Set in a harsh 1821 Canadian winter, the folk horror film Ithaqua follows the starving residents of an isolated fur-trading fort as they turn against each other and face a primordial, hunger-inducing creature.

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According to the device’s inventor, the Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti, the chronovisor allows people to view events from the past, from Cicero’s orations to Christ’s crucifixion, as if they were images on a television screen. Despite Ernetti’s collaborations with renowned physicists like Wernher von Braun, a chief architect of NASA’s Apollo program, the device registered as little more than a blip on the radar of public consciousness. Since then, it’s faded into history as just another pseudoscientific curio.

Now, Kevin Walker and Jack Auen, childhood friends from Baltimore who operate under the banner of the Cosmic Salon filmmaking collective, are trying to change that. Walker found out about the chronovisor in passing from a sprawling philosophical text, and Auen soon followed him down the rabbit hole. Much of their debut feature, Chronovisor, mirrors the pair’s own journey of learning all they could about what felt like a great buried secret of the 20th century.

In the film, Béatrice Courte (played by real-life academic Anne-Laure Sellier) serves as an avatar for the directing duo’s own research process as the professor pores over archival materials in search of the truth. Chronovisor visualizes two parallel processes in Béatrice’s scholarly inquiry. There’s the delight in her discoveries, with the text appearing to jump off the page as she translates it. But that’s also accompanied by a growing sense of unease as she realizes the magnitude of the conspiracy into which she’s stumbled, a dread that Walker and Auen concretize through their increasingly avant-garde and animated visual scheme.

I spoke with Walker and Auen ahead of Chronovisor’s theatrical release. Our conversation covered how they approached filming the mental process of researching, why the story of the chronovisor device remains largely unknown, and what guided the eclectic programming choices in their Film at Lincoln Center repertory series “Bibliomania: A Preface to Chronovisor.”

How did Baltimore shape you as filmmakers?

Kevin Walker: So many things that happened in our lives while we lived in Baltimore have provided infinite inspiration for everything we’ve done going forward. Particularly, our families who showed us movies and books, and then wonderful teachers we had at our school like Mr. Christian and Mr. Spragins. We still talk about them during our writing process.

But [as to] the arts scene in Baltimore, Jack and I are really bad at making friends and in the arts. We’re shy and nervous, and we make movies in a super isolated way. We’ve made movies [with no crew], just a camera with me and Jack in front of it. Anything we can do to avoid having to make embarrassing asks of people! So while we were living in Baltimore, we hardly encountered anyone else in the film community just out of pure fear and embarrassment. And honestly, in New York, it’s mostly still like that. We’re just pretty self-isolating. So Baltimore, yes, inspired us endlessly. But the art scene there, we actually almost know nothing about.

How did this become such an Upper East Side movie? I clocked Beatrice’s address on a piece of mail, which would indicate that she lives above the Penrose, a bar whose vibes aren’t exactly academic.

KW: It is the Penrose. That’s where I met my wife, so I just put that. You caught the one detail in the film that’s incredibly unrealistic. That was just a shout-out to my wife, but good catch!

What informed your approach to filming New York? Watching Chronovisor, I felt like a ghost experiencing images of the city.

Jack Auen: We talk about New York on film all the time. Speaking just for myself, I actually don’t always find it a super visually inspiring city because I feel like it’s been [filmed] so much and so well so many times going back through the 20th century. We were trying to find some way to shoot a New York City that both of us are familiar with. Kevin lives on the Upper East Side. We spent a lot of time in Manhattan without feeling like we were treading ground that we had seen before, but also paying some homage to eras of film that we really love and the way they shot [New York]. We talk about Rosemary’s Baby and Breakfast at Tiffany’s all the time. Those are amazing movies with amazing New York scenery. Beyond that, a lot of the film takes place at night, so that like already helps create a certain type of feeling. It was winter in New York, so we shot the exteriors in the snow. We also tried to make it look as empty as we possibly could, and I think that has a certain impact on you. Everyone knows that’s not what it looks like.

If you’re in the Upper East Side at the right time of year, it’s empty. I’m always shocked at how in the peaks of summer and winter, everyone’s at their second home. It gets so quiet that you forget you’re in New York.

KW: Sometimes I’ll go on late-night walks around the Upper East Side. You’ll look down, left, and right on Park Avenue, and you cannot see a car. You literally can’t see headlights, and it’s like, “Whoa, where am I? Was there some apocalyptic event that just happened in my neighborhood?” I love walking at that time and feeling like you have the city to yourself.

