THE STORY – A lonely academic comes across a recording of a priest who claims to have invented a device that can see into the past.
THE CAST – Anne Laure Sellier
THE TEAM – Jack Auen & Kevin Walker (Writers/Directors)
THE RUNNING TIME – 99 Minutes
There’s a romance in the smell of old pages, in a pile of old tomes waiting to be opened, and the covert pleasure of reading at twilight. That’s the vibe of Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s compellingly bookish “Chronovisor,” their low-budget debut feature that turns academic research into an entrancing cinematic mystery. An unlikely thriller, the filmmakers use a fictionalized history around a real-life occult device as a gateway into dark academia. Thanks (in part) to Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” the genre has become a familiar aesthetic; there’s a classicist devotion to the classics, the uncovering of abstruse knowledge, and the coiled threat of lurking danger. That menace can also be the act of seeing itself: like the cursed play in “The King in Yellow,” Sutter Cane’s novel in “In the Mouth of Madness,” or the treacherous tape in “Infinite Jest,” Walker and Auen soon demonstrate it’s using the Chronovisor itself that commands the greatest peril.
Playfully blending fact and fiction (or, to it put another way, expanding on facts with fiction), this historiographic mystery follows Béatrice (Anne Laure Sellier), a professor of philosophy at Columbia University in New York, as she is distracted from her scholarship on the neurology of memory with the story of Father Pellegrino Ernetti – which, incredibly, is based largely on actual history. An Italian priest and musicologist who specialized in Gregorian chants, she hears a recording explaining he has invented a device that can pierce the veil of the past and conjure it on a television screen. With this image-based time travel that treats the universe as one big memory palace (the subject Béatrice had studied), he claims he has witnessed the crucifixion of Christ. Most who have used the machine have gone mad, and the Vatican hushed it away.
Béatrice is inevitably hooked, and spends most of the film in the midnight oil of gothic libraries and her own apartment. In a sense, she has swapped studying one form of memory for another, from the cognitive and into the spectral. Her descent becomes one of compulsive research, absorbing dozens of books, scanning through magazines, sampling hours of news reports and VHS tapes of lectures. While watching the film, these texts might seem like typical movie props, but in fact are almost entirely primary sources; Walker and Auen went on their own international treasure hunt to procure them (mostly on Ebay), allowing what discoveries they found to dictate the shape of the story.
Béatrice’s methods are more draconian. She begins calling anyone who may still have a connection to the Chronovisor by amusingly promising fictitious academic prizes, foot-in-the-dooring her way to living testimony of the device. Played adroitly by Sellier, a real-life academic in her first on-screen role, her Béatrice is asocial, prickly, isolated, and devious, a performance that not only effortlessly switches between multiple European languages and convincingly speaks lecture jargon, but plays Béatrice with convincing tenacity. Neither a blank audience surrogate nor as fully filled-in as a usual protagonist, she anchors the character in familiar emotion that invites the audience to fall into obsession, or maybe even madness, with her.
Yet, if film as a medium can be partly defined by its ability to capture dizzying chases (movement) and emotionally supercharged close-ups (pure expression), it’s often struggled to portray the inner echoes of thought. Fiction that uses a stream-of-consciousness style requires a crafty adaptation to work on screen, especially as classic voice-over narration has aged into kitsch. Look at any time a character plays poker or a game of chess and the internal logic is almost never explained, and instead relies on character behavior to tell the story. It’s one reason Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” failed, with endless dialogue about art history. Imagine the best “research” sequences in movies – any from David Fincher’s triptych of murder mysteries “Seven,” “Zodiac,” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” would do – and they deliver a particular mood amplified by the contact-high of the protagonist’s quest.
