shub and Dziga-Vertov to package their social, political and commercial messages in a cosy style more suited to British audiences who had just had their first taste of Labour rule.

Photographed by Boris Frantsisson and Yevgeni Slavinsky with the customary Constructivist fascination with machinery, this account of the building of the 1445km railroad between Turkestan and Siberia is a patriotic paean that not only promotes Stalin's Five Year Plan, but also emphasises the vital role that ordinary people will have to play in its realisation. Thus, Turin and screenwriters Yakov Aron and Viktor Shklovsky reinforce the notion of a mass hero and use typage close-ups to encourage every watching citizen to think that they could make a similar contribution to banishing the backwardness of Tsarist times and hauling their vast nation into the 20th century.

Crucial to this modernisation process was the optimal use of land and Turin explains how Turkestan could concentrate its limited water resources on producing cotton if Siberian grain could be transported by rail to feed the workers. But the laying of track is not the sole focus of this often bucolic picture, as Turin shows that even in an age of progress there is still a place for trusted farming methods - although the scenes of soil tilling and sheep shearing are contrasted with a sequence depicting a camel caravan's struggle through a sandstorm, which subtly stresses the need for the railway to carry the precious cotton cargo with greater efficiency and safety.

This digital restoration boasts a new score by Guy Bartell of the electronica unit Bronnt Industries Kapital, but Grierson's original captions have been retained and it's amusing to learn that HG Wells considered their gushing enthusiasm to be `epileptic'. But it's difficult not to be exhilarated by scenes like the horseback pursuit of the locomotive steaming along the newly laid tracks, as they not only convey the great leap being taken by the Soviet peasantry, but they also have a cinematic vibrancy to match the sagebrush chases and cavalry charges that were becoming an increasingly familiar aspect of the Hollywood Western.

It's no surprise to learn, therefore, that the 34 year-old Turin had spent the period 1912-22 in the United States and had been employed as an actor and scenario writer at Vitagraph before returning home to be accused of abstraction and formalism in his study of the capitalist class system, Battle of Giants (1926). He learned his lesson well, however, as the rhythmic lyricism in Turksib was tempered by a realism, clarity and wit that brought a rare humanity to what was still essentially a propagandist exercise. Yet Turin was prevented from making another film until 1938, when he abandoned his executive desk to travel to the Baku studios in Azerbaijan make the 1905 Revolution drama, Bakintsy.

Opening with The Workers' Topical News No1, which was the newsreel shown at Turksib's 1930 London premiere, the British slate ably reveals how the oblique camera angles and accelerated editorial techniques imported from the Soviet Union transformed the rather staid indigenous documentary style. Ironically, Paul Rotha put these socialist strategies to commercial use in Australian Wine (1931), which follows the production of sweet, sparkling and dry vintages from branch to bottle. However, the same year, Basil Wright invoked the spirit of Turin (as well as Ukrainian maestro Alexander Dovzhenko) in The Country Comes to Town, which examines how mechanisation was introduced and communication links were improved to speed the delivery of milk and other fresh produce to urban markets without diminishing the beauty and tranquility of the familiar pastoral scene.

Arthur Elton similarly waxes lyrical about tradition and progress working in harmony, as Professor Stapleton of Aberystwyth discussed Welsh farming issues in Shadow on the Mountains (1932). And Paul Rotha warms to a similar theme on behalf of the Central Electricity Board in The Face of Britain (1935), which harks back to a golden age of agriculture before denouncing the slums that arose during the Industrial Revolution and calling for planners to embark upon a new era of hydro-electrical plenty, cleanliness and equal opportunity.

These little-seen items are fascinating. But they are overshadowed by the majesty of Harry Watt and Basil Wright's timeless gem, Night Mail (1936), which fulfilled Grierson's remit to focus on everyday activities that audiences could readily identify with and, thus, ameliorate community accord by giving each class grouping an insight into their neighbours' contribution to the general good.

However, Grierson was also an artist whose funding invariably came from state or commercial sponsorship. Consequently, he had to inform and persuade, as well as entertain, and this GPO Film Unit short was designed to reassure the public that not only was their mail safe within the vast network that transported it from postboxes and counters to the doorstep, but also that the government was doing a decent job in keeping such a complex system working efficiently.

