“Chronovisor” makes literacy the key to another world

When people talk about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, no one ever seems to discuss what it would’ve been like from Christ’s point of view. Perhaps that’s because, if we stop clinging to the hope that it was all for the greater good, the events become too disturbing to imagine. Surely it’s a suffering so immense that the only word to really describe it is “biblical.” Just as the pain of the crown of thorns digging into his forehead flattens into something comfortable, comes the searing torment of a spike driven through the body. Awaiting death, drifting in and out of consciousness, what else would Christ see when his vision focused but a horde of people staring back at him; eyes empty, souls adrift. Is it a sight of pure, inhumane evil, or do their blank expressions merely reflect a corruption that can still be reversed?

That’s why the Bible was written, right? So we could read it and be saved?

Ask five people, and you’ll get five vastly different answers, not unlike the responses you’d get asking the same five people their thoughts on “Chronovisor,” the startling and masterful debut film written and directed by Jack Auen and Kevin Walker. The duo, working under the Cosmic Salon label, has conjured up something biblical in its own right: a staggering cinematic showpiece that stands head and shoulders above any other narrative feature released so far this year. Chasing the film’s sole character, a fictional professor and researcher Béatrice (real-life academic Anne Laure Sellier), down a very real conspiratorial rabbit hole, the film is a chimeric experience that shifts shape the moment you think you’ve got a handle on where it’s headed. As a bibliophilic library thriller, “Chronovisor” is terrifying. As a collection of ideas about the human condition, ripe for interpretation, it’s invigorating. And as a film, it’s a masterpiece that will rattle around your head for days, constantly sparking more affection — and the occasional nightmare. 

Yes, “Chronovisor” rewards on a massive scale for its relatively small structure, but viewers will have to work to get the most from it. The majority of the film’s narrative is communicated through on-screen text — translations of archival material, superimposed in English over their original printed matter. For the avid reader, it’s paradise. And for those who see that as a challenge, well, “Chronovisor” would ask you to consider why a fair but not unwieldy amount of reading would be considered a barrier to entry. But regardless of your personal relationship to reading or research, Auen and Walker’s magic trick entrances from the very first sentence, using a hypnotic combination of Dutch angles, spectral typographic design and lush, crackling 16mm film print. The filmmakers don’t guide you into this world so much as they grab you by the hand and yank you into its maze while you’re still deciding whether or not you want to enter. 

As Béatrice moves further into a long-buried conspiracy, “Chronovisor” tests its audience’s nerve to see if they have what it takes to transport themselves into another dimension, another consciousness. That’s all that reading and watching are: entry points to a different perspective. And here, Walker and Auen offer theirs, fashioning academia into a key that opens a portal to the past, present and future. It’s not time travel so much as it is tapping into a second sight. But to access this lucidity — the answer to all strife from Christ to “Chronovisor” — you must pay close attention. Don’t you dare look away.

Not that you could, really, when “Chronovisor” is so inviting. Atmosphere is integral to the film’s success, fashioning the quiet landscape of wintry Upper East Side Manhattan into an ambience far warmer than the biting New York cold. Béatrice’s world is inside scholarly libraries and teak-paneled restaurants with colleagues, where screens are blessedly few. The blue-lit monotony of every day is replaced by warm amber table lamps and dimly lit corners flanked by books on all sides. One gets the sense that, were you to crack open one of the tomes, a mystery would come falling out from between its pages.

One evening, poring through the picturesque archives at the Yale Club while researching her monograph on memory and mind palace theory, Béatrice stumbles upon a curious audiotape. The voice on the recording details the invention of a machine called the Chronovisor, developed by Italian Benedictine priest Pellegrino Ernetti, which supposedly captures brainwaves from the ether and plays all memories from recorded time on a screen the size of a small television. Despite developing the machine with scientists, Ernetti’s claims of what he saw — including Christ’s crucifixion — quickly became sensationalized fodder, with some believing in Ernetti’s discovery and others dismissing it as a hoax. Ernetti produced an image he believed was akin to the Christ he witnessed, which was soon debunked as a close-up photograph of a wooden sculpture. 

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.Sign up here

Auen and Walker delight in trickling real historical information — the result of painstaking research they both conducted studying the Chronovisor — through the film at a slow but steady, always compelling pace. We discover the depth of the supposed conspiracy alongside Béatrice, walking hand in hand into the unknown. She learns of new ripples at the same time we do. Her curiosity is ours. When Béatrice pulls at another thread and comes to understand that Ernetti’s photo of Christ was merely intended to be similar to what he saw, not an actual reproduction, she’s both returned to square one and too far to turn back now.

With the advent of hypertechnology and millions upon millions of Wikipedia entries, it can often feel like anything we want more information about is readily available to us. But that’s the thing about academic research: When you go looking for specific details, they tend to evade you — something that’s easy to forget for those of us who have stopped writing thesis papers. “Chronovisor” reminds its audience that there is extensive information in the world that is out of our grasp, either because it hasn’t been digitized, it’s in a language that we don’t speak, or some combination of both. Translation apps might help, but they’re unreliable, and one first has to know what information to seek out and where. 

That’s part of what makes the film such a blissful, worthwhile experience. The filmmakers have done the work for us, but laid the information out in such a fashion that watching the movie genuinely recreates the thrill of research — all the overwhelming excitement in pursuit of knowledge. For a film so heavy on style, “Chronovisor” somehow never reads pretentious. Like all academics worth their salt, information is presented in fascinating and accessible ways. Scholars don’t just do their work because they want a reason to turn their noses up at others; they feel they have an imperative duty to help people understand the very complex, often crushing experience of being alive.

“Chronovisor” provides a similar aid, albeit one slightly more abstract than language laid out plainly on a page. (Though anyone who has read a scholarly journal knows that this is sometimes not the easiest task, either.) Walker and Auen understand that humanity is deeply entrenched in an empathy crisis, with every last way out being sealed off one by one. Their film is a trapdoor, a hidden escape hatch that only two people willing to pause and look around amid all of the chaos could see.

Almost everything here is analog. But it’s when the filmmakers submerge the viewer into that celestial static that “Chronovisor” assumes an enduring, practically ancient quality. The ability to make a viewer truly feel as though they are witnessing something that transcends time, something that has always existed, is a very rare and special one. Only two pieces of analog horror have chilled me to the degree that this film has: Cecelia Condit’s unforgettable short film “Possibly in Michigan,” and John Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness,” the latter of which features the only sequence that has made me lose sleep in my adult life. But when Walker and Auen plunge our cipher, Béatrice, into the world of sparse electrostatic video, the result is both harrowing and unbelievably beautiful. Their images are disturbing, but not entirely scary; they don’t read like those of a horror film, but rather, a sight of some obsolete era of humanity. If “Backrooms” was all about stumbling onto a place humans aren’t supposed to go, “Chronovisor” puts us exactly where we need to be.

Then again, that’s no different than that book on your shelf that you’ve been meaning to read forever, that film you’ve sworn you’re finally going to watch, or even those 26 articles in browser tabs lingering on your laptop — perhaps even mine. Wait, can you see me right now? You’ve made it this far. If you close your eyes and let your mind drift into the ether, can you access the memory of me, clacking away at my own laptop, pleading with you to consider all that this film has to offer, if we just approach it as openly as possible? Maybe that’s all any of us are doing; maybe it’s all any human ever did: try to get people to pay attention.