The Brooklyn Rail

Chronovisor (2026), the latest feature from filmmaking duo Kevin Walker and Jack Auen (Marblehead [2021], Roundabout [2024], Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World [2025]), begins with a long and static shot looking across a bar table at a middle-aged woman (Anne Laure Sellier), academic in type, surrounded by glasses of wine and, one assumes, her seated drinking companions. She’s discussing the history of neural science as relates to memory, charging through Jacobite and classical theories of the various ventricles’ different functions, to get at what she calls “the inner phenomenological architecture of [the] mind.” She’s shot on 16 mm film, and much of the low-lit bar background is obscured in darkness. Her lecture, which in fact begins while the production logos are still playing, is quite quiet in the sound mix, otherwise filled out with barroom chatter and the clanking of dishware.

The woman is Béatrice Courte, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University. Over the course of the film, her obsession with memory will take her deep down the rabbit hole of the titular “Chronovisor,” a fabled device claimed to be invented by the Benedictine monk and musicologist Pellegrino Ernetti in the 1950s. Allegedly, the machine was capable of receiving and displaying memories from any point in history, before being promptly hushed up by Pope Pius XII. Given that the Chronovisor case has been sealed shut for something like multiple decades before the film begins, much of the drama takes place in the pages of books, if not in the magnetic pulse encoded onto plastic tape.

The opening scene introduces some of the film’s essential tensions: Where do we focus our ears? How can we distinguish signal from noise? How do we begin to form a narrative from the sensory chaos? The question is rather similar to Chronovisor’s fundamental gambit: crafting a sub-two-hour film from thousands of pages of largely text-based research. With the sum total of the world’s memory in play, the role of the intermediators—technological and human—is placed under considerable stress.

“Fascinating,” one of her companions responds, standing, as soon as Béatrice pauses for breath. “But I have to return and grade student papers. I have an 8 a.m. class tomorrow morning.”

While, on the one hand, Chronovisor seems to share some DNA with various Dan Brown adaptations and other Catholic-conspiratorial pulp, Walker and Auen are more interested in the fuzzy boundaries of conspiratorial thinking—its temptations, hazards, and stubborn grains of truth. The amount of prop literature the film summons in evidence of the Chronovisor beggars belief, until one verifies post hoc that all, or nearly all, of this material actually exists. Pellegrino did claim to have invented the Chronovisor with the collaboration of Wernher von Braun and other scientists; he did publish part of the text of the ancient tragedy Thyestes that he claimed to have traveled to 169 BC to watch; a photo of the “true face” of Jesus Christ at Golgotha was published in connection to him. Walker and Auen’s film is too tempted by fantasy to make a documentary of this material, and yet includes too much truth and documentary technique in its mix to exist comfortably in the category of fiction.

The film curates this trove of material from cavernous New York City academic library reading rooms reminiscent of Seven (1995). Béatrice is first shot from a distance in these rooms, before cutting to the shots of text-on-page that will comprise the bulk of the film. There are many tropes for depicting text-based research on screen: dissolve-heavy montages of headlines cut with reverse shots of a gasping or frowning researcher; desktop candles burning low in the wee hours; researchers muttering their most notable findings aloud to an audience of no one.

Chronovisor invents a new set of techniques: superimposing white optically printed translations atop Italian and German sources, erasing whole pages save for the relevant sentences of English works, deploying single-word-by-single-word rapid montage for the bits they really wish to emphasize. As the film progresses, the camera moves ever closer to Béatrice in establishing the research scene, and these techniques for displaying text seem to escalate both in urgency and in the amount of non-highlighted text that they must dispose of. All the while, the formerly prominent background noise recedes in favor of a dramatic score sourced from Gustav Holst’s Planets suite. But as the narrative tension rises with Béatrice’s growing myopia, the film’s material grounding in historical truth maintains a taut attachment to her conspiracy.

Chronovisor does nothing if not fetishize pre-digital recording technology—at one point, we watch Béatrice wipe the sweat from her brow as she disassembles a VHS cassette to replace the tape—but the invention of any “super-machine” unfortunately must call to mind our current AI-inundated culture. The various incursions of generative artificial intelligence into “history” have thus far included the animation of still photographs, the upscaling of analog footage, and, more often, the visualization of various episodes from history. Homemade looks at the Mongol invasion of Japan are worrisome already, but Darren Aronofsky’s recently announced On This Day … 1776 represents a shrugging acceptance, if not outright legitimization, of this route into the past. Diegetic recordings from the Chronovisor as well as the film’s archival props beg similar and familiar questions: What is being cited and what is being hallucinated? Can anyone invested in the technology be trusted to separate the two?

But while Chronovisor partakes in its fair share of excitement regarding the device at its center, the film is refreshing insofar as it does not treat this miracle technology as anything exempt from the old hazards of confronting the past. One sees what one wants to see. Regardless of the Borgesian perfection of the archive, the myopic researcher is presented with a reflection of their own starting biases. When Béatrice, having at last located the Chronovisor, goes to switch on the device, its harsh display looks like what one might expect of magnetic tape footage kept in a dank and dusty storeroom—the device intended to rescue mankind is itself not exempt from the ravages of history. This sparse array of dots is at first difficult to compile into a meaningful image, but morphs into legible forms with much staring and mental arrangement. It could be nothing or anything: after a few minutes, one could be forgiven for glimpsing one’s own face in the reflection.