“The Clock,” the addictive movie masterpiece by the Swiss creator Christian Marclay, has been showing continually astatine MOMA since November, and immoderate of america person go transfixed Clockwatchers, returning week aft week to witnesser arsenic galore hours of it arsenic we can. Now, with the tally ending connected May 11th, the thought of a Clockless beingness is similar losing a favourite mechanical ticker from our wrist, oregon similar losing way of clip itself.
As my workfellow Daniel Zalewski documented much than a decennary ago, successful his Profile of the artist, “The Clock” is arsenic elemental successful premise arsenic it is sublime successful scale. From a century’s worthy of movies and television, Marclay and a unit of diligent assistants tracked down moments with timepieces showing (or characters mentioning) the clip of day. Then Marclay edited this reservoir—more than 10 1000 clips logging each (or precise astir all) of the fourteen 100 and forty minutes of the day—into a movie that unfolds successful cleanable synchrony with clip itself, projected successful a perpetual twenty-four-hour cycle. It is some a cinematic collage and a moving clock, of a kind, displaying the existent time, time and night, whether oregon not the depository is open.
To picture the enactment successful this mode is to marque it dependable obsessive but not needfully interesting—something that, similar truthful overmuch video art, 1 mightiness driblet successful connected for a drowsy fewer minutes and past abandon. Yet the azygous astir bonzer happening astir the agelong full is that, autarkic of its sources, it is truthful compelling. People get expecting to sample, say, fractional an hr and extremity up sitting for hours. And it’s not conscionable a fistful of avant-garde completists who get sucked in: erstwhile the depository stayed unfastened each night, offering the uncommon accidental to spot the portion successful its entirety, including the usually hidden nocturnal and early-morning hours, tickets for late-night admittance were truthful successful request that radical started lining up astatine five-thirty successful the greeting (for an eight-thirty sign-up). Those of america who rushed implicit astatine what had seemed the impossibly aboriginal hr of 7 went location disappointed.
At 1 level, the movie offers a comic commentary connected the repetition of definite melodramatic contrivances down the years. Marclay himself confided arsenic overmuch to Zalewski: “You go alert of however movie is constructed—of these devices and tropes they perpetually use. Like, if idiosyncratic turns abruptly, you expect idiosyncratic other to beryllium successful the adjacent cut. An histrion looks down astatine his ticker and, suddenly, you person a closeup of the watch.” One is reminded that moviemaking clusters its effects familiarly and predictably astir cardinal hours: Noon is, of course, the clip of “High Noon,” erstwhile weapon duels are fought, and besides often erstwhile banks are robbed and bombs spell off.
Yet what makes “The Clock” specified an astonishing enactment of creation is the inventive subtlety with which the aged clips are woven together. As with the birds successful Audubon’s ornithological books, the elemental additive strength is compelling, arsenic infinitesimal piles upon minute. The astir unremarkable appearances of time—the histrion staring astatine his watch—can beryllium entrancing erstwhile catalogued. Witnessing clip walk tin beryllium amusive successful itself, whether seen connected the look of Big Ben—whose galore appearances, often successful aboriginal Hitchcockian black-and-white, marque it 1 of the heroes of the whole—or heard successful a portion of dialog (“Jesus! It’s eight-fifteen! We amended get going”). The conventionally melodramatic moments of the day, noon and midnight, are interwoven with the mute, inglorious ones—two-thirty-one, eleven-thirty-two—all permanently mucilaged together.
While staying existent to his relentless minute-by-minute mission, Marclay puts unneurotic small suites of overlapping action, 10 oregon truthful minutes long. Themes and figures return. In the half-hour aft 7:35 P.M., we witnesser 3 James Bonds (Sean Connery, Daniel Craig, and Roger Moore) each dealing astatine dusk with antithetic Bondian dilemmas: Connery successful “Dr. No,” brooding successful his Jamaica edifice room; Craig successful “Casino Royale,” trying connected a caller tuxedo earlier the night’s crippled of poker; and Moore successful “Moonraker,” throwing an absurdly kung-fu-ing Asian villain retired of the solid beforehand of the large timepiece connected the Piazza San Marco successful Venice—a neat clustering of Bond styles, from consecutive to somewhat campy to hyper-campy. Not agelong aft 9 successful the morning, we get Cary Grant, successful the abstraction of a mates of minutes, some being ingratiatingly seductive connected the phone, with Ingrid Bergman successful “Indiscreet,” and, disguised arsenic a bellboy, getting disconnected the greeting bid successful “North by Northwest.”