We’re used to seeing people fall down conspiratorial rabbit holes through screens in the digital age, but perhaps a little bit less so with academic texts. Do you see these as permutations of the same human impulse, or is there something different when there’s tactile materiality to the research materials?

JA: We felt like we were lucky that the actual materials that exist that one would be required to consume to understand the story [around the chronovisor conspiracy] were analog. They came from an era prior to digital technology on screen. Honestly, we didn’t quite feel up to the challenge of finding a way to make that interesting visually if it was digital, especially on 16mm. Not that it can’t be done, and some movies have done it in interesting ways. But we were grateful that we didn’t have to climb that hill and were able to keep it within the world of the story, but in an aesthetic that we felt much more comfortable in and excited by. All of these tactile, analog materials felt fresher to us as well because you don’t see that as often with movies coming out these days. We felt like we had hit the jackpot with subject matter that necessitated it.

You’ve alluded to having some theories about why the chronovisor phenomenon is buried in our culture and not something well-known. Why do you think it isn’t more ingrained in the public consciousness?

KW: Honestly, I think one of the biggest things is language barriers. It’s really not possible to research the story without a decent working knowledge of Italian, German, and French. The one primary source we have about someone who knew Ernetti well is written in French, and then all the original articles that were published about him were written in Italian. Now, you’re able to research it and make a film like this because of the Google Translate app, where you can take a picture of something and auto-translate it. You don’t have to go hire a translator. Luckily for us, as we were talking about making this movie, it’s possible to research in this way without a great knowledge of these languages. But I think for the last 30 years, you’d have to have the confluence of someone who was interested in this case, the time to research it, the ability to read English, French, Italian, and German, and the money to buy all the research. The probability of anyone being able to research it before the advent of this technology was pretty minimal.

The film has a unique relationship to the written word. How were you developing and evolving this visual style over the course of the production?

JA: We tried subtitles at first, [and it’s] kind of crazy to think about a time where the movie didn’t have the superimposed element. Our first attempt with subtitles didn’t work. Text covering text, looking up and down, the whole directional emphasis of the audience’s eyes were just lost in that case. As Kevin said, a lot of the initial translation—before we hired real translators to do the official translations—we were experiencing through these apps that had a similar viewing experience. That was probably in there subconsciously, and then [the superimposed translated text] came up [as an option] one of our camera tests. It was just undeniable how much better it was than a subtitle route.

The sentence-by-sentence or word-by-word flashing text came from an undergrad psychology course I took that taught us a speed-reading technique. If you can put certain syllables of the words in the exact center of your field of view and cycle through them, you can get people up to a reading speed that’s 10 times greater than what they would normally be able to read if they were just reading across a page. I don’t know why that came back up in our conversations; it had been six or seven years. But as we were thinking about how to make the text engaging and convey certain aspects of our main character’s personality, that popped up as a good candidate.

The film plays out like a gender-flipped version of Paul Schrader’s maxim that the most dangerous thing in the world is a man alone in a room writing in his journal. How did you work to capture that same sense of interiority and slipping sanity from Anne-Laure Sellier, especially since she’s not a trained actress?

KW: Honestly, I think our idea was to do that mostly by omission. We tell the story of the Chronovisor in this documentary fashion, and we deliberately don’t spend much time on her character, her psychological profile, and her behaviors. We thought it wasn’t productive to spend much time learning about her. I think anything that people are reporting about their experience of what she’s going through psychologically during the film is supplied by them. A few of the signposts we plant throughout are minimal, and that’s on purpose.

JA: And with Anne-Laure, we just got lucky!

How did you find the right balance for how to score the film? It’s grand, like a John Williams score from 20 years ago, without feeling like pastiche or parody. I think you all approached it with a real sincerity.

JA: Yeah, I would definitely say that’s true. The film is very intimate in certain ways; it arguably takes place in a three-foot span between the face and the book. But we felt like we had grander aspects of the story, both internally and externally, that we still wanted to communicate, and music would be the perfect tool [to convey it]. In this instance, specifically, a grand and mysterious orchestral score just ticked all the boxes. Kevin was the one who initially stumbled across “The Planets” suite, and then shared it with me, and it was a done deal right away.

You name-check Borges and Eco with the same gusto as Harry Potter. How do you synthesize these influences across what might be considered high and low culture?

