Chronovisor (Kevin Walker & Jack Auen, 2026).
Upon its premiere at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s Chronovisor was mistakenly perceived by many viewers, myself included, as entirely fictional from start to finish. That’s understandable given that it has the starting points of a conventional thriller—an academic on an unpredictable research path, a mysterious lost object suppressed by the Catholic Church, an inventor whose fate is unclear—and the conceptual outlandishness of science-fiction upon reaching its final destination. The academic is Beatrice (actual professor of behavior science Anne-Laure Sellier in her film debut) and the object is the titular Chronovisor, a device invented by one Father Pellegrino Ernetti that could allegedly pick up signals from long-past events and visualize them, as if translating history from waveforms into a crudely visualized form of TV.
But both Ernetti and his invention are real, part of a historical rabbit hole the American filmmaking duo stumbled down and constructed a fictional edifice around, resulting in a film about the act of reading which slowly transforms into, by film’s end, video art. En route, copious texts in multiple languages, from meticulously sourced primary materials, are shown with English-translated subtitles laid directly over the relevant passages. Those, as well as an unnerving video of Ernetti’s funeral, were part of the difficult-to-source artifacts Walker and Auen put together for their striking debut. Shot on 16mm, the mesmerizing research quest—much of the film consists of close-ups of texts, scored to Gustav Holst’s The Planets for maximum dramatic effect—leads to an unexpected final destination: first out of the country, and then into an entirely different form. Reading can help change reality as we perceive it, illustrating the duo’s guiding principle that intellectual quests are high adventure.
The week after their IFFR premiere, I spoke to the filmmakers; Chronovisor will next play at New Directors/New Films and the Los Angeles Festival of Movies.
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NOTEBOOK: This began as a nonfiction project, then at some point became fiction. I’m wondering at what point you realized that the film should be fictional, but also when you realized people might be confused about the film’s veracity.
KEVIN WALKER: You could say that it was fictional to begin with. I stumbled across the Chronovisor in a book about aliens called Angels, Archons & Aliens by Ambrose Andreano. I was interested in UFOs at the time, which is the main subject of that book—specifically from the angle of theology, which is what I have my master’s in. That’s the subject of that book: what kind of import does the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have on our theological vision of the world? I spent weeks researching every detail I could possibly find, brought it to Jack and we knew there was something cinematic about it. Your mind immediately goes to a Ninth Gate [Roman Polanski, 1999] situation of international mystery—jumping from European country to country, trying to find the Chronovisor—which is obviously not feasible at our budget level.
JACK AUEN: We had been talking in vague terms about something feature-length we wanted to write. We are both wannabe academics, so that’s very attractive: We love whenever there’s a late night scene in the library involving research, even in films that are not really about that. So, there was that vague idea of a film centering around an academic, happening in parallel with the separate obsession with the device, then two ideas became one.
We were not thinking about to what extent audiences would understand, or care, whether these materials were real or not. Obviously, that was part of what drew us to it, because it’s like this quote-unquote “real conspiracy.” We enjoyed sifting facts from fiction and the contradictory nature of the sources, so it would be important to transmute that in some way to the audience. Early on, we did have this conception of a documentary wrapped in fiction. That was how we would pitch it to people. There was definitely a sort of awakening seeing it being reacted to by audiences. It became clear this is one of the first questions we’d get asked: Is this stuff real? What did you fake?
NOTEBOOK: Kevin, I’m looking at this book that you named, and I would love to know how on earth you came across this in the first place. This cover is crazy, I’ve never heard of this press, this is not an academic text.
AUEN: I think I’m the only person who has logged it on Goodreads. The reference to the Chronovisor is one half of one page.
NOTEBOOK; What page is that, for the record?
AUEN: 575. Out of a total of around 800 pages!
WALKER: I found this guy on a theology podcast being interviewed as an alien expert. The study of theology as it pertains to aliens is called exotheology. This author actually specializes actually in patristic exegesis, and he’s a follower of Saint Ambrose, which is why he took on the name Ambrose, which is not his original name. God, the more I talk about all this, the crazier it sounds.
AUEN: Also, if I recall correctly, this was right around the time there was a very recent release or declassification of stuff by the CIA and there were people testifying in front of Congress. That was on the mind for sure.
NOTEBOOK: It sounds almost like making the movie enabled you to do research.
WALKER: Yeah, the writing of the screenplay was synonymous with research of the Chronovisor—switching from one to the other, sometimes researching out of personal interest and sometimes trying to find the cinema in it. There are very few contemporary resources that have substantial amounts of information about the Chronovisor. I have my theories about why it’s so buried, but it required this enormous culling of books and magazines and newspapers and videos from dozens of different sources. I don’t think I would have done all that if it weren’t for the film.