Grierson began the project by asking a number of writers to contribute pieces on journeys between Euston and Edinburgh and then dispatched Harry Watt and cameramen Chick Fowle and Jonah Jones to record images that best conjured up their observations. But, despite the naturalistic sequences of the postmen bantering as they worked and the clipped commentary explaining procedures and disseminating statistics, Grierson decided that the film lacked a human touch and he commissioned W.H. Auden to compose verses identifying both those who had sent and those who would receive the various letters and packages being sorted on the night mail.

Collaborating with editor RQ McNaughton, sound supervisor Alberto Cavalcanti and co-director Basil Wright, Auden wrote to suit the visual rhythms and dozens of suggestions were discarded before the lines were finally spoken by Stuart Legg and Grierson himself to Benjamin Britten's rousing score. The result was a masterpiece of cinematic lyricism, whose evocative atmosphere has been further enhanced by the passing of steam.

Cambridge-educated Humphrey Jennings started out as one of Grierson's protégés, but he gradually developed a more poetic style that established him among Britain's finest film-makers. Several of his titles are already available in disparate DVD collections, but in compiling The Complete Humphrey Jennings, the BFI seeks to gather them all in one place. The first volume eschews a strict chronology to cherry pick 14 films from the six-year period to 1940. But they epitomise Jennings's distinctive mix of the personal, the progressive and the patriotic.

As befits a Modernist who had founded Experiment magazine with William Empson and Jacob Bronowski and helped Herbert Read, Roland Penrose and André Breton in organising the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, Jennings was more of an avant-gardist than a documentarian. Thus, when he joined the GPO Film Unit in 1934, his early outings were anything but formulaic and owed much less to the Soviets than the work of his more left-leaning contemporaries.

Jennings once wrote that `to the real poet the front of the Bank of England may be as excellent a site for the appearance of poetry as the depths of the sea' and he more than proved his point in Post Haste (1934), which opens with a picture of the Central Post Office in Lombard Street in charting 300 years of mail delivery. Drawing on documents from the British Museum and the Postal Museum in Tottenham, Jennings enlivens a potentially mundane subject with unassuming panache, as he recalls such landmarks as the launch of the Express Extraordinary in the 1780s, Rowland Hill's introduction of the Penny Post in 1840, the invention of the railway mail catcher by a certain Mr Ramsay and the replacement of horses with motorised vehicles for transportation in 1902.

Models from the Science Museum of similarly enliven The Story of the Wheel, while the scale versions of Royal George No9, Stephenson's Rocket and Lady of the Lake in Locomotives (both 1934), help explain why trains took over mail traffic in 1830. This engaging instructional also shows the Cornish Riviera Express being pulled out of Paddington by King Edward V and snagging a bag of post while hurtling along at full steam. However, despite the jaunty accordion accompaniment, the action is less breakneck in Farewell Topsails (1937), which depicts rigged schooners like Mary Barrow and Katie carrying cargoes of China clay from St Austell in Cornwall to the Thames Estuary.

This recently rediscovered gem is notable for Jennings's use of the Dufay-Chromex process, which furthered the experiments with colour he had conducted with New Zealand animator Len Lye on the Shell-sponsored Gasparcolor short The Birth of the Robot (1936), which is included among the extras along with English Harvest, a variation on The Farm (both 1938), which formed the central part of the colour triptych that was completed by the Dufaycolor offering Making Fashion (1938; aka Design for Spring), which showcased the latest creations by costumier Norman Hartnell.

The same year saw Jennings found Mass Observation with the anthropologist Tom Harrison and poet-sociologist Charles Madge and the influence of this new project is readily evident in Penny Journey: The Story of a Postcard from Manchester to Graffham (1938), an engagingly self-explanatory short that records with deft precision everyday tasks being undertaken in Lancashire and Sussex that would ordinarily be overlooked, but which played a vital role in the smooth running of the country. The same attention to detail extends across a broader canvas in Speaking From America (1938), which examines both the transmission of a phone call from London to Lawrenceville, New Jersey and the construction of a new facility at Cooling Marshes to ease pressure on the telephonists in the International Telephone Exchange at Faraday House.

