An immediate movie-of-the-year contender, Chronovisor has lost little of its luster since a February premiere at Rotterdam. After an acquisition from Grasshopper Film, Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s feature debut will open at Film at Lincoln Center on September 4 before a larger theatrical roll-out, and ahead of this is the first trailer.
As Leonardo Goi said in our Rotterdam review, “Ostensibly set in the present, Chronovisor keeps jamming your temporal bearings. Save for the occasional smartphone, the ‘action,’ such as it is, unfolds in a world frozen in time (when Béatrice tries to contact one of Ernetti’s surviving relatives, it isn’t an email she sends but a typed letter). The focus gradually moves from the academic-turned-detective toward the media she consults: we hear recordings of a lecture Ernetti gave about his creation, watch old TV footage concerning the man and others who sought to communicate with the dead, but mostly we read. Chronovisor is so enamored with the written word that close-ups of books and articles comprise most of its runtime—with English translations of their various languages dished out not as subtitles but placed directly over the original text on the page. There’s nothing precious about the choice: Auen and Walker want you to read along with Béatrice, and what’s so fascinating about their film is the way it tries to combine two different art forms (literature and cinema) and different actions (reading and watching) all while adjusting its pace to the time needed to perform both.”
Here’s the synopsis: “While writing a monograph on historical theories of memory, Beatrice, a dedicated and respected academic, becomes beguiled by the story of the “Chronovisor,” an occult device that is said to reproduce visuals from any point in history on a TV screen. Her obsession with the machine drags her from her Upper East Side apartment through the depths of New York City’s hidden libraries, finally to the edge of a breakthrough and a breakdown.”
Watch below:
The post A Conspiracy of Jesus and Tech Unfurls In Trailer for Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor first appeared on The Film Stage.
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