NOTEBOOK: It seems like it would be too expensive to call up all these resources without some kind of financial incentive.
WALKER: Totally. We used a decent portion of the film’s budget on the collection of the—props, you could call them
NOTEBOOK: Are they acquisitions, are you borrowing from archives or is it both?
WALKER: A couple things were checked out from libraries, but a pretty limited amount. Most of it was purchased on eBay—you know, somebody found a collection of magazines in their dad’s basement and didn’t know what they were. We sometimes didn’t even know if there would be any information in something that we ordered. There were a lot of educated guesses and a lot of it was a crapshoot, but we got pretty lucky in the dregs of eBay and various foreign versions of eBay, which are very difficult to navigate. Trying to track everything down was chaos.
NOTEBOOK: Roughly how many volumes are we talking about and how long did it take to source all of them?
WALKER: Six months. I think there are at least 20 to 25 different archival materials used in the film.
AUEN: There’s probably more that we sourced and ended up not using because they’re redundant or not the best. We both have our different language expertises—“expertise” is a generous term. Jack has some high-school French, he studied a little Italian in his time. I have a little Greek, high-school Spanish. We both have a decent amount of Latin. So, we would distribute the materials according to our various skill levels with certain languages. But also, new apps that can take photographs of text and provide a preliminary translation—not always incredibly accurate, but enough to get through the research process—played a huge role.
Chronovisor (Kevin Walker & Jack Auen, 2026).
NOTEBOOK: I’m guessing there’s not an archival obligation to maintain these materials that you’re acquiring in good shape, which was my initial hypothesis about why you were filming the reading rooms in low light. Can you talk about deciding on that being the environment for the presentation of the text, whether it be this responsibility to the archive that you yourself are creating or just aesthetic?
AUEN: It definitely was first and foremost aesthetic. It fits the setting we wanted the film to take place in and harkens back to some of our favorite research scenes in film. There are scenes in Seven [David Fincher, 1997], The Silence of the Lambs [Jonathan Demme, 1991], and from early Harry Potters, that have that same sort of high gothic.
WALKER: National Treasure [Jon Turteltaub, 2004].
AUEN: There’s always a room, a big table with several banker’s lamps, frayed edges on the bindings of the books and all of that. That was something we knew we wanted early on and built everything around that.
WALKER: We shot at four libraries: the Yale Club in New York, the German Society of Philadelphia, the George Peabody library at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and Gilman, our high school in Baltimore.
NOTEBOOK: Was that about the amount of time that you could get at each one?
AUEN: It was a combination of that and also just wanting a little bit of variety. It’s not all just there for the taking from one library. And then yeah, of course, some logistics— getting the crew out to Philadelphia for one day instead of three, that kind of thing.
WALKER: I think the only one that’s ever been shot is the George Peabody Library in an adaptation of Washington Square and a scene in Sleepless in Seattle [Nora Ephron, 1993].
NOTEBOOK: Tell me about filming the texts themselves. There’s a lot of attention to the translucence of each page, and you’re zooming in very far, which probably poses its own problems in 16 millimeter low light.
AUEN: First, we have to shout-out our unbelievable cinematographer, Leo Zhang. He’s an incredible operator: never misses a movement, never had to redo another take for the camera. The vast majority of the archival stuff was done with a one-to-one shooting ratio, just because there were hundreds of shots and we needed to preserve as much film as possible. It was pretty high stakes and he would stick the landing almost every single time.
Formally speaking, there was a lot of testing involved. Jack and I went to his apartment and shot all of the pages, even more than we ended up using, because we wanted to be able to go into the editing suite and build those sequences from scratch—finalize the cadence and narrative of those sequences exactly—for the sake of preserving film.
AUEN: It ended up being a lot more laborious and delicate than we thought it would be. Certain pages reacted differently than they did digitally, or we had a slightly different lighting set-up for when she was in different libraries, so that would change the amount of green in the image or glare on photographs within the text. That was a real trial-and-error process—again, trial without actually rolling but just sitting there looking through the viewfinder, to the extent that that’s reliable on 16 millimeter.
NOTEBOOK: To what extent do you find it to be reliable?
AUEN: Mostly with framing, not really with color in any meaningful way, and certainly not with contrast. We just trusted Leo.
NOTEBOOK: And is there a hand model involved?
WALKER: There are three.
NOTEBOOK: What are the criteria for hand models and where does one find them?
AUEN: Some were from early-on casting that we had done before we decided to go the route of hiring a real academic for the role. I ended up sending some odd messages—“Can you send me photos of your hands, please?”—and promising that they wouldn’t end up on the internet. It’s a really hard thing to do on camera. I was the hand model for all the digital test footage, so I got firsthand experience. You’re crouching underneath this camera, being told, “Lean really far back, but stick your hand out to just the right place.” For maybe one or two shots, my mom is one of the hand models.
