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Enough hours spent in the stacks, and you’ll start to feel freaked out, too.
Filmmakers Kevin Walker and Jack Auen (aka Cosmic Salon) turn academic research into a terrifying project with their docufiction debut feature film “Chronovisor,” which first premiered at Rotterdam at the top of this year. Also a New Directors/New Films selection, it’s part metatext, part Vatican conspiracy theory, and fully an existential thriller that disintegrates into Bill-Morrison-meets-Alex-Garland levels of indescribably unsettling visual chaos. IndieWire exclusively debuts the trailer below ahead of the film’s September release.
A brainy, post-doctorate spin on historical science-fiction, “Chronovisor” adapts documented 20th-century lore in 16mm and in New York City, focusing on a polyglot academic researcher down a hole of parascience and through reams of archival text: specifically into an obsession over a makeshift device that, once belonging to Vatican clergy, allegedly can allow viewers to watch the past (such as Jesus’ crucifixion) on a small TV screen. And much of the film unfolds as text displayed on the screen, with Béatrice (Anne-Laure Sellier) poring over decades of historical documents that the filmmakers translate for us. As much a literary detective story for English majors as it is a chilling slice of time-travel weirdness, “Chronovisor” is one of the year’s most bewitchingly weird (and best) movies.
More from the film’s official synopsis: “While writing a monograph on historical theories of memory, Béatrice (Anne-Laure Sellier), a respected academic, becomes beguiled by the allegedly true story of the Chronovisor, an occult device said to reproduce visuals from any point in history on a TV screen. Her obsession with the mysterious machine drags her from her Upper East Side apartment through the depths of New York City’s hidden libraries, to the edge of a breakthrough.”
Plus, here’s what IndieWire contributor Vadim Rizov wrote out of Rotterdam: “As with any good time travel narrative, there are unexpected, sinister ramifications to this discovery: Vatican secrecy and ominous disappearances swirl around a narrative that, for much of the film, simply consists of Sellier sitting and reading esoteric texts in multiple languages. All of these texts have been printed and laid-out in shots that showcase the variety of fonts and paper stocks used. It’s a work of rigorous textual fetishism, shot on 16mm and appropriately devoted to analogue pleasures, all the way to an ending that takes the film out of the library and into a mysterious realm of video art.”
Fun fact: Sellier is an actual academic, serving as a professor of behavioral science at HEC Paris, with research into perception, creativity, and cognitive biases.
“Chronovisor” opens in select theaters courtesy of Grasshopper Film starting Friday, September 4.
English (US) ·