By Frank Milligan
Chronovisor (Jack Auen & Kevin Walker)
American independent filmmaking duo Jack Auen and Kevin Walker make their remarkable feature debut with Chronovisor, a resolutely analogue yet wholly contemporary spin on the conspiracy thriller. Dubbed by the pair as an ‘academic noir’, it’s a film whose minimalist formal approach belies a heady, labyrinthine narrative that more than earns its allusions to the likes of Eco and Borges. Late one night in the midst of study, Columbia neuroscience professor Béatrice (real-life academic Anne-Laure Sellier) stumbles upon the work of Pellegrino Ernetti, a Benedictine monk who claimed to have invented a machine capable of visualising the past. It’s her first step into a web of rumours, intrigue and esoterica that, if true, could mean the most consequential invention of the 20th century has been actively covered up by the Vatican.
What makes Chronovisor such an atypical work of conspiracy fiction is its ruthlessly methodical, borderline avant-garde emphasis on the process of research. Far from a globetrotting adventure, the film’s action is set largely in university libraries, and its visual content consists mostly of grainy 16mm footage of the texts and resources that Béatrice consults to glean anything she can about the titular time machine. Blending the duo’s background in experimental shorts with an earnest aspiration towards populist genre cinema – it plays somewhat like The Da Vinci Code by way of Michael Snow’s So Is This – the film devotes the majority of its runtime to an experiential study of the pleasures, puzzlements and perils of losing oneself in the written word.
Béatrice is fundamentally (though by no means exclusively) a cipher, her obsession with the mystery of this supposedly suppressed invention gradually becoming our own as fragments of on-screen text pile atop one another, a perfect visual expression of what it feels like to compulsively scan a book for what you want to see. That the narrative is experienced at an agonising spatiotemporal remove – through second-hand reportage in dusty books, obscure magazines, crackly tape recordings and video footage – makes that obsession feel all the more palpable. Auen, Walker and cinematographer Leo Zhang frame this material in the soft, reverential glow of banker’s lamps, and the physical texture of the pages Béatrice leafs through feels every bit as important as the text contained within them.
The film’s meticulously controlled palette finally expands when (spoilers ahead) the professor ventures outside the cloistered halls of New York academia on a tip that she might actually be able to experience the Chronovisor for herself. Here, it enters its hallucinatory coda, a hypnotically terrifying stretch of experimental animation and recursive memory that’s sure to stand as one of the most aesthetically audacious sequences of the year. As past is made present and present is made past, Béatrice and the viewer find their research rewarded in a strange loop of audiovisual abstraction, religious ecstasy and existential horror.
At Night (Beatrice Gibson)
We find another director in first-time feature mode with Beatrice Gibson’s At Night. Unlike Auen and Walker, Gibson is a well-established figure on the experimental circuit, and this feminist nocturne brings a newly oneiric quality to her practice. The director plays a fictionalised version of herself, Bea, who is making a film in Paris, lonely and distanced from her family in the UK. Bea wants to get in touch with former (real-life) collaborator Didi, a single Black mother living in government accommodation, but it’s made clear that their relationship has been complicated by the stark differences in material conditions that shape their experiences of womanhood. Alongside a poet, a former sex worker, a psychologist and a performance artist, the women navigate encounters with one another and the city at large throughout the course of a single night.
Shot on 16mm by longtime collaborator Ben Rivers, the film is composed with a keen eye for the hum of fluorescent lights that envelops Paris’ lonely flâneuses, and the low-rumbling chorus of buses and metro lines that soundtracks their drifting is mesmerising in its aural richness. There’s more than a touch of Akerman to its juxtaposition of urban vignettes with the disembodied voice of a filmmaker trying to call home, and Gibson mines this studied melancholy to great effect. But beyond this, At Night is focussed on how the liminality of the nocturnal can facilitate a space for contemplation, self-reflection, and dialogue. That sense of liminality extends to its form, which operates in a fragile mode between fiction, documentary, autobiography and collective performance. A gerund-intensive passage from Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, which serves as an epigraph, illuminates Gibson’s emphasis on process and incompleteness – the film is a kind of unresolved inquiry, offering a forum for a multitude of female subjectivities without presuming to be able to cohesively synthesise them.
At the centre of the film is an extended conversation between its six central collaborators. For around ten minutes, they engage in a dense yet casual and good-humoured discussion of motherhood, sexuality, the family, reproductive health, and the ways in which complex dynamics of race and class bear on their specific relationships to each. In a single take, Gibson’s gently searching camera pays as much attention to the act of listening as it does to those speaking, refusing to let any one perspective serve as a definitive thesis statement. It’s a delicate, involved and involving articulation of many of the film’s open-ended, often irreconcilable questions, but At Night has perhaps even more to say when it suggests its ideas experientially – the textures of Gibson’s filmmaking speak louder than any words can.
Dao (Alain Gomis)
The border between fact and fiction is equally porous in Alain Gomis’ gargantuan new feature Dao, which likewise blends narrative and documentary while emphasising the importance of collective participation to the creative process over the course of its 185-minute runtime. Drifting gracefully between a wedding in rural France and a traditional funeral ceremony held in Guinea-Bissau a year earlier, the film sketches out a complex, sinuous tapestry of familial history, softly centred around the stoic presence of Gloria (Katy Correa), mother of the bride and daughter of the deceased. Interspersed with these strands are interviews and workshops with the cast members (a blend of professional and non-professional actors, many of them Gomis’ own family members), as they shed light on their upbringings, the rehearsal process, and what they hope to achieve by participating in the film’s production.
Like Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, another highlight of the festival, the film uses its epic length not to expand the scope of its narrative so much as to fine-tune its granular exploration of the coexisting, often contradictory emotional details that populate its participants’ every interaction. It’s a work rich with insights into the importance of ritual and ceremony, as well as the differing ways these customs are both practised and perceived across generations and geographies. Hovering over and around all of this are weighty thematic concerns – Gomis is extraordinarily sensitive to the histories of extraction, enslavement, displacement and emigration that inform the geographically fragmented family tree his camera traces. But Dao’s primary focus is squarely on the here and now, and, crucially, these histories are treated as part of the fabric of everyday life for its characters.
If the title’s reference to Chinese philosophy implies an interconnectedness between all things, it’s manifested most firmly in the film’s fluid, kinetic editing, which subtly suggests the circularity and coexistence of life, death, grief and joy across time and space. Mutual echoes of each gathering resound throughout: singing, dancing, drinking, crying, fighting, laughing, singing again. Gomis’ deft fusion of discursive modes complicates the notion of performance and further deepens the narrative’s emotional resonance – inspired by the director’s own encounters with the two kinds of ceremony depicted, there’s a feeling that these gatherings are as much re-enactments as devised scenarios. In this way, Dao is above all else about experience, and its most profound pleasures come from basking in the resplendent simultaneity of so many interdependent lives.