KW: The way it actually plays out during our writing process is just whatever pops into our head of shared cultural references that we have. We’re like, “Oh, remember that great scene?” Or, “Remember that awesome moment in The Name of the Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum?” We’re definitely not thinking about the interplay of what has been called high art and low art in cinema. We really just have things that we like and don’t like. I think we also do appreciate when someone like Tarkovsky, Kubrick, or Eco injects a little pulp into their more highfalutin ambitions and subject matter…because why not? It’s a little bit more fun!

Is that the same approach that you all brought to programming the “Bibliomania” series at Film at Lincoln Center? It’s not every day you see Howard Hawks and Jacques Tourneur alongside National Treasure: Book of Secrets on 35mm.

KW: Yeah, and those are honestly the things that made their way into Chronovisor. It’s hard to explain. I mean, we’re well aware of the fact that these are films with different reputations.

JA: More or less guilty pleasures.

KW: We certainly don’t deny any of that. But every film in there, we found something to love in. That something that we found to love is something we thought was a relevant feeling while we were making Chronovisor, and we wanted to explore, downright copy, or use them as a launching pad. It’s so fundamental to who we are, that variety of film and literary styles, that I don’t even know how to interrogate it internally.

The post Interview: Jack Auen and Kevin Walker on ‘Chronovisor,’ Conspiracies, and Bibliomania appeared first on Slant Magazine.

The cause of preserving literature and literacy in the contemporary world was met with another fresh outrage this month, when it was reported that AI companies such as Anthropic have quietly been purchasing huge quantities of used books, many of them very rare, scanning them to train their large language models, and then destroying the books en masse. The destruction of these invaluable works is troubling enough, but the practice becomes even more sinister in light of what appears to be its ultimate purpose: the consolidation of essentially all human knowledge into an opaque, privately owned digital cloud that can then warp that knowledge according to the ideological dictates of its owners.

This battle between the preservation and obfuscation of historical truth is at the heart of Chronovisor, the extraordinary debut film by American writer-director duo Jack Auen and Kevin Walker. The film’s title refers to a device that the real-life Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti claimed to have invented in the 1970s, which he said could capture and display any event in history exactly as it happened. Auen and Walker employ a strikingly original array of aesthetic strategies in following middle-aged academic Beatrice Courte’s (Anne-Laure Sellier) research of Ernetti and his supposed invention, a mystery that becomes only more absorbing and thought-provoking the deeper the film goes down the archival rabbit hole.

Depending on the viewer, some of those aesthetic strategies will likely serve as either the film’s main calling card or its biggest hurdle to enjoyment. After a relatively conventional prologue in which Beatrice, over wine with colleagues, lays out a theory comparing human thought to a physical labyrinth with rooms acting as different repositories of knowledge, Chronovisor settles into its unique rhythm. Roughly half of the film is composed of images of words on pages, with the most relevant passages highlighted via overlaid (and usually translated) text.

These texts, along with phone calls between Beatrice and various disembodied voices, serve as the trail of evidence leading to Ernetti, who (in the film) seems to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the 1990s. One of Auen and Walker’s many achievements is the riveting feeling of discovery that pulses through these text-based sections. Much of Chronovisor’s pleasure comes from sharing in Beatrice’s increasingly all-consuming obsession with unraveling a mystery lost to time, succinctly captured by several shots of Sellier alone, shrouded in darkness and empty space at various East Coast research libraries. The film’s sharp compositional sense is matched by the accumulating momentum of the editing, an ecstatic rush of words and images that replicates the synaptic thrill of fitting these puzzle pieces together.

Chronovisor isn’t afraid to wear its influences on its sleeve, directly referencing authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, and Paul Auster in its closing credits. The much-cited debt to Borges and Eco isn’t just evident in the film’s investigation of labyrinthine historical enigmas, but in its close attention to how these labyrinths can be constructed and used as epistemological tools by powerful institutions to bend public conceptions of material reality to their own ends. Beatrice finds that the implications of the Chronovisor for the Catholic Church—not to mention for questions of mass surveillance and other military applications—seem to be behind the device’s forced removal from the public consciousness.

Auen and Walker’s cinematic influences are also readily apparent, from Straub-Huillet’s experiments melding literary and filmic forms to the playful use of on-screen titles in Michael Snow’s “So Is This.” But they’re more than capable of conjuring up dense, evocative images in their own right, as in the twinned shots of curtains flowing in the breeze toward the start and end of the film, each suggesting a spectral presence as powerfully as any of the archival material.

