Kevin Walker and Jack Auen on CHRONOVISOR

In 1972, a Catholic Benedictine priest named Father Pellegrino Ernetti claimed to have invented a device that could record and play back moments from throughout all recorded time. The theological conspiracies and media circus that ensued form the basis for Kevin Walker and Jack Auen‘s debut feature, Chronovisor, so named for the Father’s mysterious Pandora’s Box. Like Courtney Stephens‘ doc-narrative hybrid from last year, Invention, this film is a semi-supernaturalist transmission from the outer regions of scientific consensus and academic legitimacy, a serious look into the kinds of subjects often relegated to the realm of the internet rabbit hole.

Studiously shot on soft 16mm, the film plays like a late night in the stacks: The pair have developed a novel way of shooting the act of reading–– a pursuit that takes up much of the runtime. White English text floats over passages from real archival materials in an impressive range of languages (translated by a team of seven), providing viewers with exposition and historical details that manage to feel completely gripping, even stressful, as the film’s academic protagonist, Beatrice (Anne-Laure Sellier, a real-life Professor of Behavioral Science at HEC Paris), descends further and further into the occult world of pseudoscience. As her research progresses, the film’s roots in genre potboilers like The Da Vinci Code (2002) begin to shine through, providing a deliciously eerie viewing experience at once intellectually electrifying and–– perhaps counterintuitively for those unfamiliar with the agonies and rewards of building out a dense bibliography–– emotionally gripping.

source: Grasshopper Film

The filmmakers, fresh off of programming a screening series at Lincoln Center to preface Chronovisor‘s release, joined Film Inquiry for a conversation about research, conspiratorial thinking, late night walks on the Upper East Side, and their shared love of academia.

I’d love to start by talking about research and format. This story is rooted in actual events and actual conspiratorial thinking. When you encountered such compelling archival material, what lead you to adopt doc-narrative hybrid format instead of, say, a straight documentary or even a straight fiction film?

Kevin Walker: For me, that doc-hybrid stuff mostly stems from an aversion to writing [laughs]. Working with stuff that exists in real life makes things really easy. We don’t consider ourselves documentarians at all; this was meant to be a completely fictional film, but the screenplay was already written by all of these archival materials, so we got to skip some of the hard stuff on the front end, which is really nice.

Jack Auen: Kevin said that it makes things easy, which it does in certain respects of the writing process, but he’s definitely also underselling the amount of effort that he in particular put into sourcing a lot of these primary materials, which weren’t readily available. They were coming off of, like, German eBay, and oftentimes we were paying 10x the cost in shipping than the books actually cost just because they were the only copies we could find. We wouldn’t even be sure there was going to be relevant material in the documents, either, so we were flipping page by page hoping to come across a keyword. That was an incredibly laborious, monthslong process that Kevin really spearheaded, while I got to be the first audience to that material as it was being curated. It was very rewarding, but by the end of it, Kevin‘s apartment was wall to wall, floor to ceiling boxes of books, none of which were in languages that he or I could actually speak [laughs].

And when did you first hear about the Chronovisor?

KW: It was in a in a book I was reading called Angels, Archons, and Aliens: An Assessment of the Theological and Psychological Implications of Government Secrecy (2022) by Ambrose Andreano. I recommend it heartily to anyone who’s remotely interested in UFOs or conspiracy theories in general–– particularly in the theological implications of those things. There’s a little diversion in it about Father Ernetti’s Chronovisor, and I was completely hooked almost from the second I read the title of the chapter. Then I shared it with Jack, and we never looked back.

How would you both describe your relationship to conspiracy theories?

JA: We’ve shared texts about recent releases of potential UAP [another term for UFO] information back and forth, enjoying and indulging in them. But beyond that, I wouldn’t consider us experts in cryptids or iceberg theories or anything like that. We’re definitely open to them when we hear them, but before this, we were not really actively searching them out any meaningful way.

So, what was it that hooked you about the Chronovisor in particular?

KW: It was more the implications of what the existence of such a device might mean in an individual human life–– the ability to, with an almost theistic omniscience, be able to view all of human history up until one second ago is a fascinating power that feels tantalizing and scary. There are a million different films you could make about the Chronovisor, and that richness was the attraction. It took us quite a long time to figure out which story we wanted to tell, the one that most aligned with our personal, spiritual, and thematic ambitions. It was it was actually quite difficult to pin that down. It went through many permutations before we found the story of Beatrice.

And how did this specific character develop out of that process?

JA: We describe ourselves as wannabe academics, and we love not only the aesthetics of that, but also the process of it. A central character who was an academic embodying a very certain way of being in the world was something that we had had both been spiraling around separately, but then once we came across the Chronovisor, our two ideas became one whole one.

Beatrice is quite an interesting character in how she relates to academia more broadly. This movie has been compared to things like the Da Vinci Code (2002) or National Treasure (2004)–– 2000s-era conspiracy movies. But in those films, those central characters are normally presented as powerful voices in their fields. Here, though, she’s dismissed by her peers. What was was it that made you want to put this character on the outside that way?

