The Brooklyn Rail

“And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too soon needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute—like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.”

—Haruki Murakami

It is 12:00 a.m., that portentous threshold when the old day dies and the new stirs to life. The soundtrack crescendos in expectation of the moment. As the bells toll 12:00 Orson Welles is impaled by a clockwork soldier, and Big Ben explodes cataclysmically. The hour of the midnight movie is upon us. A vampire emerges silently from a grandfather clock. The music takes a turn towards the dreamy and sinister. Nancy struggles to stay awake in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Criminals synchronize their watches. Barton Fink fulminates. The POWs of The Great Escape (1963) drop into their tunnel. The clocks tick forward, relentlessly.

Cut in a steady tempo to the actual time of day, The Clock doesn’t stop. It’s a loop. A perpetual twenty-four hour machine. Time is the essential medium of film editing. Time is lost, compresses, elongates, jumps. Each edit is a stroke of the conductor’s baton, establishing rhythm and tempo, marking beats. In its fragmentation, The Clock strips its source materials of any original complex temporal structure, including the character’s subjective experience of time. The effect is one of a mass parallel edit, in which we can imagine every film’s storyline continuing linearly and simultaneously through a day, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, absent of flashbacks or forwards, absent the filmmaker's manipulation of story time, nailed upon the bars of the hour and minute hands. The loss of narrative is replaced by clever juxtapositions and transitions in the work. But the joy they provide proves transitory, so that after several hours you are left with a scattershot recollection of moments like a shattered dream.

The soundtrack by contrast has a rough, punk rock, ready-made quality. It frees the artist from the rigid linearity of his own creation, allowing improvisation. The sound slips like a rhythm thief between shots, sometimes rushing and sometimes dragging the pace. Classic pre-lap and post-lap sonic transitions score entire sequences, marking themes and leitmotifs. Characters in bed sit up to hear revelers from other countries. Phones ring across decades. Doors whoosh and slam open into other worlds. The sound is never entirely untethered from its image, but it has a longer leash, both creating and blurring the picture cuts.

Marclay has composed an original score from a collage of many soundtracks, creating successive waves of anticipation followed by stretches of almost monotonous, quotidian normalcy. In this way, he not only makes a twenty-four hour film into an addictive watch, but also re-creates the subjective experience of time speeding by or endlessly dragging—an experience that is otherwise lost in his visual and sonic sampling. As the countdown to 1:00 a.m. commences the soundtrack begins its anxious crescendo yet again. Nancy, her eyes heavy, is at last succumbing to dangerous sleep. The governess from The Innocents (2021) is already tossing in the sheets, deep in her own nightmare. Ellen Hutter sleepwalks towards Nosferatu (1922). And inside her prison cell, the convicted prostitute from I Want to Live! (1958) wakes up screaming. As human beings, we are uniquely able to live simultaneously in the past, present, and future—through memory, anticipation, and despite or because of the knowledge of our own finitude. Martin Heidegger argued that constant awareness of death is what allows us to live an “authentic” or meaningful existence. In The Clock, the sequences, like the sound, have begun to blur into one another, becoming slightly unhinged, presaging the long, strange night ahead.

In film sound, a ticking clock, with its short and regular intervals, can serve both these contradictory motifs of time—the crescendo of a countdown to a bomb exploding versus listening to life’s seconds tick endlessly by; running to catch a departing train versus sitting around waiting for one. But arguably its most potent use is to focus our attention on the importance of time itself to the story. Composers frequently make use of our psychoacoustic reaction to ticking for this purpose, like Hans Zimmer’s obsessively metronomic score of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), where the army’s time is literally running out as men wait to die or be rescued, and the film itself is a study in parallel temporality. One soon becomes attuned to the many things that stand in for the sound of a clock in The Clock, including tick-tocking metronomes, heels clacking on pavement, the scything of pendulums, and the steady drops of rain. Alan Alda, defibrillators in hand, instructs a medical student in ER: “Don't look at the clock; look at the heart!” This is the crux of The Clock, the sonorous bells and “lub-dub” of its beating heart—a clue that what’s important is not the telling of time but what we do with it.