On some level, it always felt slightly embarrassing to me that one of the “films” that felt most unattainable—a genuine holy grail of cinema to me alongside much rarer experiences like Eduardo de Gregorio’s Aspern (only available on a 35mm print) and a proper, uncropped viewing of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster—was Christian Marclay’s single-channel video installation The Clock, which premiered in 2010 at the White Cube gallery in London. The premise sounded both amazing and, viewed from a more ungenerous perspective, something of a stunt: a full 24-hour behemoth, comprised solely of clips from films and television shows that, in some form or another, features the time, either visually in the form of an actual clock or aurally by someone saying the time aloud. By playing the video continuously, even outside of regular museum hours, The Clock is intended to be perfectly synchronized with the actual time according to the time zone of the museum where it is being exhibited.
I don’t remember exactly when I first heard of The Clock, but I’m fairly certain it was early in my cinephilia: it was probably before the first time I heard of Vincente Minnelli’s 1945 romantic masterpiece of the same name, and from the logline alone I found it immensely intriguing, the kind of ludicrously airtight concept that I kept in mind and instinctively lumped in together with my growing awareness of genuine avant-garde classics like Wavelength, “(nostalgia),” and “Mothlight.” But while I’ve been able to see each of those multiple times including (and especially) at home, allowing me to examine individual moments and marvel anew at the intricacies with which they expounded on their premises, no such opportunity exists for The Clock; countless thousands of films aren’t available even on the farthest reaches of the Internet, but the perverse scale of this piece made it seem inevitable that, like the 857-hour Logistics, it simply had to be accessible for viewing somehow.
It’s thus probably not an exaggeration to say that I’ve been waiting for LACMA’s new exhibition of The Clock for a full decade, and certainly with heightened need since 2017, when both J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum placed it on their lists of the 25 best films of the 21st century thus far; compounding the interest was Hoberman’s choice to place it as the sole #1, with no ranking afforded to the other films, and Rosenbaum having written about all of his films *except* The Clock. I knew that LACMA had last exhibited it in 2015, three years before I moved to Los Angeles, and waited through the immediate post-pandemic era with nothing to show for it. Such was my fermenting obsession that I even contemplated traveling to New York for the second time in three months to see it at last year’s MoMA exhibition; I abstained, and thus was free to buy tickets for the July 25 opening night 24-hour presentation (one of two nights across the month-long run that the installation was available to watch from 7 PM onwards) to ensure I’d have a backup date on the closing night if needed. After two hours of waiting—the screening space at LACMA holds about 60 people on three-person couches, plus 40 people sitting or standing at the back and sides—I was finally free to bask.
I don’t know anyone personally who has experienced every second of The Clock, and the unexpectedly delayed entry allowed me to let go of any ludicrous hope of doing so; nevertheless, I was able to watch over nine hours: 9:07 PM-12:07 AM, 2:39 AM-4:40 AM, 4:52 AM-8:07 AM on the first night, plus an additional visit on August 11 for 11:53 AM-12:25 PM. Actively during the first segment and almost involuntarily for the rest, I found myself actively trying to remember the numerous little details and thoughts that arose while viewing and quickly wrote them down in my Notes app as soon as I exited the room. From these fragments, this piece is an attempt to piece together a half-formed thesis on what exactly makes The Clock tick.
The first and most silly thing first: by my own vague definition, and in contradiction of Wikipedia’s classification, The Clock is not actually a film. This may seem hypocritical coming from someone who stubbornly holds that Twin Peaks: The Return indeed operates as a single 18-hour film, but it makes sense to me: by dint of its concept, The Clock has no definable starting or ending point, entirely dependent on when the viewer enters or exits the screening space. Technically speaking, without these specific boundaries, it has no fixed runtime, setting it even further from the realm of film qua film than the Marciano Art Foundation’s fantastic nine-film Bruce Conner exhibition earlier this year, or the few moments of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s two-channel installation “For Bruce” that I caught three years ago at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Another, much more significant distinction: just as Wavelength is not merely a single zoom across an apartment, but rather hundreds of micro-zooms interrupted by hellish color filters, abrasive sound design, and the skeleton of a mystery, The Clock is not, as I assumed, 1,440 clips, each lasting a minute, or even a larger agglomeration of excerpts that still nevertheless consistently feature an image of a clock or someone reciting the time. Instead, it is both something less and infinitely more: a grand experiment in match-cutting and narrative that uses its concept as both animating principle and cover for an endless parade of plot threads and tantalizing connections.
