"The Clock (2010), an ode to time and cinema, comprises thousands of fragments from a range of films that create a 24-hour...video. The Clock tells the accurate time at any given moment, and wherever it is screened it is synchronized to the local time zone, so that it is literally a working time piece."
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| Four shots from the movie. There are NOT multiple screens simultaneously, and the movie is not all close-ups of clock faces. It's much more complex and amazing. |
Each clip includes a clock, watch, or someone mentioning the time. Each instance of the time matches the current time I'm watching the film. Each clip is long enough to put the instance of the time in context, but rarely with any context for the plot of the movie from which it is taken.
Sometimes the time in the scene is the subject of the scene: "What time is it?" or "I'm going to be late!" and so on. Other times, there's merely a clock in the background of the shot.
What elevates this project from antiseptic obsessive-compulsive symptom to art is HOW the clips interact with each other. It's not merely the appropriate scenes edited in order. Marclay made choices:
- To smooth the transitions between scenes, the background "soundscape" and/or incidental music from one scene often continues after the visual ends. Sometimes it's just the street sounds, birds chirping, or, appropriately, a clock ticking.
- Characters from different clips will seem to be joined together: Johnny Depp talks to someone offscreen. We cut to Vivien Leigh demurely smiling back at him. We cut again to a dog, probably from Depp's original scene, and back to Depp again.
- An bell will ring in one movie, and a character will pop out of bed in another movie.
- A scene will begin, then three unrelated clips will play, then we'll return to the original scene, a little later on, as if the original scene were taking place concurrently with the three imbetween. This is a editing technique called "parallel action" which we take for granted until clips gathered from the whole universe of cinema are edited together.
- Because it's assembled from nearly a century of filmmaking (from Buster Keaton to Jason Statham, I swear to God) the quality of the visuals varies wildly from scene to scene, but we're so hard-wired to trust the editor, it hardly matters.
Marclay's chosen one piece of the moving picture storytelling universe and discarded everything else. This eliminates all plot from the movie, but he could have accomplished the same thing by making a 24-hour-long montage of people eating in the movies, or people climbing stairs, or cursing. That would accomplish the goal of observing the art of cinema detached from the story and stars and music itself. Marclay's goal is larger than that. In a strange way, removing the plot and focusing on time reveals the plot of life as it is: not the things we do, or the things which happen to us, but rather everything which happens in between. Time is passing by us and through us every moment of our lives, whether we are paying attention to it or not. This movie, by moving Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Close, and Michael J. Fox to the background and placing their wristwatches, Big Ben, and alarm clocks in the foreground, reminds us that everything we've accomplished, everything we hold dear, and all our favorite memories, all happened while time was passing.
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| It's truly weird to watch a movie where you don't have to check your watch to see what time it is. I knew I wanted to watch until 11am that day. I simply had to wait until the movie WAS 11:00am. |
This art can be easily sustained for a few minutes: the YouTube is full of "supercuts". THE CLOCK lasts for 24 hours. My Stub Hubby Grade: A-plus.
It's playing all day every day at the MFA through New Year's Eve. I strongly recommend checking it out for an hour or two. I have seen 10:55 through 11:35 on one occasion, and 10:20 through 10:55am the next time.
RELATED: Jennifer Bruni on THE CLOCK
VIDEO: BBC feature on THE CLOCK [seven minutes]