In 1939, Jennings fused his Surrealist and Observationalist preoccupations to form Spare Time, which was produced for the New York World Fair and incurred the wrath of actuality purists who mistook the decision not to accentuate the nobility of the working-classes for patronising satire. However, the director's affinity is evident in every frame for the Sheffield steelworkers heading to the big match, the Lancashire cotton millers playing in a kazoo band and the day-trippers enjoying the zoo, wrestling and dancing at Belle Vue, and the Pontypriddians going to the fair, a puppet show and the YMCA or those content to sit in the pub with a pint and a few pals.

Presenting life as it is lived without commenting on pressing social and economic matters, this is anthropological cinema at its most non-judgemental. Moreover, it is also aesthetically audacious, as Jennings reveals his subjects to be much more animated in their leisure than they usually are in their labour. As Laurie Lee suggests in the commentary, `Spare Time is a time when we have a chance to do what we like, a chance to be most ourselves' and therein lies its message that even the best things in life can always be improved.

On the surface, SS Ionian (1939) makes a similar point, as it shows the crew of a cargo vessel being too busy with its duties to notice the beauty of the Mediterranean or such ports as Gibraltar, Valletta, Limasol and Alexandria. But, while Jennings was keen to capture the daily routine of the seamen, he was more intent on contrasting the British Empire with the peaceful democratic paradise of Ancient Greece and implying that the more expansionist Romans also had a latterday equivalent in Nazi Germany. Consequently, it's no accident that he pays such close attention to the Royal Naval presence in the region, as his aim is less to boost the GPO and Imperial Airways than reassure imperial outposts that they will not be abandoned in case of aggression.

Sadly, the conflict to which Jennings alluded was not long in coming and he teamed with Pat Jackson and Harry Watt to record the state of a nation ready to do its bit in The First Days (1939). Showing London making Phony War preparations for the hostilities that would inevitably follow, the film is dominated by Jennings's cool lyricism, as the images of barrage balloons and sandbags, searchlights and sirens, tanks and guns provide calm reassurance rather than alarm. Even the removal of paintings from the National Gallery is presented as an act of common sense rather than a harbinger of blitz and destruction, although there is something chilling about the line accompanying a shot of the Thames: `The gleaming river may betray London yet.'

Jennings would prove to be a skilled propagandist, whether he was discussing Ministry of Labour plans to protect the labour force in Welfare of the Workers, commending the efforts of the War Agricultural Executive Committee and farmers like East Anglian Fred Martin to restore the fertility of unused land in Spring Offensive or promising the world at large that the country was ready for any eventuality in London Can Take It! (all 1940). Indeed, the latter proved so effective that the Ministry of Information commissioned a shorter version, Britain Can Take It! (which is also in the extras), to convince American isolationists that not only would the Royal Family would stand shoulder to shoulder with Eastenders to protect the Houses of Parliament and St Paul's Cathedral from the Luftwaffe, but that every man, woman and child from Land's End to John o' Groats was braced for battle.

Had he survived the 1950 fall that claimed his life while scouting cliff locations in Greece, Jennings may well have embraced the neo-realist style that had emerged in postwar Italy. It clearly left an indelible impact on Martin Scorsese as he grew up in the New York neighbourhood of Little Italy and, in My Voyage to Italy (1999), he recalls first seeing the masterworks of Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini on the family's 16-inch RCA Victor television.

However, such personal interjections are much fewer and further between than they were in Scorsese's treatise on Golden Age of Hollywood, A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995). Indeed, he is pretty sparing with insights into the political and aesthetic significance of the pictures that helped inspire him to quit a vocation to the priesthood and become a director. But he cannot be faulted for allowing the extracts he has selected to speak for themselves and, thus, allow viewers to immerse themselves in four hours of monochrome genius.

In structuring the survey with co-writers Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Raffaele Donato and Kent Jones and editor extraordinaire Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese has narrowed his focus and concentrated on particular favourites rather than trying to tell the entire story of Italian cinema between the coming of sound and the start of the Economic Miracle. As a consequence, there are sizeable gaps and some odd omissions. But there are also charming surprises like Scorsese's passion for Alessandro Blasetti's Fabiola (1949), Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953) and Visconti's adaptation of Camillo Boito's novella Senso (1954). Indeed, everything included here is irresistible and Scorsese shows it the respect it deserves by according it the latitude to entice and enchant.