Like the best films, The Clock offers an infinite number of experiences based on the viewer’s vantage point: here, perhaps the key is whether one recognizes the film and/or actor on screen, and the attendant personal and cultural associations that result from that encounter. I was able to recognize somewhere in the neighborhood of half of the clips, but while it’s tempting to align this with feature-length essays like Los Angeles Plays Itself, such a specifically analytical work is emphatically not in the cards here. Indeed, I can certainly see people objecting to the relative uniformity of display here: all of the clips here are formatted to flat widescreen, cropping Academy ratio and CinemaScope alike, and no subtitles are provided for non-English films. (I don’t believe that any dialogue specifically giving the time was relayed in those latter clips, though I can’t rule it out.) That’s not to say that the disjunctions between each clip are not important to Marclay: shifts from color to black-and-white and vice versa are the rule rather than the exception, and the wildly varying condition of the clips provokes the same bewilderment of virtually every compilation film before Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven: was there ever really a time where, say, Casino Royale was in worse shape on home video than The Spirit of the Beehive?
The Clock‘s central preoccupation, aside from *maybe* time, is movement and action, whether through repetition or continuity editing, typically bolstered by sound bridges; in this respect, it largely resembles Morgan Fisher’s excellent short “( )” and Frank Beauvais’s embarrassingly relatable Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream. This quickly became apparent to me during the first hour of the first segment: the virtuoso treatment of the climax of Otto Preminger’s Laura, as it starts from when a shotgun is hid inside an upright clock and continually returns to the film over a period of about ten minutes, inexorably moving forward until the violent resolution. I couldn’t speak to whether this actually represents how far forward the clock in the film moves, but it serves as both a coherent narrative strand in itself and one that reflects upon the other clips surrounding it. Time and again, a clip will end with someone exiting a doorway and a different person in a different film decades later will emerge from another, or the other way around, and Marclay has just as much fun with subverting the viewer’s expectations: he shows, for instance, Doc Brown dangling from the clock tower in Back to the Future, but declines to depict when the bolt of lightning actually strikes.
Such a dedication to action and excitement not terribly far removed from Hollywood cinema helped reinforce another thing that The Clock is not: slow cinema. While What Time Is It There? does make a blessed appearance, to me the essence of what might be called slow cinema rests in the inability to perceive the precise passage of time: a long take or extended sequence in which one does not know exactly how much time has passed feels far afield from what, at least on a surface level, represents a fairly ironclad reminder in most moments of how much time has actually passed since the last time one consciously checked. Most, but crucially not all: at least one of my segment boundaries is inexact, as I believe a large portion of the clips included to fill out the 24 hours do not actually feature a clock in them at all; I am willing to believe that Marclay has a clip for every minute, but am even more certain that he slotted in other resonant images and moments with little to no resonance: I spotted what looked like a shot of a figure shrouded in fog from Metropolis in the first segment, and Laurence Olivier’s Yorick speech from his adaptation of Hamlet played in the final section, both featuring what seemed like no relationship to the time of day at all.
