Chronicle

Were it not for the changing lighting, one would be forgiven for thinking accomplished cinematographer Martin Kollar’s second film had been shot simultaneously, from as many cameras as there are carefully arranged shots:a kind of cinematic snapshot of a planet and what is left of a society, struggling with ordinary or inexplicable events, small and large impending catastrophes. It is as if Kollar has involved a whole country, its people and animals, the landscape and even atmospheric phenomena, in an inexplicable ritual or collective performance, where people are almost superfluous silent extras, and events and objects speak to each other behind our backs. Here is a world dominated by accidents and coincidences, signs that are only apparently incoherent and that could hide the secret of everything or perhaps nothing at all. It is no coincidence that Chronicle portrays numerous numb and slumbering individuals: the film is their collective dream, a mysterious combination of revelatory moments from which any reductive logical link between the parts has disappeared.

Sergio Fant

Chronicle, 2025
5 October, 2016