For the record, the other key clips come from Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria (1914), Mario Camerini's What Scoundrels Men Are! (1932) and Il Signor Max (1939), Blasetti's 1860 (1934), Rossellini's Fantasia sottomarina (1940), Rome, Open City (1945), Paisà (1946), Germany Year Zero (1947), L'amore (1948), Stromboli, The Flowers of St Francis (both 1950), Europa `51 (1952) and Journey to Italy (1954), Visconti's Ossessione (1943) and La terra trema (1948), Giuseppe De Santis's Days of Glory (1945), De Sica's Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), Umberto D (1952), The Gold of Naples (1954) and Divorce, Italian Style (1961), Fellini's La dolce vita (1960) and 8½ (1963), and Antonioni's L'avventura (1960), La notte (1961) and L'eclisse (1962).

Fellini adored the circus, but other film-makers haven't always appreciated its magic. From EA Dupont's Variety (1925) and Tod Browning's The Unknown (1927) and through Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and Ingmar Bergman's Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) to Tizza Covi and Rainer Brummel's La Pivellina and Jacques Rivette's Around a Small Mountain (both 2009), cinema has invariably depicted the big top as a place of daring and magic. But it has rarely shied away from presenting the harsher side of life on the road and the difficulty of sustaining a traditional form of entertainment imperilled by progress and it's the latter approach that Aaron L. Schock takes in his documentary, Circo.

Such was the profitability of the circus that Antonio Ponce founded with his wife Alejandra that he was able to divide it into four equal businesses for his sons. However, times are now so tough that Circo García, Circo Dunbar, Circo España and Grán Circo México are now competing with each other for dwindling audiences and the stress of keeping the latter troupe going is beginning to tell on Gilberto and Lupe Ponce and their sons Tino and Tacho. With daughters Reyna and Erika having already quit their hula-hoop and trapeze acts, Tacho is left to ride his motorbike in the Spectacular Globe of Death, while ringmaster Tino tames the big cats. But, much to the dismay of their mother Ivonne, much of the remainder of the programme is filled by Tino's children: Cáscaras, Julio, Moisés and Alexia.

Despite the long hours of travelling and training, the quartet seem to enjoy mastering their skills and only fleetingly envy the kids at their shows who get to live in houses, go to school and play with nice toys. After all, not many youngsters have lions, tigers, llamas, camels and long-horned cows for pets and their five year-old cousin Naydelín would much rather be nomadic than stuck in one place with mother Erika and her `settled' husband.

But Ivonne is tired of pitching and striking tents in a new town every night, especially as Tino does all the hard graft and Gilberto pockets what little cash they make. Consequently, after Naydelín returns to her mother after the family reunion for the Day of the Dead celebrations, Ivonne snaps and bundles the youngest children on to a bus, leaving Tino to make do as best he can with Cáscaras, Tacho and the new non-circus girlfriend who is utterly despised by both Gilberto and Lupe.

This is a hugely dispiriting experience, but it's also an entirely compelling one. The animals forced to spend their lives in cages are evidently cherished and well kept, but it's difficult to condone the continued use of such noble creatures for such demeaning purposes. But the human cast seem to be every bit as exploited to outsiders unfamiliar with circus's `pitch in' mentality.

After years of cooking concession snacks, keeping her kids illiterate and trying to make a home in a cramped caravan, Ivonne has clearly lost the enchantment that prompted her to run away with Tino at the age of 15. But one can understand her frustration at Tino's refusal to stand up to his martinet father, just as it's easy to see why he is reluctant to challenge the code that has shaped his entire existence and in which he retains an enormous pride. However, the expressions on the faces of Julio, Moisés and Alexia as they head into an uncertain future seem to leave little doubt where they would rather be.

While splendidly capturing the sights and sounds (and even suggesting the smells) of circus life, Schock also handles the domestic spats with considerable sensitivity. He notes with equal tact the shabbiness of the tents and the mediocrity of some of the acts, which forces Tino to admit that they aren't good enough to play the big city circuit and have to stick to the provincial backwaters. But Schock can't prevent a tinge of sadness from tainting the action, as he intimates that not only is the Grán Circo México facing extinction, but so is circus itself.

