In my former life as a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy, I spent a lot of time doing what looked like a lot of nothing. I read; I ruminated; I sat in apparent idleness, unknotting skeins of arguments in my head. At my most gregarious, I talked with other graduate students; we had a habit of contorting our fingers into what those in the business call “philosophy hands,” which at least looked like something, if not exactly like most people’s idea of a meaningful contribution to society. Physicists and chemists could produce pictures of themselves manifestly Doing Science, wearing white coats and wielding pipettes. What did we have to show for ourselves? What did thinking look like, which is another way of wondering, What is thinking, anyway? Is it a substance? A spirit? A shiver?
Whatever it is, it is maddeningly spectral, which is why it was so hard for me to convince anyone (not least my parents and the administrators of my erstwhile university, who refused to provide dental insurance for graduate students until we went on strike) that what I was doing when I was sitting in silence was work, labor in want of compensation or at least dental insurance, alchemy that had the potential to alter the world, however impalpably. The philosopher and critic Elaine Scarry once wrote that “to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” We could say almost the same of thinking: from the inside, there is nothing more undeniable (though the thinker may come to doubt her conviction in the face of so much skepticism); from the outside, it is wispier than vapor.
But the difficulty of visualizing thinking hasn’t dissuaded filmmakers from attempting to stage thought’s convolutions onscreen. Cue montages of cryptographers staring at strings of numbers that light up suggestively (the film “A Beautiful Mind”), detectives taking stock of the corpses of murder victims as the camera zooms into the details that strike them as salient (the series “Sherlock”), chess prodigies hallucinating games on the ceiling (the series “The Queen’s Gambit”), and policemen affixing bits of yarn to bulletin boards with thumbtacks (innumerable crime procedurals). In movies and television shows, tortured geniuses think for brief, febrile stretches; then their paroxysms end, and the product of their toil (a cracked code, a jailed murderer, an especially clever checkmate) sets a more readily legible plot into motion. Thought is invariably the handmaiden of action, and the experimental contrivances that dramatize mental exertion—the closeups, the animations, the glowing numbers—are impatiently retired in favor of more standard fare.
“Chronovisor” is one of the few movies about thinking to deviate from this formula. In Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s mesmerizing directorial début, mental foment is not a prelude to car chases or crime-fighting but an event in its own right. The film has just one character: Béatrice Courte (played by the real-life academic Anne-Laure Sellier), a philosophy professor at Columbia who is hard at work on a monograph about memory. In the opening scene, she describes her project to her peers over drinks in a dark, loud restaurant. She tells them that she is interested in ancient theories of the mind, which hold that different regions of the brain give rise to distinct mental functions—but above all, she continues, she is fascinated by memory palaces. According to the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, Béatrice explains, “an orator wishing to fixate an oration in memory should plan an itinerary through a large imaginary building, all of whose rooms and galleries, courtyards and corridors, statuary and adornments, are as clearly lined out as possible.” Thus a speaker’s roving thoughts are fixed, outfitted with an architecture. But Béatrice’s peers are not interested in memory palaces, and they are not impressed by her fervent monologue: they make their excuses and beg off, leaving her to return home to her desk.
Soon, however, she happens upon an even more ambitious effort to instantiate the insubstantial, to endow memory with form: the chronovisor, a real device that the Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti claimed, in 1972, to have invented. Ernetti hypothesized that events emit electromagnetic waves that linger in the ether, and the chronovisor is intended to record these traces and reconstruct them, creating audiovisual documentation of history, much like a camera shooting a film. “Each one of us gradually leaves behind what happens in a span of seconds, hours, days, months and years, as a visual-acoustic double track,” Ernetti is quoted as saying in one of the sources that Béatrice consults in the course of her manic research. Exploiting this “visual-acoustic double track,” both the real and the filmic Ernetti took what he insisted was a kind of “photograph” of Jesus.
In reality, Ernetti was outed as a fake—the image was revealed to be a doctored reproduction of a sculpture by the Spanish artist Lorenzo Coullaut Valera—but in “Chronovisor” this verdict comes to seem wavering and indeterminate, at least as elusive as the residue of history that he purported to synthesize into images. As Béatrice combs through the archives, always alone, always in the dead of night, always in libraries dense with darkness, she becomes skeptical of the many attempts to discredit the monk and his discovery. “Chronovisor” accelerates and syncopates as she reads on and on—at an ever faster and more scrabbling clip, in increasing desperation—about the Vatican’s determination to silence him and suppress his findings, about threats and subterfuges, about the makings of a great conspiracy. The chronovisor, Ernetti and his supporters claim, was capable of recording not just history but also memories and fantasies, affording whoever controlled it the ultimate means of surveillance. “If I could reach into my heart, take hold of my thoughts, and with my bare hands lay them without further embellishment in your own, then, I confess, the innermost desire of my soul would be fulfilled,” the German Romantic novelist and playwright Heinrich von Kleist wrote, in 1811. Ernetti’s device intrigues and appalls us because it seems to be a means of both satisfying this desire and realizing the fears that it raises: the machine promises, horribly and redemptively, to transmute our inner intangibilities into something that others might see and touch.
