Chronos

Originally filmed for the IMAX, Chronos is an immersive and mesmerising work. Rest assured the cinematography is of a suitably high calibre. Every screen shot is a gem; each camera still must be a beauty. The musical score is at once triumphal and ominous, and threads together the loose narrative which concerns the transience and futility of human activity as set against the monumentality of time.

With soundtrack replacing narration, the film attempts to transcend verbal language in its examination of universal themes. Chronos boasts of being the world's 'first non-verbal, non-fiction large format motion picture filmed in time-lapse photography'. With apparently no script, no characters and no plot, this is not a film to follow convention, nor an easy one to credit in words.

Its novel use of continual time-lapse photography is absorbing. In a matter of seconds the viewer is privy to months of activity in a streetscape or landscape. Sadly, some appeal has been lost in translation to the downsized small-screen format, but the film's strangely unreal filmic qualities render the armchair traveller both dazed and awestruck. [Yasmin Ali]