With a little luck, stereoscopy has also become an endangered art form once more, although the odd outing during the current boom has suggested that it could be put to greater aesthetic purpose than hurled projectiles and thrusting buttocks. Wim Wenders had long planned to make a documentary about the German choreographer Pina Bausch. However, she died in June 2009, just two days before their collaboration could commence. Wenders decided to continue the project, nonetheless, and focus less on Bausch's methodology than on the works she devised and the impact that she had on the ensemble at her Tanztheater Wuppertal. The result is Pina, which is being hailed as one of the first arthouse films to make creatively kinetic use of 3-D. However, most will now get to see it in its flat version on disc.

Judging by the inertia and pretentiousness of the talking-head recollections of the Tanztheater's principal performers, it's perhaps no great shame that Wenders was unable to produce his cherished profile. In fact, this task had already been admirably performed by Klaus Wildenhahn's What Are Pina Bausch and Her Dancers Doing in Wuppertal?, Chantal Akerman's One Day, Pina Asked For.. (both 1983), Lilo Mangelsdorff's Ladies and Gentlemen Over 65 (2002) and Anne Linsel's Dancing Dreams (2010). Thus, Wenders was much better off being forced to concentrate on the dance itself and the challenge of using three-dimensionality to capture the grace, dynamism and uniqueness of Bausch's choreography.

Both Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly would have approved of Wenders's positioning and movement of Hélène Louvart's camera, as he not only shoots the dancers (for the most part) in full figure, but he also makes potent use of space and cutting on action to capture both the meticulous blocking of the dances and their distinctive vivacity. Consequently, even in 2-D, it's possible to appreciate the conceptual brilliance of Bausch's choreography and Wenders's mastery of stereoscopy and its ability to immerse the viewer in the action. However, it might have increased this sense of inclusivity had Wenders identified the pieces for non-aficionados.

The opening interpretation of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is not particularly inspired. But its energy contrasts with the more measuredly mesmerising movements contained in the dance-hall flirtation, Kontakthof, the dramatic restaurant sextet, Café Müller, the quirky human nature study Arien (complete with giant plastic hippo), and the audaciously splashy aquatic reverie, Vollmond. Wenders follows Bausch in utilising both teenage and veteran casts for Kontakthof, which explores the preening pressures of trying to make an impression of members of the opposite sex across the dance floor. And this generational mix is also employed in a gesticulatory procession that meanders beyond the proscenium and out in to ridge of a nearby quarry to the accompaniment of Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five's rendition of `West End Blues'.

Indeed, Wenders shrewdly sets a number of set-pieces outdoors to exploit such eye-catching backdrops as the Wuppertal Schwebebahn monorail, an old factory, some woodland and a public swimming pool. But, even though this is a tribute and not a treatise, the refusal to name the talking-heads or contextualise their reminiscences is frustrating and reinforces the rather supercilious air that Wenders had so scrupulously avoided in such previous actuality outings as Lightning Over Water (1980), Notebooks on Cities and Clothes (1990) and Buena Vista Social Club (1999).

The terpsichorean tone is markedly different in Sue Bourne's Jig, which follows various juvenile contestants during their preparations for the 2010 Irish Dance World Championships. Forming an unofficial trilogy with Marilyn Agrelo's Mad Hot Ballroom (2005) and Beadie Finzi's Only When I Dance (2009), this is an engaging, if not always enlightening insight into the effort and expense involved in helping a child realise a competitive dream.

Although she hops over to Holland to profile Sri Lankan adoptee Sandun Verschoor and ventures further afield to Moscow to watch Ana Kondratyeva rehearse with her ceilidh team, Bourne focuses primarily on Midlands-based ex-champion John Carey's tutelage of 10 year-old John Whitehurst and 15 year-old Joe Bitter, and the friendly, but still intense rivalries between 12 year-olds Brogan McKay (Derry) and Julia O'Rourke (New York) and older teenagers Simona Mauriello, Claire Greaney and Suzanne Coyle, who hail respectively from London, Galway and Glasgow and have been competing against each other for many years without Simona ever taking the top prize. There are occasional interjections from proud parents, but Bourne wisely let the kids do most of the talking, as not only are they enthusiastically garrulous, but they are also utterly devoted to their art and refreshingly free of ego and attitude.

