Going to Movies to Read Books

What if you could photograph the past? That's the vertiginous premise of Jack Auen and Kevin Walker's Chronovisor, a singular spellbinder turning the act of research into a riveting noir conspiracy. A Columbia scholar (Anne-Laure Sellier) stumbles upon the story of a Benedictine monk who claimed to have invented a device capable of displaying any historical moment on a TV screen—including the crucifixion of Christ. In close-ups of archival texts, with key passages highlighted or translated via floating text, this hypnotic 16mm discovery argues that the most radical act in our digital consolidation age might be the patient, physical work of reading. Or, what if structural filmmaker Michael Snow made The Da Vinci Code?

Brydie O'Connor's Barbara Forever is a lovingly crafted tribute to lesbian avant-garde film pioneer Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), a vital record of a life lived in fearless defiance of erasure. Constructed from Hammer's vast personal archive and even narrated by her (using audio she'd recorded throughout her life), the film captures the tactile eroticism and curiosity of her early work to her layered experiments with optical printing, to her late-in-life documentation of her battle with ovarian cancer. "Touching another woman’s body, it changed my life. It had to be shown," Hammer explains in this poignant and illuminating celebration.

Jack White played on The Go's 1999 debut, yet their sophomore album "Free Electricity" circulated for 25 years as a bootleg for Detroit rock obsessives. Maybe it was the label expecting the more digestible garage flavors that moved units, or the band punished for trying to sneak their version past, but it's hard to understand today why this live-wire squall of MC5-style overdrive, Stooges-y swagger, and lysergic haze was rejected back in 2001. Heavily influenced by the cosmic free-jazz improvisations of Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra, perhaps this exciting long-lost record simply needed time to catch up and normalize its chaos.

Two Questions for Vaishali Sinha. The Brooklyn-based filmmaker's urgent yet gentle-humored new documentary Give it a Shot, about the push to launch the first reversible male contraceptive, premieres today in NYC (with Q&As all week).

How do you get people, especially trial subjects, to speak so candidly? I happily tell everyone that talking about sex is the easiest thing to do. You'd be surprised how much people will open up and allow a peek into their personal lives. I want people to imagine a future in which male birth control is possible. It would be great if we can actually talk about it in a way that's not just simply funny, but can actually exist. Because I do think it's coming down the pipeline.

How did my consulting help you? I remember something you said that I still carry with me: your film doesn't necessarily have to take the mainstream major festival path, and that's not something to be disappointed by. Your champions could be elsewhere—women's film festivals, science film festivals, South Asian film festivals. And truly, that is what has happened. These smaller fests with incredible concentrated audiences have been our cheerleaders. So whenever we get the occasional rejection, I think, "Aaron said, don't be disheartened."