Marclay's Clock

Christian Marclay’s Clock makes us live aware of every minute of each hour minute by minute with a shot or a short sequence of shots culled from a vast array of films, old and new, mostly American.  It was first exhibited at Paul Cooper Gallery in Chelsea back in February 2011.  Last week I sat through two and a half hours of its 24-hour loop at MoMA from 9:35 to 12:05. To say it was an enthralling experience is understating it.

The film is composed of at least 1440 pieces of film, if we count one shot a minute, each with a timepiece of one sort or another -- a clock or a watch, or else, spoken words saying the time; but actually it contains at least twice that number in all because there are shots without any timepiece, too.  The sheer task of
compiling and splicing them is a heroic act of patience.  But, above all, the continuity that accomplishes a semblance of narrative is truly breathtaking.  For example, a woman knocks at an apartment door; the cut shows the interior and a man opening it but this is from another film.  Similarly, a man starts a car, checks his watch, and then the next shot shows another car speeding on a highway with a different character at the wheel from another film.  A woman pours tea but another woman drinks it in different setting of another shot.  Different segments from one film are at times distributed over a length of passing time, some without a time piece in it, but always synchronous with the real time regardless. 

Ideally, one should view it in its entirety, all day and all night, or at best, say, from 5:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. continuously.  Otherwise, one should catch in two to three hour segments several times to cover as much of the whole film.  A DVD version of the film would be impractical without a means of synchronizing it with real time. But a catalogue raisonnée listing all the filmic sources minute by minute would be useful for film buffs, for whom the work is an inexhaustible source of pleasure. Even within my two-and-a-half hour of viewing, I recognized, without being able to identify immediately, numerous films from my stock of knowledge.  It was a tremendous pleasure to encounter familiar faces of actors from the past, near and remote, even if, again, I was unable to quickly remember their names since the shots are flashed only instantaneously and go fast. 

In the course of two-and-a half hours we are also made aware of the situations when we are alert to the elapsing time; awakening in the morning or from a nap, waking someone up, going to work or school, waiting for and catching a bus or train, a rendezvous of all kinds -- an appointment, a date, a tryst, a conference, a meeting, and any consorted action requiring the watches to be synchronized, completion of a task, looking up a large clock in a public place, like the Big Ben, and later in the day, getting up to start cooking dinner, checking on the return of a family member, remembering a TV program to watch, the movie showtime, or a curtain time at a theater, preparing to hit the sack, and waking up in the middle of night.  Conversely, we are reminded of those instances when we forget the passing of time as when we are deeply engaged in work, play, reading, or daydreaming. 

Daydreaming, indeed, quite aptly describes the experience of watching Christian Marclay’s cinematic masterpiece, Clock.