The Brooklyn Rail

Throughout The Clock, architecture operates as both a framing device and as a passageway, linking various scenes, characters and conversations, across time and space. Just as the display of specific times manages to unify otherwise unrelated filmic worlds through Christian Marclay’s jump cuts, certain architectural typologies—city squares, bedrooms, railway stations, offices, etc.—suggest a sense of continuity between the histories and activities that the vast collective cast of The Clock experiences. The late-night stretch leading up to midnight feels particularly rich with these evocative settings, notably in the depiction of architectural spaces with a liminal quality. Examples abound of people in dimly lit spaces, surrounded by deep shadows, waiting, anticipating, laboring, in transit—and transition— between one place and another. We witness characters sometimes completing mundane tasks, or indulging in moments of leisure, idling away the time in locales that often feel unrooted and provisional in some way—defined by the architecture itself, or by the nature of the activities taking place within them.

A few minutes after 11:00 p.m., Al Pacino oversees piles of cash being counted in a grimy low-lit backroom. The camera pans up to show a wall clock slow-fade dissolving to show a new time, over two hours later, with this tedious process almost at an end. Half an hour later we see a similar scene of mundane late-night labor, with Tony Leung toiling away in a cluttered Hong Kong office. It is close to midnight, and the trail of smoke from his cigarette slowly arcs upwards creating a cloud that fills the upper part of the room, indicating how slowly time appears to be passing within this claustrophobic space.

In 1992, the cultural anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term “non-place” to refer to the transitory, anonymizing, spaces that had become so prevalent during the late twentieth century, such as airports, hotels, office cubicles, and supermarkets, and the experience of driving along highways and sitting in front of television and computer screens. The Clock is particularly adept at depicting the singular architectural qualities of these “non-places.” Transit spaces often crop up, bolstered by their potential for fleeting encounters, and unnerving potential for dramatic tension. Just after 11:15 p.m., Grand Central Station appears twice: Tobey Maguire rushes to catch a train, and Al Pacino features in a chase sequence—with both scenes foregrounding the concourse’s iconic central clock. Tom Cruise uses a payphone at London’s Liverpool Street, keeping a watchful eye on the digital station clock above him, so he can cut the call seconds before his exact location can be traced. A few minutes shy of midnight, Franka Potente waits on a deserted tube platform at Charing Cross station, before hurrying onto an empty carriage to catch the last train of the evening. Scenes involving late-night taxis reveal the allure and precarity of the nocturnal city streets. Robert De Niro pulls up in his cab to a traffic light at 11:40 p.m., waiting for the signal to change, as the transition from red to green light is reflected ominously in his front windscreen. One minute later, the kaleidoscopic neon lights of Shibuya scatter over the passenger window of Scarlett Johansson’s Tokyo taxi, like a scrolling abstract pattern.

The emotional tension of the anticipated encounter is often heightened through the frame of architectural space. Around 11:10 p.m. we see a couple checking in, for one night only, in a cheap motel entrance lobby—while other characters drink alone, or wait impatiently for someone, in dark and dingy bars. A late afternoon scene features a hypnotically languid Steadicam shot that follows Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as they make their way up a winding staircase towards Delpy’s Paris apartment, acting as a counterpart to a scene just before 11:00 p.m. where Jake Gyllenhaal and Jena Malone go upstairs together at a Halloween house party.

Domestic interiors also offer a stage for characters whiling away the time before midnight, including a late-night card game in a dilapidated old house in the country, or a huge (seemingly never-finished) puzzle being worked on alone in the vaulted halls of Citizen Kane's Xanadu. In between, we observe hushed conversations in kitchens; bedroom lazing interrupted by telephone calls or irate parents; and characters watching television while doing the ironing or while lying in bed eating cheese puffs.

In marked contrast to these cocooned environments are heavily regulated architectural spaces, such as prisons and mental institutions, classrooms and libraries where clocks mark the end of the school day, workers pouring into, and out of, factory buildings, and cubicle-like offices within gleaming skyscrapers. And then we have angry commuters stuck inside hot cars, battling gridlocked traffic jams.

These architectural spaces act as “wormholes,” instantly bridging one film to the next, whether through a nimble “match cut” of specific architectural features, or through the communal experiences that unite these disparate environments. In this way, architecture deploys itself as a powerful tool that can flatten time and space, across these richly varied histories of cinema.