As a director, Terrence Malick has plenty of key identifiers and obsessions – metaphysical ruminations on nature, history, and personal relationships. Now he’s acting as executive producer on The Book Of Vision, the directorial debut of Italian filmmaker Carlo S. Hintermann, a first feature that looks to be of a piece with Malick’s work. It stars Lotte Verbeek as promising young doctor Eva, and Charles Dance as 18th-century Prussian physician Johan Anmuth – their disparate lives bound by the Book Of Vision, a manuscript written by Anmuth that contains the stories of hundreds of his patients, which Eva becomes drawn to as she studies the history of medicine at an isolated university. Also among the cast are Sverrir Gudnason, Isolda Dychauk and Filippo Nigro. Watch the mesmeric first trailer here.
And here’s an accompanying artwork for the film by Lorenzo Ceccotti.
“The possibility of traveling through time has always fascinated me and it may be why I fell in love with cinema,” explains director Hintermann. “It allows us to leap into different dimensions of time and space. In The Book of Vision, the time travel is a source of strength, both visually and narratively. I grew up with fantasy films of the ‘80s and ‘90s, such as The Goonies, Labyrinth, The Neverending Story and Back To The Future. The mechanism in these films is almost always the same: a door is opened onto an unexpected fantastic dimension. From a visual point of view, both the contemporary part and the past always take into account this ‘door’: every place, every object, every action has an ambiguous value, poised between two dimensions.”
The Book Of Vision is set to open the 35th Venice International Film Critic’s Week on 3 September, with further release details yet to be confirmed.