Invariably cuddling a member of the menagerie that dwells on his bed, Whitehurst is easily the most charming subject, as he hopes rather than expects to do well. Relocated from California to Solihull to follow his star, Bitter is equally genial. But Bourne never lets on quite how talented the pair are until they reach the competition itself. Nor, for that matter, does she reveal much about Carey's credentials as an eight times former champion and a key component of Michael Flatley's Riverdance and Lord of the Dance shows.

But at least Carey gets a name check, as McKay and O'Rourke's coaches at the McConomy and Petri schools barely merit a mention. Indeed, Bourne seems more interested in the boys and rather struggles to develop storylines for the girls beyond their relationships with each other and their mothers. Consequently, she pays as much attention to their wigs, dresses and make-up as she does to their training. But all this changes once everyone assembles at the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow.

In truth, the climactic sequence is a bit of a muddle. But the chaotic structuring conveys something of the excitement of the event and the chasm between the lows of Verschoor and Kondratyeva's early exits and the highs of Whitehurst and Bitter's inevitable triumphs. Yet the most dramatic moment turns on the reading of the results in McKay and O'Rourke's category, with the changes in facial expression raising more pertinent questions about the psychological toll that competing takes on the youngsters than the rest of the film put together.

The strain of striving for excellence is also the theme of Liz Garbus's Bobby Fischer Against the World.

When Fischer challenged Boris Spassky for the World Chess Championship in 1972, the contest took precedence over Vietnam and Watergate on American television newscasts. Henry Kissinger viewed the match as a chance to claw back some kudos in the Cold War, while chat show hosts like Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson fell over themselves to interview the new superstar. For a brief moment, the most cerebral of pastimes became the subject of mass hysteria. But, once the fuss had died down and Fischer no longer had expectation to sustain him, he was left with the desperate dilemma of having to deal with his own prejudice and paranoia for the next 36 deeply unfulfilling years.

Born in Chicago in March 1943, Fischer was raised in Brooklyn with his older sister Joan by his mother Regina, a Polish-Jewish, Communist-sympathising political activist who was divorced from German biophysicist Hans-Gerhardt Fischer and took maintenance payments from Hungarian-Jewish physicist Paul Nemenyi (whom some have since claimed as Fischer's actual father). He began playing chess at six and won the first of his eight US championships at 15. However, within a year, Regina had moved out to further her medical career and Joan was left to accompany her brother to tournaments and TV appearances.

Fischer's rise up the chess rankings was nowhere near as meteoric as Garbus would have the viewer believe. Indeed, there is no mention of his 1960 clash with Spassky, his defeat by Samuel Reshevsky or the semi-retirement that followed accusations of collusion after his failure at the 1962 Candidates Tournament in Curaçao. However, she does mention his membership of the Worldwide Church of God, which he joined in the mid-1960s, along with fitness coach Harry Sneider, who played a key role in the strenuous physical regime that helped make Fischer the poster boy of American chess.

But, intriguing though the backstory is, the emphasis is firmly on the Reykjavik showdown and Fischer's eccentric behaviour beforehand, as he argued about the purse and playing conditions and seriously considered backing out altogether before receiving a stern phone call from Dr Kissinger. His arrival came as a great relief to tournament organiser Gudmundur Thorarinsson, although Fischer was unsportingly late for the first game, which he inexplicably lost after moving what became known as `the poison pawn'. He failed to show at all for the second game and chief arbiter Lothar Schmid still feels a pang at having been compelled to `destroy a genius'.

However, following complaints about the positioning of cameras and the need to play games in total isolation, Fischer began the fightback in Game Three by famously using the `Son of Sorrow' strategy. He surpassed this in Game Six, however, when his victory took on a `placid beauty'. But, even though the world was gripped by every move three decades ago, Garbus decides to condense the next 14 skirmishes into a breakneck montage (slickly assembled by Karen Schmeer and Michael Levine) and concludes the segment on Game Twenty-One, when Spassky resigned by telephone after an overnight adjournment.

