The Brooklyn Rail

At 10:04 p.m. in 1955, lightning strikes a courthouse clock tower in the small, fictional California town of Hill Valley, sending Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) forward thirty years to the “present day.” At precisely the same minute and hour in 2012, the author Ben Lerner, seated in a theater at Lincoln Center, saw a clip of that very Back to the Future (1985) scene, this time embedded in Christian Marclay’s The Clock. Lerner’s encounter with his favorite childhood movie, mediated by this epic film collage, opened a hinge that culminated two years later in the poet’s non-sequential, meta-fictional memoir titled 10:04. This book, much like The Clock, lays bare the inherent contingency of the present by continuously recontextualizing past events and forcing us to reconsider their meaning in the now.

The Clock, as Marclay describes it, is a memento mori, a device designed to illuminate the fragility, and hence uncertainty of life by pointing to the most universal of fates. Instead of a skull and bones, the artist unearthed clips of movie stars, some dead and others younger than they are now. He asks: if grappling with mortality necessitates the ability to cut through the distractions of earthly life, then how can one be present while constantly looking at the time? Yes, the viewer is certainly aware of the here and now with the tick tock of the titular clock, but that does not mean that he or she is consciously present for it. In this way, Marclay points to a core problem of cinema and medium specificity. As even the most self-reflexive directors Dziga Vertov and Jean-Luc Godard have demonstrated, self-aware film-watching is only ever fleeting—since the cinematic narrative can and will reabsorb the viewer in its immersive processes.

By never uncoupling itself from the endless task of measuring the passing seconds, The Clock thwarts the natural ability of film to suspend time by stretching or truncating its perceived duration. Instead, Marclay builds a flickering bridge that connects real and diegetic time. Here, 10:00 p.m. is the hour of calm, interrupted. Children—well, most of them—are in bed. Teenagers are staying out past their curfew. The pace slows, the lighting dims. It is a transitional time rife with card playing, drug dealing, drinking, carousing, and other illicit activities that thrive in the shadows. Because each inserted clip was originally shot over multiple takes, the time stamps and temporal referents it registers were likely faked to convincingly fabricate the hour depicted onscreen. Thus, any notion of the present—or presentness—is complicated by the fact that we are filmically immersed in the past, notwithstanding the time represented on the instruments invented to “keep” it.

In medieval times, the danse macabre of the living and the dead was a powerful memento mori, for biological death does not spare the virtuous or the celebrated. What of the bodies we see onscreen, i.e., celebrities, in The Clock reduced to light projections? The ageing process witnessed in Marclay’s montage is by and large transcendent, a reality countered by the films of Richard Linklater, for whom the physical maturation of his actors is a primary material sculpted over three decades in the Before trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013), or over twelve years in one feature film (Boyhood [2014]). Rather, The Clock embalms iconic “stars” and minor actors alike in digitized celluloid. Our fond recognition of them in the films that made a mark (like Back to the Future in Lerner’s case) reminds us that we inevitably view our present through that foggy lens of an irretrievable past, known as nostalgia.

Again and again, The Clock asks us if the time spent watching it has been invested judiciously, in anticipation of its ultimate lesson—the transience of life. Beginning at around 10:59 p.m. and into the twenty-third hour, Rex Harrison playing the role of Cecil Fox in 1967 film The Honey Pot flips an hourglass siphoning grains of gold. He muses that his membership among the elite had given him a greater appreciation of time, saying “We special ones, we slow down for the good. We sip it second by second like great wine. We speed up the bad.” As we learn in the film from which this scene was taken, the conceit of the hourglass, like the penniless Cecil merely pretending to be rich—is in fact a deceit—a decoy filled with pyrite, or “fool’s gold.” In his attempt to take a fortune with him after death by swallowing the gold dust, Cecil is left with nothing. His fate is a reminder that like time itself, the value of a person cannot be weighed against the perceived consequentiality of material goods. Only upon leaving the dark screening room, do we finally realize that we—the viewers—have been the embodied clocks this whole time, measuring its ravages in our mortal selves.