NOTEBOOK: Generally speaking, how far is the camera from the text? Is it basically the distance that a human being would have to the text, closer or further?
WALKER: It’s about double the distance that a human being would be from the text because of the focal lengths we were using. We were just using regular lenses, we weren’t using lenses that were specific for extreme close-ups, so all of them are shot on the floor and then we’d prop the camera up on a box or a table or something and be shooting down. It was such a precarious setup.
AUEN: Our operator was standing on an apple box in order to operate the camera from above, then we’d have the actor sitting on the floor on as comfortable of a pillow as we could set up. The camera’s probably two feet behind their head so that we could get some slightly dirty over-the-shoulder shots or zoom in over a shoulder and become clean. We needed a little bit of presence there.
NOTEBOOK: In terms of the subtitles, when did you arrive at the idea that they would be placed on top of the original texts?
WALKER: That was an editing discovery. We had originally planned on doing traditional subtitles, but when we got into the edit, we were gaining less and less confidence, because of the amount of foreign language text, that subtitles were going to be a pleasant way to experience the film with the up-and-down. As soon as we got into the editing suite, we threw these words on top and it worked immediately. Looking back, it’s such an essential feature that I can’t believe we didn’t know it on day one. Then we added a lot of layers of effects onto the text to make it feel optically printed. We added some gate weave, some grain and halation effects to really make it pop, but also make it feel of a piece with the rest of the aesthetic of the film. We also did this for the traditional subtitles so that it all has the quality of artifacts.
Chronovisor (Kevin Walker & Jack Auen, 2026).
NOTEBOOK: In terms of casting the lead, was the biggest requirement somebody who’s extremely multilingual?
WALKER: There were so many demands we were making of this lead role that it was quite difficult to find anyone that could meet the criteria. We needed someone who speaks four languages, very strong proficiency in them, and a specific look that we wanted for the character. We eventually realized we needed someone from academia—we just couldn’t find an actor that could handle the language in a way that sounded convincing to us. If they have strange pronunciations of obscure words or the rhythm of the way they were talking is off, you could just tell it was alien to the way they typically speak. And we needed someone—and this was more difficult than I even expected—available for the dates that we needed to shoot, nearby enough that we wouldn’t have to pay extreme sums for travel, and above all who could commit insanely hard to the role. There’s so much dialogue in several languages, huge monologues, some of which got cut down a lot for the film and were double or triple the length that you see.
AUEN: There was a brief period of flirting with Backstage and trying to find a trained actor. But parallel with that, we were exploring the idea of real academics in New York. I started with the NYU alumni database where you can see headshots, the field of study and recent publications. I did that also for Columbia, for Fordham, a couple of others. When we found Anne Laure’s name, we came across a TED talk that she had given, and she had another Zoom recording of a lecture Q&A or something, wearing a black turtleneck and in her TED performative voice. It was so clear to us that if she was capable of doing that on camera—which is easier said than done, being yourself on camera—then we would have our Beatrice.
NOTEBOOK: Can you talk about the VHS footage of the funeral? I assume that’s staged.
WALKER: No, that is Pellegrino Ernetti’s real funeral in Venice.
NOTEBOOK: How on earth did you source that?
WALKER: It was three am. I’m very much a night owl, so that’s my prime creative time. There was always more Chronovisor stuff to find, and eventually, in the dark corners of YouTube, I stumbled across this Italian channel that was like a fan account of Pellegrino Ernetti not pertaining to the Chronovisor at all, someone who was a follower of him as a holy figure—attended his sermons in Venice, followed his exorcisms—and had this treasure trove of all these sermons that he gave. I remember being completely shocked, because I’d never seen any of those videos.These videos have like 70 views.
AUEN: The channel has, like, 900 subscribers right now. It probably had fewer when we were researching. There are dozens of videos on there, and eventually I clicked on one. It opens very enigmatically— someone on the shores of Venice filming one of those boats coming into a dock—and it slowly started to occur to me as it was manifesting through the pixelation that there was a casket on the boat. It’s this very long video, 17 minutes or something—we chopped it up—but as they’re processing into the church I was glued to the screen. I was like, “This cannot be real,” then they get to the church and I’m like "Oh my god, this is about to be open casket.” We don’t show it all because it felt inappropriate, honestly, how intimate it got. The cameraman starts moving and zooming in. He’s standing right on top of him, a close-up on his face. It was terrifying. I had a lot of trouble sleeping that night, because it was truly like a fictional figure had come to life—maybe “had come to death” is a more accurate description of it.
This interview has been edited and condensed.