JA: Lemme start by saying that we also love that genre and era of conspiracy film. We just programmed National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007) in our series [Bibliomania at Lincoln Center], so even though our film is operating in a different niche, we’re huge fans of those kinds of movies. Our inspirations for our work are very eclectic, and so we wanted to capture that with our series. Programing something at Lincoln Center is like a dream come true, so we wanted to use that opportunity to flatten this high-art-low-art distinction that plagues a lot of media criticism and consumption. We’re just as likely to take parts we love from big blockbusters as we are from experimental film, so I think that was really a fun thing to get to put out into the world in the form of a screening series.

But yes, as I said, we’re wannabe academics, so we don’t consider ourselves experts on the politics and dynamics of academia. We relied a lot on Anne-Laure for that because she has firsthand experience. She would tell us, “Oh, I know so many people just like Beatrice.” But we definitely knew that her psychological profile as a character would lead to a certain kind of isolation and a prioritization of a certain kind of work over other aspects of life.

You’ve said a couple times now that you think of yourselves as wannabe academics. What is your relationship to academia and research as a process?

KW: Jack studied psychology, and I studied English, classics and theology. For anyone who attended a university, research probably occupied the vast majority of your time. You have a love-hate relationship with it when you’re being forced to do it like that [laughs], mostly love from our end, as you can probably tell from the film. But we look back on those days fondly. I wish I could just go back to college and be studying religion in class with no worries about taxes or shooting our next commercial. What a heavenly time that was! So this is our way of reliving it, basically, being able to put it on screen. It’s nice, too, because the research is curated for you in the film; you don’t have to go through any of the dead ends [laughs]. It’s like if you were researching a subject and every single time you landed on a page, it was exactly what you were looking for. That’s the kind of satisfactory experience we wanted provide viewers.

JA: Kevin and I were also very lucky to have an amazing secondary education in middle school and high school that really kicked off our love of the classics and research very early on. Our school offered Latin, which each of us took for five years; we translated the Aeneid and took an elective where we read all of the Divine Comedy with amazing professors. We had a true liberal arts and humanities upbringing, which we talk about all the time. and whose value has become more and more apparent as we’ve gotten older. So, we’re very grateful to our parents and our school for that.

Let’s pivot a little bit more into film form. The way this movie is cut is so satisfying. Cutting a film to the rhythm of reading is such a compelling premise, it’s like reading a paper. Can you talk to me about the editing process?

JA: We had a little bit of a cheat code in our back pocket, which is the “Planets” by [Gustav] Holst (1914-17), which is an incredibly fun thing to get to edit with as your backing track. It did take a lot of finessing over multiple versions to get the rhythm and the reading speed correct. We had to test it with audiences to make sure, and we did not always strike the balance correctly the first time.

source: Grasshopper Film

KW: Some people still don’t think we struck the balance correctly in terms of reading speed [laughs]. We get a good amount of complaints about that.

JA: Yeah, definitely [laughs]. It was definitely a big trial and error process. We shot and edited all of the research sequences twice. The first time digitally with me as a hand model to be able to put it in the timeline and figure out the pacing and how long we needed to hold on each sentence. Then went back with the 16-millimeter and shot with a much lower shooting ratio so we could save on film, and then we-edited it. Having gone through that whole process twice, by the end, we had a pretty locked-in sense of where we wanted to spend time and how we wanted to dole out the information rhythmically.

In terms of style, I’ve never seen New York shot quite like this. It’s a very different look and feel–– I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Met stairs shot like that, for example. Can you tell me a little bit more about that visual side of things?

KW:  In terms of shooting New York specifically, it’s really just a reflection of the way that we live in New York. I live on the Upper East Side, I walk around at night a lot, and one of my favorite things that I see is the Met at night. It’s lit so beautifully, and it’s only open late on Fridays and Saturdays, so most people don’t see it like that. I happen to see it like that a lot, so we shot it that way. That’s our life in New York: libraries, museums, late night walks. It was really just a matter of pointing the camera at it, and our cinematographer Leo Zhang‘s eye brought that to life in ways we never could.

This movie is so deliberately analogue in its research practices, right? It’s a lot of VHS tapes and libraries and archival materials in the mail. At the same time, at least for me, it evokes questions around AI and phone addiction in terms of how the Chronovisor is being related to: the way it invites you in and hooks you, the way you stop being able to distinguish between reality and hallucination. Were you thinking about those ideas at all?

KW: We definitely welcome interpretations like that, and I think they’re very justified. I think that kind of idea is an outcropping of just the infinite possibilities that the Chronovisor conjures up in people’s minds, which was part of the reason we were attracted to it as a device: We knew that audiences, even if we did a horrible job with the film, would at least have their thoughts provoked by this device. That said, we would never discuss things that literally in the writing process; we’re not super interested in making allegorical or even metaphorical films. The way we discuss things in the writing process is always spiritual, thematic, human, and never dictated by anything that exists in the world as cultural or social phenomenon.

JA: There are always, in any time period, going to be specific villains that people attribute to society’s ills to. We would hope that if this film had come out in 1975, or 1995, or 2045, people would find it just as relevant.

We would like to thank Kevin Walker and Jack Auen for taking the time to speak with us.