Chronovisor

In this wild, one-of-a-kind shrine to the wonders of research, an academic falls down a multimedia rabbit hole of hoax, conspiracy and Vatican intervention.

Béatrice Courte (played by real-life professor Anne Laure Sellier) is a polylingual academic with research interests in the darkest corners of philosophy. When she encounters a short paragraph on the Chronovisor – a device built in the 1950s that claimed to “photograph the past” as a kind of spectral, visual time machine – she soon becomes obsessed. Camping out at libraries, poring over pages and chasing up leads in four different languages, Béatrice is hot on the trail of the machine’s inventor: an eccentric real-life Benedictine monk named Father Pellegrino Ernetti. Is he still alive? Is his machine a hoax? And how is the Catholic Church involved?

With its closing crawl listing a bunch of “creditors” including Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Roberto Bolaño and Paul Auster, this hyper-literary work of sleuthing offers an experimental, lo-fi riff on reading-room conspiracy classics like The Ninth Gate (MIFF 2000), Neil LaBute’s Possession and even The Da Vinci Code. Neither strictly documentary nor fiction, the debut feature of directors and academics Kevin Walker and Jack Auen fashions an uncanny bricolage from largely authentic books, magazines, journals and degraded videos. Shot on 16mm in a host of shadowy, Gothic libraries, this is an atmospheric, slyly funny oddity that cast a spell on audiences at Rotterdam and New Directors/New Films.

Content: Melbourne International Film Festival