The written word is a powerful thing, and not always as simple as it appears on the page. This is true in life, and this is true in “Chronovisor,” the film written, directed, and edited by Jack Auen and Kevin Walker. “In many ways the script is objectively bad,” Walker joked to IndieWire.
Unlike a lot of bad scripts, however, the film that Walker and Auen created is a spare, lean, captivating thriller — powered in large part by real archival materials that the directors gathered, and then made come alive on screen in the way the idea of time-travel comes alive in the mind of their protagonist.
As any project that tries to use text messages as plot points finds out, it is really hard to make text onscreen look cool or even interesting.
And yet, in “Chronovisor,” text is the engine of discovery inside the film, and slowly, almost hypnotically, it becomes one of the most thrilling things about it. In order to pull that off, Auen and Walker really had to finesse the assembly of their archival material and the pacing of its reveals, well before they had a roll of film or had even cast their protagonist.
That protagonist, Beatrice Courte (Anne Laure Sellier) lives, if not a solitary, at least an isolating life; her strongest connections aren’t really with other people, certainly not the colleagues she goes to dull dinners with; they’re with the philosophical and psychological texts she analyzes by the warm glow of research lamps and thinks about as she walks through the dull thrum of New York City by night.
It’s in this beguiling atmosphere, shot lovingly on 16mm film by cinematographer Leo Zhang and set to (budget-friendly) pulls from Gustav Holst’s “The Planets,” Beatrice slowly falls through a knowledge wormhole around a (real!) device called The Chronovisor. She goes further and further to find out if indeed it still exists.
But a healthy chunk of the film is just Beatrice looking at books and old magazines; the text appears on screen, pieces of it highlighted at a speed that creates the illusion of illumination from within, like those bits of information simply caught our eyes and lit up, with some hidden import.
“We laid out the order of documentation, in the order in which information is distributed, but we had the pleasure of cutting that arrangement to Holst’s music, which provided the impetus for the rhythm and the cadence of [those text sequences],” Walker told IndieWire. “That was all done initially in pre-production, and shot digitally, so we could edit it to the music, see how it all fit together, get the timing right, and save on film costs because then, when we shot it all on film, it was with basically a one-to-one shooting ratio. We knew exactly what we needed.”
This measure twice, cut once approach helped Auen and Walker spend their limited budget where it would really count — shooting in the George Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins (which doubles for the New York Historical Society) and the uncanny, maybe unearthly, glow that suffuses the film, be it from Zhang’s lighting or from how the pair treat the archival imagery onscreen.
“There are thousands of films, particularly documentaries, that are constructed entirely with archival footage and documentation, but we wanted to explore the possibilities of text’s presentation on film,” Walker said. “All the formal choices and narrative choices and Beatrice’s psychological profile were an extension of that initial formal choice, and created sort of this domino effect.”
“Kevin and I talk often about what it is that gets us attached to an idea and makes it worth making a movie about, because you deal with a lot of headache and heartbreak,” Auen added. “It’s kind of ineffable. But there was something about this challenge, narratively, cinematically, and then also the opportunity to not have to compromise on the creative and formal choices while keeping it in a realistic budget for us.”
Auen and Walker designed the superimpositions that highlight texts in the editing bay, trying to mimic the timing and the feeling of the 16mm footage until they got it just right. “When we first did it, it was a font out of Microsoft Word, and it felt separate from the image, and there was a lack of embeddedness,” Walker said. “It took a few editing tricks to make it feel like the 16mm. But once we got it there, we were like, ‘This is gonna work.’”
They also very carefully curated the flow of that text onscreen to teach viewers how to read it, find it mysterious, and start trying to look deeper the way that Beatrice does. “We really did mimic the journey that Beatrice goes on in the film for several months, just the two of us, before putting it onto film. So our process of going down that rabbit hole inspired the story,” Auen said. “All of the documents in the film are authentic, except for one. And all of the videos in the film are authentic except for one.”
“We’re leaving it open to everyone’s guesses to see what people decide is the wheat and what is the chaff,” Walker added.
But whether working with text onscreen, faking archival material, or simply letting an image breathe long enough for the audience to project character psychology onto it, Walker and Auen see their work as directors as a little bit closer to curators of many different kinds of media and influences, rather than simply image-makers.
“We trust ourselves and our tastes as consumers of art and literature and media,” Auen said, “So we have a much easier time reacting to something and saying, ‘I know what’s working for me,’ and that’s why I think we found such a wellspring of inspiration from the conspiracy itself, from literary sources which we credit in the film, from the music. We wanted to create this cumulative effect building up, even if you couldn’t pinpoint an exact moment that creates that feeling. It’s a build-up and release.”
That structure is a huge part of the suspense of “Chronovisor.” The build-up is constant, and the release may well be the next page that you see.
“Chronovisor” is now playing in theaters.