Chronovisor

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Preceded by Bibliomania: A Preface to Chronovisor (August 28–September 3), a curated anthology of features and shorts that brilliantly wring suspense, humor, and terror from seemingly undramatizable subjects. 

Benedictine monk Father Pellegrino Ernetti claimed to have invented, alongside Enrico Fermi and Wernher von Braun, a device called the Chronovisor, capable of transmitting events of the past as if live on TV. He professed to have witnessed orations by Cicero and the Crucifixion, though the evidence he provided, reported in the Italian press, was widely disputed. Taking this as their jumping-off point, filmmakers Kevin Walker and Jack Auen engage in a form of time travel as well, following Columbia scholar Béatrice Courte (real-life professor Anne-Laure Sellier), who comes across the Chronovisor while researching an unrelated topic and then, like countless hyperlink- or microfiche-surfing grad students before her, gets lost on an academic side quest. Traveling deeper and deeper into a stubbornly analog archive, she unearths an elaborate web of conjecture and conspiracy reaching all the way up to the highest echelons of the Vatican. Dense with on-screen text from real primary sources, scored to music by Gustav Holst, and shot on 16mm in the pooling shadows of many of New York City’s historic libraries, Chronovisor is a witty literary mystery about one of the many secrets that still hide out in libraries, waiting for someone with time, curiosity, and a JSTOR login to come along and disturb the dusty stacks—a standout of this year’s New Directors/New Films and one of the year’s most singular and formally assured feature debuts. A Grasshopper Film release.