The Brooklyn Rail

By luck, the first time I saw The Clock, at Paula Cooper Gallery in 2011, it was very early in the show’s run and hadn’t yet gotten much attention. It took me a little while to see that it was unspooling in real time. The delight I experienced at the recognition is rare; I felt I had fallen into some wondrous secret rhythm of the visual world.

Part of the pleasure of viewing it in 2025 is teasing out the ways that The Clock is now additionally time-stamped. In 2011, it seemed plausibly comprehensive, or at least representative, in its sampling of popular filmmaking. It reached back to the medium’s birth and forward to the present. Now, it feels like a decidedly closed circle, its daylong loop shaped like a clock face, or an old-fashioned can of celluloid. It seems an artifact of a period when the media circus was just a little quieter, jump cuts slower, and the boundary between fact and fiction more secure. Of course, my temporal position has shifted too. Time does hurry us along, progressively.

That is not to say that The Clock’s fairly miraculous internal propulsion has stalled; its fluidity—its negotiation of arresting incident and tempering continuity—remains mesmerizing.

I expected my allotted late-morning hour to be on the quiet side, but the period between 11:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. is a steady crescendo of anxiety. Toward the end, there are several clips from caper films of men dangling perilously from the arms of huge clocktower clock faces, desperately attempting to slow time as noon and some (unseen) calamity approach. Soon, Leonardo DiCaprio, having won a card game, rushes to board the Titanic, its noon departure minutes away. Ultimately the footage builds to a kind of opera buffa of drum rolls and shoot-outs, culminating, inevitably, in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952). Fatefulness, it becomes inescapably clear in this hour, is a basic premise of Marclay’s project.

Perhaps needless to say, The Clock’s themes also include mortality. Funerals are plentiful. Along with the films sampled, we watch actors age. The pre-noon hour features younger and older versions of Charles Bronson and Richard Gere, and catches Gary Oldman as a slender, feral-looking Sid Vicious—an especially arresting turn if you’ve seen him in the current series Slow Horses. In addition to the many featured actors who’ve departed, recently or long since, there are some who have come under clouds since 2011, including Johnny Depp, shown repeatedly in the hours around 11:00 a.m., and Woody Allen, glimpsed quickly and looking characteristically—if now with new meaning—disheveled and stupefied with alarm.

Even when death and disgrace don’t shadow the screen, The Clock sustains unrelenting, simmering tension. We are continually counting down, the clock is always ticking, someone is always late, then too late. The need to get somewhere is often desperate, and impeded. Train stations and airports abound. On the other hand, there is plenty of comedy, not infrequently involving slyly dilatory women. Before lunch, there is little outright violence.

Marclay strikes a delicate balance between the breezy and the ponderous and occasionally allows actors to deliver provocative meditations on the wiliness of time. Adding my own, I’ll cite writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, who observed, in a memoir he titled Scraps, “My life, which does not need to think in order to continue, goes more quickly than I advance through the twists and turns of what I am writing about it,” causing “a daily increasing lag.” Similarly conflicting time-signatures structure Marclay’s project, and our experience of it. Like writing, attention and reflection are asynchronous with clock time. Watching The Clock, minutes seem alternately to slow and hasten. Similarly, the philosopher Stanley Cavell, in his memoir Little Did I Know, interleaved sequential reconstructions of his life with new reckonings required by the editorial process, producing a narrative with several temporal registers; it evokes a musical score, apt for someone who—like Marclay—was deeply involved with music.

I share a birth year with Marclay—who was born in California (land of movies), raised in Switzerland (land of clocks), and lived in London while making The Clock (Big Ben features prominently). On this viewing, I found the coincidence of our age worth noting. All of us fit our self-narratives into the cultural and political developments surging around us, constructing individual, if unstable, senses of nostalgia and novelty. Marclay and I apparently share sweet spots in the 1970s and ’80s, when our adulthoods were new. Of course, everyone’s clock is personal, and none are remotely reliable. We each keep our own differential time, though I can’t be alone in situating myself in a perpetually shifting near-middle. In any case, my faithful private timepiece continues to tell me, on good days, that I am somewhere pretty close to noon.