Beatrice Courte, the protagonist of the beguiling curio that is Chronovisor, isn’t a religious devotee like the figures she ends up researching, foremost among them a Benedictine monk named Father Pellegrino Ernetti. Beatrice, played by actual academic Anne-Laure Sellier, is a professor at Columbia whose work focuses on how historical conceptions of memory can inform present-day studies of the brain. She lives in a book-filled apartment in the Upper East Side, and still, there is something ascetic about her, and not just because she looks a little monklike herself in her wool coat and hood, making her way to various libraries and archives around Manhattan. Beatrice’s is a life of the mind, something Chronovisor emphasizes by the fact that we never see her eat or sleep, to the point where even the drinks she’s sharing with colleagues in the opening scene sit on the table untouched. Her existence is solitary by design, freeing her up to disappear into her studies at all hours of the night, the doors of every institution seemingly always ready to welcome her into its stacks and viewing stations and leather reading chairs. And yet, something in this character snags on a strange mention she hears while listening to a tape of an old lecture, in which a man claims to have invented a device that allows its users to peer directly into the past. This chronovisor, which Ernetti claims to have invented with the help of a dozen physicists, captures Beatrice’s attention and gradually consumes her, though given the life she lives, it takes a while for us to understand how fixated she’s become.
Chronovisor is the directorial debut of the writer-director team of Jack Auen and Kevin Walker, and it’s one of those minuscule indies that actually seems richer for how little money it clearly cost to make. It doesn’t hurt that Auen and Walker, working with cinematographer Leo Zhang, shot the movie in warm, grainy 16-mm. that makes it look like an artifact out of time, as analog a creation as all the media its main character sifts through. But the very concept of Chronovisor is that the whole universe can be funneled through the pages of a book, an old tape, a spool of microfiche, and even the screen of a fabled invention, should you be able to find it. The vast majority of the movie involves Beatrice sitting at a desk, either in a library or in her home, reading, but what opens up before her eyes, her gaze rapt and her expression inscrutable, is a conspiratorial history that exists at a crossroads between science and the supernatural. There really was an Ernetti, who really did claim to have photographed the face of Christ during the crucifixion using a time viewer of his own creation — a picture whose fraudulence becomes a plot point onscreen. But it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters in Chronovisor, a rollicking ride down a rabbit hole of archival material, Italian magazine articles, vinyl records, Gregorian chants, endless author photos of graying men, and multilingual phone exchanges with publishing houses about long-dormant relationships with writers.
Chronovisor is equal parts Umberto Eco and dark academia, an engrossing work that’s as enchanted by the aesthetics of research — the rows of legal lamps over a long table, the solitary light of someone watching something on a small screen in the dark, a drop of blood welling from a paper cut — as it is by the headiness of what the chronovisor offers. It makes the city look both magical and forbidding, seen almost entirely at night and accompanied by a lush soundtrack of Gustav Holst that hints at momentous things just on the horizon. When Beatrice emerges from her meetup with fellow professors, it takes a beat to realize that she’s coming out of Tavern on the Green, that old chestnut of a spot, which in the shot might as well be an inviting cottage in the woods, with skyscrapers looming in the background. Beatrice is half-magic herself, flipping effortlessly between English, French, German, and Italian and letting loose with lies when she isn’t able to get her way with the truth (it takes her faltering during a faculty speech to appreciate that something’s truly going wrong with her). What the chronovisor promises, with its possible cathode-ray tube window into the past, is certainty to someone whose entire life has consisted of piecing together history from conflicting sources and imperfect records (the movie’s biggest applause moment finds Beatrice opening up and restoring a disemboweled VHS tape). It’s no leap to imagine that, if this apocryphal device actually existed, the Vatican and plenty of other powers that be would have tried to suppress it. The question that runs through the movie like an unsettling leitmotif is whether Beatrice is obsessed because the chronovisor can provide certainty or because it represents a sort of oblivion.
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