Guillermo Del Toro's "Cronos": The Birth of Clocks

The cinephile is a fetishist: being the prey of a spell is not enough for him. He still needs to understand the why and the how, the origin and the matrix. The youth of a filmmaker thus offers a precious laboratory in which to sequence the DNA of his art, to glean its salient features, even if only in the draft stage. Especially if we think with Truffaut that a filmmaker is entirely contained in his first film. Guillermo Del Toro would not say otherwise. His first opus, Cronos (1993), which is being released for the first time on French screens (having until now only benefited from a video release), is a perfect illustration of this. A blue palette, a sense of the baroque, cleverly distilled motifs (the monster, the vampire, insects, childhood, mourning, etc.), are enough to place aficionados of the master of Mexican fantasy on familiar ground. The big issue of Cronos, as you might expect, is the question of time. And it is ultimately logical that the film opens with a narrative in ellipses that spans four centuries in just a few minutes.

It all begins with a magic box, a little devil's machine, a sort of all-gold clockwork mechanism in the shape of an insect, which a 16th century alchemist invented in Mexico in order to access eternal life.