Indeed, Chronovisor is the most exciting entry yet in what feels like a cycle of works by young American indie filmmakers that tap in to the narrative possibilities and tactile physicality of a deep dive into archival materials (others include the films of Ricky D’Ambrose, Adrian Anderson and Patrick Gray’s Pomp & Circumstance, and Julian Castronovo’s Debut, or Objects of the Field as Currently Catalogued). Leo Zhang’s 16mm cinematography is essential to that mission, capturing the grain of paper and the warmth of Beatrice’s reading lights. So, too, is the research undergirding the film’s plays with truth and fiction. (Many of the volumes Beatrice combs through are genuine, rare academic volumes obtained by the filmmakers.) At a moment when so much of our connection to these physical materials is disappearing into a proprietary digital ether, the insistence begins to feel less like format fetishism and more like a principled stand.

Still, for all its lofty influences and ambition, the film never takes itself too seriously or loses its appreciation for the pleasures of fiction, as perhaps evidenced by the citations of films like The Ninth Gate and National Treasure. A running joke involves Beatrice consistently gaining access to people by claiming that she’s hoping to give them an academic award (after all, Borges wouldn’t be Borges without his own satirical edge). Nor is it hopelessly mired in an obsession with the past; it’s hard to ignore, for example, that Beatrice works for Columbia University, an institution that has done more than its fair share of sociopolitical truth-warping in recent years.

More broadly, the concept of the Chronovisor is easily applicable to our age of ubiquitous screens and recording tools, a connection the film eerily and subtly evokes. The deeper Beatrice goes, the more her own identity seems to be subsumed into the search for the device, despite being warned with tales of “addiction” to the Chronovisor. The film’s revelatory and frightening denouement creates a closed feedback loop from which Beatrice may never escape, finally asking what remains of ourselves when we gaze into the past too hard for too long.

The post ‘Chronovisor’ Review: A Thrilling, Borgesian Plunge Down a Conspiracy Rabbit Hole appeared first on Slant Magazine.

On Friday the 11th of September, Vlissingen’s Film by the Sea festival starts. It’s the 28th edition this year, and it has become one of the largest and most glamorous festivals in the Netherlands. Last year saw over 45 thousand tickets sold, and the average audience rating for the films was a whopping 4.2 out of 5. The increase in ticket sales has been considerable each year, so will the festival hit 50K in 2026? We’ll see! It’s quite an achievement for a festival which is, geographically, a bit out-of-the-way for most people. Utrecht, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Leiden are within an hour’s travel of each other, but Vlissingen (or Flushing) is in Old Zeeland, in the South-West, part of a group of islands and peninsulas…

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Only four features into her career, Justine Triet has already emerged as one of the defining voices of contemporary French cinema. Winning the Palme d’Or certainly accelerated that ascent, but her reputation rests on films that probe the elusiveness of objective truth, the tensions between women’s personal and professional lives, and the ways identity itself can be constructed, performed, and reinvented. Another Croisette only member, Triet’s Age of Panic was a 2013 in the ACID section, In Bed with Victoria was a 2016 selection in Critics’ Week section, and her last two efforts were profiled in the competition section – 2019’s Sibyl (read ★★ review) was followed by 2023’s Anatomy of a Fall (read ★★★½ review) – her thunderous international break-out film not only won the Palme but an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.… Read the rest

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Known for her discomfort and absurdity brand of comedy, we thought that Janicza Bravo might be moving into the kitchen for the Martha Stewart biopic title Good One, but in another juicy tidbit of future American indie project news via the World of Reel folks, we learn that her third feature might be shooting as early as next month and circles back to a true crime story of 1980’s NYC. Titled Preppy – the project is being produced by Michael Costigan and John Buderwitz.

Written by Rose Lichter-Marck and David Levine, this is based on the infamous 1986 “Preppy Murder,” two young women unknowingly fall for the same charming, dangerous man during a sweltering New York summer.… Read the rest

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Plus: ‘Coyote vs. Acme,’ ‘Boorman and the Devil,’ ‘Legend of the White Dragon,’ ‘The Sun Never Sets.’

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I was not a child in the 1990s, nor did I have children of my own, but I would nevertheless catch the occasional glimpse of the TV show Barney & Friends in the background, its titular purple dinosaur leading kids […]

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Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Connelly, Alice Braga, and Jimmi Simpson reprise their roles in the series adapted from Blake Crouch’s novel.

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Synapse Films brings two cult classic horror films home on 4K UHD.

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