Such apparent flagrant violations of The Clock‘s concept also crop up in clips that do feature clocks. No regard is given to the seconds, and clips of the minute hand or segment of a non-face clock flipping over to the next minute happen well into the minute in question. Sometimes there are ersatz clocks: in the second clip I saw, Charles Bronson is looking at a photograph that contains a clock far in the background, only to look at his own, “accurate” clock; in others, someone changes the time from what is already shown, either to correct or deliberately in error, or there is a radio which has a face that looks a lot like a clock. There are other clocks too, after a fashion—two separate versions of The Pit and the Pendulum—though it’s striking to think that The Clock was released at exactly a moment right before smartphones, and how difficult it would be to make a version heavily featuring films from the past decade and a half with the near-total demise of alarm clocks.
While The Clock is a far more instinctually exciting experience than any extraordinarily long film I can think of—with the probable exception of Mariano Llinás’s La Flor, which in many ways shares the same playful spirit—that does not mean it doesn’t share slow cinema’s capacity for providing the viewer room to dream: the hangout sensations of Out 1; the reminders of time passing and its correspondence to deliberate idleness engendered by, say, Wang Bing’s 15 Hours, Kevin Jerome Everson’s Park Lanes, and C. W. Winter and Anders Edström’s The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin); the puckish conceptual rigor of Johann Lurf’s compilation film ★. Based on when I entered, I was also inclined to think of two British icons that emerged as quasi-protagonists: Big Ben, likely the most famous clock in the world, and James Bond, by virtue of his notable watch sponsorships from Rolex and Omega, among others. (Joan Crawford inexplicably featured in many moments during this stretch as well.) Certain linkages are more obvious: Orson Welles’s The Trial appearing in close succession to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, though I couldn’t determine how purposeful placing a scene from Vanilla Sky that features a Godard poster in the background close to Every Man for Himself was. (I was also very glad to see maybe the greatest filmmaker on time, Wong Kar-wai, got a few clips in the segments I saw, including one of the time turnovers in Chungking Express.)
That room to dream also made me reflect on the undercurrents of Marclay’s concept: the need to take that a clock has appeared or will be appearing on faith, the willingness to believe that it’s the correct side of AM/PM, even the confidence that there hasn’t been any slight lag or playback issue that has caused The Clock to come slightly off. There are also the more obvious ideas that come as a result of my own relatively developed knowledge of the artifice of film: that in any given moment on the one hand the time on the clock was likely not actually accurate to when the scene was being shot; that on the other the clock may have been included in the shot accidentally, and thus the time was accurate to when the scene was being shot but not to the diegetic time. Other diametrically opposed conventions are less existential but nevertheless interesting: in some of the films, a character will look down at their watch and look up again without a close-up to let the viewer know what time they saw, while in others there will be a close-up, frequently a freeze-frame to accommodate the filming technology of the time. And perhaps most importantly to The Clock‘s project of a smooth portrayal of time as a concept rather than an intrinsically meaningful thing: midnight isn’t really treated any differently. Big Ben does blow up courtesy of V for Vendetta, but no New Year’s celebrations are seen, and the installation moves on as swiftly as ever; a similar thing occurs with noon, where the buildup to shootouts from High Noon and The Quick and the Dead are shown without any of the actual gunfire. (On another note, I was glad to see two clips from 24: the first, of Kim and her friend driving to the furniture store in the first episode, concluded my first segment, while I believe there was also one from the first season where Nina faked her death; in the latter, I heard one of the signature beeps, but the digital clock did not pop up in either.)
I can’t pretend that all of these observations are anywhere as close to organized as I was hoping, but I do hope they provide some sense of the dizzying experience that The Clock provides. Far from the memento mori that Marclay described as the key to his museum piece—even in the late night segments that, for the first time I saw, use cross-fades to induce a slightly hallucinatory effect with heavy use of the dream sequences in Vertigo—it strikes me as a work bursting with life, one where context is largely stripped from its film and television clips in order to provide a blank slate off of which viewers can read any meaning into them that they want, and in which time provides a point of focus from which all other actions flower. To take the episode title of one of the most prominent sequences in the last segment I saw: I couldn’t have been more happy to finally find Time Enough at Last to begin to appreciate this impossibly staggering yet deft playground.
Taipei Mansions 