Chronovisor

Wer Jesus Christus mit eigenen Augen am Kreuz gesehen hat, ist seit zweitausend Jahren tot – oder im Besitz eines Chronovisors. Eine New Yorker Philosophin macht sich auf die Suche nach einer von einem italienischen Pater und einer Gruppe von Physikern entwickelten geheimen Maschine, die Bilder und Stimmen aus der Vergangenheit sichtbar machen kann. Mit fatalen Konsequenzen für die Gegenwart. Eine an die postmodernen Gedankenspiele Umberto Ecos angelehnte Mischung aus Science-Fiction und Verschwörungsthriller, in der gelbstichige Buchseiten, zerschrammte Videobänder und ein Blutstropfen am Finger zu einer gefährlichen Wahrheit führen. (Michael Pekler)

In basic terms, “Chronovisor” refers to a machine to see time, a mysterious device invented in the 1950s by Benedictine monk and musicologist Pellegrino Ernetti and a team of physicists including Enrico Fermi, which is allegedly able to display all human history on a small television monitor. It is also a reference to cinema, depicted here on 16mm film via the endeavours of philosophy professor Béatrice Courte (Anne-Laure Sellier), the grain accentuated by the shadowy libraries she haunts. In Courte’s quest, these two levels converge in ways both figurative and literal. While researching theories of memory, she finds a reference to Ernetti’s Chronovisor, an object too strange to be real and too specific to be fiction, and is pulled into a rabbit hole to end all rabbit holes. The film unfolds in extreme close-up: text on a page intercut with Courte’s rapidly scanning eyes. Her search is solitary, without collaborators with whom to conveniently extemporise her findings. Instead, we read with her as she pores over magazines, books and musical scores. French, Italian, German, Spanish and Latin are made legible by English titles superimposed over them. Key words and phrases repeat in her field of vision, which becomes, terrifyingly, our own. (Genevieve Yue)

Jack Auen, Kevin Walker: MARBLEHEAD (2021, K), THINGS HIDDEN SINCE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD (2024, K), ROUNDABOUT (2024, K)