Chronovisor

“In the beginning there was the Word”, is invoked as holy scripture in New York-based filmmakers Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s debut Chronovisor, a conspiratorial tale of obsession that takes place in the shrouded, nocturnal eaves of New York’s libraries. For much of its runtime, the film fills the cinematic frame with text, recalling the work of experimental filmmaker David Gatten and Michael Snow’s So Is This (1982). In the film, neuroscientist academic Beatrice Courte (Anne-Laure Sellier, a real academic at the HEC in Paris) becomes increasingly side-tracked by her research on the titular device, a time- travelling machine invented in the 1960s by the Italian Benedictine monk, philosopher and musicologist Pellegrino Ernetti (a real event as detailed in a select few online articles). The machine was purported to reproduce hologram-like reliefs of past events – Christ’s Crucifixion, Roman Senate meetings – by tapping into the wavelengths of collective memory, and Ernetti even claimed to have transcribed the lost play, Thyestes by Quintus Ennius using the machine. Despite the machine’s gift of image-making, the film leans temerariously into the drama of the written archive as Chronovisor treats logocentric interpretation as a form of investigation, à la Umberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges. The film is an enthralling interrogation of the all-encompassing desire for knowledge: even the most pious believers seek empirical certainty, and we as viewers are implicated in that same desire. Drawn into the film’s structure of uncertainty, we are left constantly wondering when it shifts from non-fiction into fiction, and whether the texts themselves are authentic or fabricated.

The film slyly feeds into our present appetite for conspiracy, taking the syntax of the mystery genre in a brilliant, unexpected direction; into the annals of the almost forgotten world of the library, set against a society slipping even further into the digital. Shot on low-lit 16mm by Leo Zhang, the film’s mise-en-scène unfolds across textual terrains whose shifting typographies, paper textures, and marginalia immerse viewers in a landscape of intrigue, leaving us to decode the dangers, mysticism, and sub rosa collusions of the Vatican, all heightened by the drama of a Gustav Holst soundtrack. Reverse-shots of Courte’s anxiety-stricken blue-eyes against close-ups of the text sources she amasses – a litany of English, French, German, and Greek magazines, newspapers and periodicals – precipitate a thrilling form of tension as the frame tightens in tempo with the centripetal force of her hypotheses. The filmmakers foreground selected phrases by literally glossing over the original text with glowing English translations (rather than subtitles) that tease out questions about translation, interpretation, and how individual biases narrow every trajectory of a researcher’s narrative. It’s electrifying to see Courte descend deeper into her folly, embellishing her phone calls to publishers with small deceptions in order to pry loose details about Ernetti’s invention, a reminder that the hermetic world of academia is full of its own frills and thrills.

In a recurring montage refrain, single words flash in rapid succession, culminating in the phrase “I was myself a camera", Ernetti’s first-person account that opens onto another series of philosophical questions. If the chronovisor’s images are assembled from the accumulation of individual memory, then each body must already be shadowed by its own form of surveillance. What would it mean to inhabit a world in which every image, every memory, could be recorded, with no space left for the unknown?

Venturing into Cronenbergian territory within the coda of the film, we finally see what images the chronovisor fabricates: haunting cathode-ray textures collide with video grain and faint figures emerge from analogue pools of abstraction. The footage depicts Courte approaching the machine itself, though we initially see only her back, framed within a subtly voyeuristic gaze. Rather than offering closure, the chronovisor’s images open further questions: from whose perspective would our histories be told? Such a gaze remains partial, already implicated in a singular viewpoint, just as textual histories are marked by subjective bias. Ultimately, the gap between image, text, history and the self is not a failure of representation but its condition of possibility – a fracture through which the chronovisor exposes every archive as partial, embodied, and endlessly rewritten.