Fundamentally, mysteries in cinema are an aestheticized approximation of the detective’s investigation, forcing the audience to be outsiders looking in. Films don’t have enough time to spell out a complex case, so the puzzles are usually either simple and disappointing, or satisfyingly labyrinthine but rely on textured filmmaking (or multiple viewings) to do the work. In a brilliant flourish of cinematic experimentation, “Chromovisor” solves this problem. Through a technique that on-paper sounds like it might risk boredom, Walker and Auen present these sequences, which take up the majority of the film’s running time, with an inventive and virtuosic method; rather than having the camera linger on Béatrice while she reads, the camera, capturing warm-toned but delightfully macabre 16mm images, assumes her point of view studying page after page. Most of it in French or Italian, a highlighted portion manifests as a glow of white translated-to-English text, a kind of cine-speed-reading that alerts attention to what is most important. This simultaneously plunges the audience into Béatrice’s obsessive point of view while – maybe for the first time – making the audience active participants in a thriller’s research process. Without hand-holding narration, it is up to the viewer to piece together connections and follow the mystery from A-to-B, blending aspects of reading academic research, lore in a dense RPG, and literary fiction. Fiction and film have never felt so joyously entangled.
In excerpts across multiple texts, one volume reveals “Father Ernetti simply vanished,” while much later, another divulges the more ominous line “I advise everyone to be careful! Keep an eye on Father Ernetti and his team.” Apply that same kind of set-up and pay-off to dozens of webbed examples and you will find the sturdily plotted foundation to this radical approach. Walker and Auen know how to propel their mystery forward. Clue by clue, “Chronovisor” slowly builds to a fever of intellectual obsession, capturing the addict-like impulse to satiate, the need to work out a kink in the system, and the dopaminergic rush that comes from elongated anticipation knowing one day you can experience the thing. In other words, “Chronovisor” delivers an experience somewhere between the feel of a great novel impossible to put down – with the compulsion to keep turning the page – and a lengthy, life-dominating research project that slowly subsumes personal identity.
Part of “Chronovisor’s” addictive appeal is in how it educates an absurd, fascinating history that never became a mythologized or viral legend, and then builds upon it. In “The Nolan Variations,” Christopher Nolan challenged writer Tom Shone to look up several pieces of information in a library, and then to try and find those pieces of information online. His point was to prove the Internet merely appears endless. But rather than the impossibly vast Library of Babel in Borges, the web is deceptively finite; like the constructed world of the “The Truman Show,” the internet’s walls are trickily disguised, but you can run into them sooner than you think.
For the filmmakers, that makes the Chronovisor an exciting cultural blindspot to plunder. Ernetti faded to historical obscurity partly because various instances of “proof” sent to the press were discredited (the most notorious involving an image of Christ’s crucifixion that turned out came from a photograph of an actual crucifix). But Walker and Auen have answers for that too, and weave into their tale raving explanations for how each accusation was slander or misunderstanding, all to lure the audience into a state of mind to – whether you knew of the device’s history of not – believe in its provenance.
“Chronovisor” makes for a unique blend of genres: science fiction, campus novel, gallery work installation (the camera is often static and allows for a durational effect in some scenes), the micro-budget equivalent of a globe-trotting adventure, and cosmic horror, influences proudly worn without ever subsuming the whole. All are bound by the entrancing music of the 20th century composer Gustav Holst, using “The Planets” as an inspired choice of easily licensed music.
Walker and Auen are filmmakers to watch. The two directors have made a seductive case not only for how this technology could exist, but the ease of being lost to it. In a late-film revelation, it is learned that the Chronovisor’s mastery of history was deemed dangerous, able to trigger war, manipulate finance, and allow total surveillance. Every truth, every secret, every religion, every political state, and every torrid affair exposed to the scrutiny of CRT television: an image culture on the rise. Before those questions around knowledge and control can be answered, a more frightening discovery comes: the user’s memories can become entangled with the device. A small film with epic horizons, by the end of the remarkable “Chronovisor,” the divide between past and present, the internal self and the external flow of time, flattens to a maddening blur, and we witness the danger of being lost to history while still living inside it.