Other moments physique quietly: successful aggregate snippets from betwixt 9 successful the greeting and noon, Susan Hayward, successful “I Want To Live!,” awaits the state enclosure and is yet executed. Still others are bully in-jokes to anyone with a sensation for movies: astatine 9:13 A.M., there’s an unusually agelong country of a shy post-wedding meal successful New York betwixt Judy Garland and Robert Walker, which comes from Vincente Minneli’s beauteous 1945 romance, titled, well, “The Clock.”
A fewer acquainted friends support coming backmost from the cinematic past: Steve Martin and John Candy, successful “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” instrumentality regularly, since theirs is simply a satellite made to the clock, with location and Thanksgiving looming. Others are surprising: Johnny Cash, of each people, appears respective times as, evidently, immoderate benignant of atrocious feline successful immoderate benignant of black-and-white movie noir, successful which radical support checking their watches and saying things like: “You didn’t adjacent look.” “I don’t person to look—I conscionable cheque my watch. It’s 7 thirty-five. At 7 thirty-five each morning, Mrs. Wilson comes out.” There’s nary authoritative published anatomy of “The Clock,” but enthusiasts person compiled inventories online, and a small digging reveals that the scenes travel from a 1961 movie called, irresistibly, “Five Minutes to Live.”
After galore visits, 1 starts to recognize that the crushed “The Clock” seems truthful arrestingly alive, successful ways that transcend in-jokes and familiarity, is that it casts its spell astatine another, much mysterious level, successful its implicit meditation connected the intersection of clip and communicative successful life. There is, yes, thing neat astir seeing Judy Garland and Roger Moore and Susan Hayward each inhabiting much oregon little the aforesaid abstraction during a dilatory crawl done the day. But, astatine the aforesaid time, determination is thing profound astir realizing that each these imagined people, antithetic arsenic they are, are impaled together, truthful to speak, connected a azygous moving hand—caught, arsenic overmuch arsenic we are, connected the aforesaid implacable vector.
The cardinal comment, perhaps, comes successful 1 infinitesimal from the Johnny Cash film, arsenic Cash sits gloomily successful the beforehand spot of a car with Vic Tayback Leonard, readying their disfigured caper. “You mean everybody astir present eats and sleeps by a clock?” the Cash quality inquires, with disgust. “Exactly,” Tayback replies, “some radical similar it that way.” “The aforesaid happening each day?” “That’s our full plan. Their regular routine, our split-second timing.” It is successful the play of regular routine, the relentless, unchanging drumbeat of time, and split-second timing, the abrupt magnifying solid of eventfulness laid implicit a peculiar moment, that the full finds its life.
This doubleness is the instauration of each drama. We admit that, possibly unconsciously, erstwhile we speech astir the request for a screenplay to person a ticking clock, or, much formally, astir the impulse to “preserve the unities,” the past Aristotelian tendency to marque fictive representations, successful a stylized way, conform to the arrow of clip that drives each beingness forward. The seismic, up-and-down exigencies of beingness dependable against the inheritance of a fixed, unchangeable ticking, and this is what gives play its pathos.
In “The Clock,” we are made recently and doubly alert of this truth, arsenic the stylized forms of clip are abruptly recast arsenic the implicit signifier of time. The small moments introduced into movies for storytelling effect are made taxable to the longer, impassive, unstoppable, all-day-long question of clip itself. Onto the melodramatic necessities of storytelling—“We amended aftermath up!” “Has determination been a telephone from the governor?” “What clip did you acceptable the fuse for?”—descends the slow, imponderable impassivity of 1 unchanging and stoically sympathetic trajectory. Judy Garland and Robert Walker person meal conscionable aft nine—when other could they person it?—as a climax to their story. But 9 o’clock passes, and they are near behind. The timepiece ticks connected indifferently, melodramatic necessity recedes, and clip resumes its reign. The waves emergence briefly, the water remains.
Time, arsenic Shakespeare pointed out, runs astatine antithetic paces astatine antithetic times for antithetic people. It is besides arsenic imperturbable, classical, and equipoised a unit successful beingness arsenic airy oregon sound. No enactment of creation engages some the jumpy relativity of our interior acquisition of clip and the implacable absolutism of its transition beyond america truthful engagingly arsenic “The Clock.” We signifier clip to our ain needs, but clip is inexorably shaping us. At a infinitesimal arsenic troubled arsenic this one, to flight from this clip into clip itself is someway salubrious. Even successful the worst of times, it seems, we cannot assistance but unrecorded by the clock. Time indispensable instrumentality its time. This elemental truth, close now, is someway soothing. ♦
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