At the International Film Festival Rotterdam, audiences encountered *Chronovisor* as a work of high-concept fiction. Directed by Kevin Walker and Jack Auen, the film follows Beatrice—played by actual behavioral science professor Anne-Laure Sellier—as she navigates a labyrinthine research project involving a suppressed invention and a mysterious priest. Yet the film’s central conceit, which sounds like the product of a speculative writers' room, is rooted in a bizarre corner of 20th-century history.
The titular device was the alleged creation of Father Pellegrino Ernetti, a Benedictine monk and physicist who claimed to have developed a way to capture "electromagnetic remnants" of past events. Ernetti’s Chronovisor was not a time machine in the physical sense, but a receiver that translated historical waveforms into a visual medium, effectively turning the past into a crude, flickering television broadcast. Walker and Auen’s film treats this historical rabbit hole not merely as a plot point, but as an inquiry into the act of reading and the preservation of memory.
Formally, the film blurs the line between a traditional thriller and an archival essay. It utilizes meticulously sourced primary documents, overlaying English translations directly onto multilingual texts, and incorporates unsettling footage of Ernetti’s funeral. As the narrative progresses, the structure begins to dissolve, shifting from a character-driven study of obsession into a piece of abstract video art. In doing so, *Chronovisor* mirrors the very device it describes: an attempt to reconstruct a coherent image from the fragmented waveforms of the past.
With reporting from MUBI Notebook.
Source · MUBI Notebook
