Jered Mabaquiao
Anyone who has been swept away in a current of intellectual pursuit can identify with Chronovisor’s appeal. At least for me, I intimately recognize the kind of frightening intellectual work and mindful interiority that Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor illustrates. Chronovisor begins with the professional, and oftentimes rare, virtue of attention—with the conviction that one more source, one more language, one more archival detour, or at least one more listening ear at a dinner table might finally cohere an argument.
Between our own passions and our own attention spans, Chronovisor’s horror infuses a hubris of intellect with an occult machine that can replay and access the past. In this way, I read the film’s most unsettling discovery that “scholarship” can become a feverish, even deeply spiritually possessive narrative arc. Chronovisor frames this fever in the research professor whose funding will have been cut off if they cannot miraculously conjure a mythological machine whose sole function is to capture and bridge anyone’s consciousness and to project it as an image onto its screen.
