Chronovisor

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)