Thrust into an even more glaring media spotlight, Fischer struggled to retain his equilibrium and his demands for future tournaments became increasingly outrageous. He also started studying contentious texts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The White Man's Bible and groups like the Illuminati, with the result that his pronouncements became disturbingly anti-Semitic and the enigmatic genius was soon being branded a detestable bigot. Garbus compares his plight to that of Paul Morphy, a 19th-century chess champion whose psychological collapse similarly testified to the thin line between mastery and mania. But, while `The Pride and Sorrow of Chess' slipped into anonymity in the 1860s, Fischer very publicly accepted Hungarian Zita Raycsanyi's suggestion of a Belgrade rematch with Spassky and fled to Tokyo after he was threatened with a 10-year prison sentence for defying a UN sanction against war-torn Yugoslavia.

However, Fischer hit a new low when he called Radio Bombo in Philippines on 9/11 to gloat about the United States receiving the punishment it had long been overdue and he was forced to seek asylum in Iceland after he was detained in Tokyo at Washington's request. Footage from Fridrik Gudmundsson's documentary Me & Bobby Fischer (2009), showing how former bodyguard Saemi Pálsson helped facilitate the move back to Reykjavik, enlivens this sorry episode. But Fischer quickly alienated would-be supporters like neurologist Dr Kari Stefansson with his hateful politics and he died in January 2008 after refusing the dialysis that might have saved him.

In seeking to reconcile the sublime with the pernicious, Garbus draws on an impressive range of experts, including authors David Edmonds (Bobby Fisher Goes to War), David Shenk (The Immortal Game), Sam Sloan, (Bobby Fischer's Games of Chess), Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers), Clea Benson (Life Is Not a Board Game) and Nikolai Krogius (Spassky's `Second') and chess masters Garry Kasparov, Susan Polgar, Fernand Gobet, Fridrik Olafsson and Asa Hoffmann. However, the most useful insights come from those who knew Fischer well, most notably chess friend Anthony Saidy and Larry Evans, TV anchor Shelby Lyman, lawyer Paul Marshall, brother-in-law Russell Targ and Life photographer Harry Benson, who recalls Fischer's love of solitude and animals.

Yet nobody is fully able to explain the origins of Fischer's social gaucheness and vicious intolerance and the speculation of the early and latter stages of the film lacks the conviction of the Reykjavik chronicle. Garbus has unearthed some exceptional archive material and she tells her tale with admirable brio. But one suspects that any chance of getting to the bottom of the Fischer riddle passed with his sister Joan.

This week's final offering isn't strictly a film at all, as Santo Spirito is one of two featurettes contained in a new five-disc set from singer-songwriter Chris Rea. In addition to a studio album containing his first original material in over 10 years, the package also contains two soundtracks pertaining to a documentary on bull-fighting and a fantasy about a man searching for truth amidst the resplendent art and architecture of Florence. Only the title picture was made available for review and it makes for intriguing, if occasionally magniloquent viewing.

Arriving in Tuscany while still in shock at his best friend's suicide leap from a tall building, an unseen man heads for the Church of Santo Spirito. A pair of voices, belonging to a male (Alphonso Suarez) and a female (Julia Christina) pilot angel, communicate via intercoms to speculate about the purpose of his visit. They fear he is going to search for secrets that will cause a ruinous imbalance between his world and the one inhabited by what seem to be superior beings rather than agents of an all-powerful deity.

As images of paintings and statutes are superimposed upon murky shots of a black-clad figure who turns out to be The Truth (Jo Francesca), the stranger makes a determined human effort to fathom mysteries beyond his comprehension and enlists the assistance of a child (Dexter Mayfield) to help him attain an innocence required for unquestioning acceptance. All the while, the female angel frets about how close he is coming to cracking secrets that have remained impenetrable for centuries. But her companion strives to remain calm, as the object of the quest turns out not to be knowledge, but redemption.

Moodily photographed by Dan Hawkins and smoothly edited by co-director Scott McBurney, this is more technically than intellectually accomplished. The exchanges between Christina and Suarez (whose American accent frequently betrays a Teesside burr not unlike Rea's own) laudably seek to make deep truths accessible. But the conceit ultimately collapses under the weight of its own pretensions and many will be left with a sense of delusion rather than awe as the camera pulls away from Santa Croce to the outer reaches of the cosmos.

Initially mixing accordion and guitar, Rea's score is splendidly atmospheric and builds to an imposing crescendo as the seeker comes perilously close to trespassing on forbidden ground. But, while he can only be applauded for pushing the boundaries of his creativity, this always feels more like the work of a musician trying something new than an intuitive film-maker.