“Chronovisor” is one of the few films that suggests deviating from this formula. In Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s fascinating directorial debut, mental provocation is not a prelude to car chases or crime-fighting, but an event in itself. There is only one character in the film: Béatrice Courte (played by real-life academic Anne-Laure Sellier), a professor of philosophy at Columbia who is hard at work on a monograph about memory. In the opening scene, he explains his project to colleagues over drinks in a dark and noisy restaurant. He tells them that he is interested in ancient theories of the mind, which suggest that different parts of the brain give rise to different mental functions; but above all, he remains fascinated by palaces of memory. According to the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, Béatrice explains: “An orator who wishes to fix an oration in memory must plan a journey through a great imaginary building, with all its rooms and galleries, courtyards and corridors, statues and ornaments lined up as clearly as possible.” Thus, the speaker’s wandering thoughts are fixed and equipped with an architecture. But Béatrice’s peers are not interested in their memory palace, nor are they impressed by her heated monologue: they make excuses and beg, and leave her to return home to her desk.
But he soon encounters an even more ambitious effort to concretize the unimportant, to give form to memory: the chronovisor, a real device that the Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti claimed to have invented in 1972. Ernetti hypothesized that events emit electromagnetic waves that linger in the ether, and that the chronovisor aims to record and reconstruct these traces, much like a camera shooting film, to create audiovisual documentation of history. In one of the sources consulted by Béatrice during her manic investigation, Ernetti is quoted as saying, “Each of us is gradually leaving behind in the form of a visual-acoustic double track what happened in seconds, hours, days, months and years.” Using this “visual-acoustic double track,” Ernetti captured what he insists is a kind of “photograph” of both the real and filmic Jesus.
In reality, Ernetti turned out to be a fake—the image turned out to be a doctored reproduction of a sculpture by the Spanish artist Lorenzo Coullaut Valera—but in “Chronovisor,” that decision seems at least as vague and uncertain as the remnant of history he claims to have synthesized into images. Béatrice, always alone, always in the dark of night, as she sifts through archives in libraries always filled with darkness, is skeptical of the many attempts to discredit the monk and his discovery. “Chronovisor” speeds up and syncopates as he continues to read about the Vatican’s determination to silence him and suppress his findings, the threats and subterfuges, the preparations for a grand conspiracy – at an ever faster and more slanderous clip, with increasing desperation. Ernetti and his supporters claim that the chronovisor is capable of recording not only history but also memories and fantasies, providing the ultimate surveillance to the person controlling it. German Romantic novelist and playwright Heinrich von Kleist wrote in 1811: “If I could reach into the depths of my heart, hold my thoughts, and hold them with my bare hands, without adorning them with my own, then, I confess, the deepest desire of my soul would be fulfilled.” to transform, in a terrifying and redemptive way, the intangibility within us into something others can see and touch.