Perhaps “Chronovisor” is one of its emanations. The film has the soft, blurred texture of a dream, and it teems not with things themselves but with their echoes. Shadows flit over a curtain in Béatrice’s apartment, and beams cast by a pair of headlights extend into the offing of a road while the car from which they emanate remains out of sight. In place of people’s bodies or faces, we see photographs from the archive and hear voices issuing from offscreen. When Béatrice meets her colleagues at the restaurant, they are positioned behind the camera; in another scene, she delivers a lecture, but the shot conceals her audience, which declines to ask her any questions during the period designated for Q. & A.
What “Chronovisor” captures is not quite the past so much as an oneiric alternative to the present—a place where time detaches from linearity and twines into unrecognizable loops, doubling back on itself. Béatrice is curiously out of synch with the world around her. Night after night, she sits and works. Her life consists of compulsive repetition, of what might even be regarded as a single event: she reads and reads. Her frenzied reading is set outside of time, in an epoch eerily adjacent to our own. Instead of a laptop, she takes notes with a typewriter; instead of searching for references in a digital database, she consults a librarian. All of her sources—books, photographs, magazine articles—are physical, many of them faded with evident age. She uses an iPhone, but only to make calls, never to send texts or summon Ubers or look up directions. She is as much at odds with the norms of her era as she is with the daily rhythms of the city. “Chronovisor” is set almost exclusively at night, when Béatrice sits in gloomy libraries that are otherwise empty, or works in the smudged chiaroscuro solitude of her apartment.
There are many reasons that this ruminative film surpasses previous efforts to portray the vellications of thinking. For one thing, contemplation—not the sheer fact of it but its content—drives the plot. “Chronovisor” makes no capitulations to conventional action; the only drama is the drama of research. (“We view the act of research and scholarship itself as high adventure in its own right,” Auen told an interviewer.) As Béatrice reads, racing toward discovery, we are obliged to read along with her. Passages are limned in white as her gaze passes over them. Sometimes the surrounding text fades away as she homes in on a sentence or phrase. She reads in French, German, and Italian, and the film translates for us in real time, overlaying the words with their English renderings until the pages on the screen become palimpsests. Our eyes move as Béatrice’s do: as she grows hysterical, an enigmatic snippet that she encountered in a book apparently unrelated to Ernetti at the beginning of the film fragments into its rudiments. At first, she reads,
Later, each word is isolated in its own shot: “I,” “carefully,” “collected,” “information,” and so on and on. The words flash onto the screen slowly, then accelerate frenetically. “I lay down quietly on my bed and died,” “I lay down quietly on my bed and died,” repeats faster and faster. As Béatrice sits at her desk, phantasmagoric music—selections from Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite “The Planets” and the Gregorian chants that Ernetti studied when he was not too busy inventing occult machines to devote himself to his other interest, musicology—swells and surges. “Chronovisor” is both a patient movie—a steady accretion of atmosphere—and a feverish one. It has the cadence of a burgeoning obsession.
But, above all, it succeeds because Auen and Walker have finally hit on the ideal genre in which to depict the pangs of thinking: horror. At one point, Béatrice listens intently to a 1977 interview with the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. The interviewer asks the eminence what he thinks of dualism—the view, hegemonic for much of the history of Western thought, that “there were bodies and there were minds, and that these were two fundamentally different kinds of thing.” Quine rejects dualism on the ground that it cannot explain the mind’s influence on the body, and opts instead for a thoroughgoing physicalism. But Béatrice takes the opposite tack: for her, thought and memory wreak havoc on dualism’s neat dichotomies—and thereby suggest that there is some interstitial entity quivering at the junction of the corporeal and the incorporeal. What is so chilling about this entity is that it always tempts us to suspect that it may not actually exist.
“Chronovisor” is, after all, a chronicle of bruising failures of acknowledgment. Béatrice gives a lecture, and no one asks her any questions; she explains her research to her colleagues, and they leave the restaurant as fast as possible. The academic speaks—and is so resoundingly ignored that she is justified in wondering if she has only imagined it. Most of what happens in “Chronovisor,” like most of what happens when Béatrice is entombed in the library, may or may not have really happened at all, which is another way of saying that “Chronovisor” is a ghost movie, which is another way of saying that it is a film about scholarship. Horror is the ideal genre in which to represent thinking because the true terror of the life of the mind, like the true terror of a haunting, is the sneaking suspicion that nothing is there, that all the agonies of rumination are mere phantoms. Contra Descartes’s famous dictum, to think is to inherit a sliver of the anti-intellectual’s uncertainty—to wonder helplessly if one has in fact accomplished anything at all. I think, therefore I worry that thinking is illusory.
In “Chronovisor,” we eventually come to see some of the images that the device has supposedly recorded—and then we wonder if we are watching a reel of Béatrice’s hallucinations, and then we wonder if the existence of a reel of Béatrice’s hallucinations proves that the chronovisor is real enough to have recorded them. The film is ingeniously ambiguous between these possibilities. But, whether Ernetti’s opus is a momentous innovation or a cheap hoax, whether Béatrice devolves into delusion or comes to see the truth, “Chronovisor” provides what the machine promises, what would be in equal measure harrowing and consoling, what will in any case remain elusive once we leave the cinema and return to the library: proof, for once, that the ghosts are real. ♦