Chronovisor

CHRONOVISOR   **1/2

Jack Auen and Kevin Walker

2026

IDEA:  A professor at Columbia University becomes obsessed with learning about the chronovisor, a machine allegedly invented by Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti that allows the user to observe any moment from the past.

BLURB:  A mystery-thriller whose most recurrent visual is a slow pan over a book page, Chronovisor turns the activity of scholarly research into a subject of cinematic excitement. The narrative, as it were, is driven by nothing so much as the protagonist’s thirst for specialty knowledge. Chronovisor unfolds largely in grand, tenebrous libraries by glowing banker’s lamps, dramatizing what is basically intangible — intellectual pursuit — by focusing on its material effects. In harmony with its retro 16 mm aesthetic, the film incorporates books, journals, magazines, CRT screens, audio recordings, and other analog information technologies into a fascinating intermedia gestalt. It’s especially keenly attuned to the affects of concentrated study, using glacial long takes, a hypnotic orchestral score, and sequences composed entirely of print to reproduce the attention-sharpening, temporal-suspending flow of being drawn into a world of ideas. Anne Laure Sellier’s agog eyes, shown in closeup examining an artifact, mirror our own curiosity, while her vexed process of tracking down leads captures the more routine, enervating side of academic access. Auen and Walker know these feelings well, for the research performed onscreen is the double of the research they did to make the film. The problem is their findings become less credible the more they lead down a conspiracy rabbit hole, and their metatextual bona fides all but telegraph the ouroboros of a denouement. Chronovisor buzzes with entrancingly eerie mood, but, ironically, it could use a little more academic rigor.