The Brooklyn Rail

What happens after hours in The Clock? Nocturnal vibes and eeriness, for sure, but also far less screwing than you’d expect. Fornication ranks third behind noir nightscapes and disturbed dreams in Marclay’s time-space continuum. He favors suspense, string tremolo and malicious moods over erogenous zones and other fun things that go bump in the night. Maybe 1:00–2:00 a.m. is a bit too early for lots of fucking, or it could be that in culling from Hollywood and commercial global cinemas Marclay has effectively managed to mirror, if not replicate the motion picture industry’s staid approach to fantasizing carnal pleasure. While there were a few saucy moments in what I saw, The Clock barely breaks out of the PG-13 zone. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I caught much more soft-core skin on cable tv between 1:00–2:00 a.m. than you can peek here. I’m not suggesting that The Clock should be more “adults only,” or that sexy is better than spooky. I’m only saying that there are probably tons of clocks in the background of porn films if you go looking for them.

Whom did I see? Vincent Price (Of course!), Woody and Diane (Boo!), Roman Polanski (Yikes!) and many familiar faces fished out of our collective unconscious. The surge of satisfaction that comes with making a positive ID leads me to believe that The Clock must be one of the most self-congratulatory media works ever produced. And I mean that as a compliment! As a viewer, the cinephile’s thrill of recognizing film clips, recalling actor’s names, and finding the time element of a shot is soul satisfying. It provides moral justification for the incalculable hours spent in a theater and on your sofa gawking at the screen. As it turns out, this wasn’t wasted time: watching thousands of movies developed you into a smarter, more cultured person. But before you give yourself a gratifying back slap, just imagine the rounds of victorious high fives dished out in Marclay’s studio whenever he and his team discovered a clock that read, like, 1:37 a.m. That had to feel amazing. If The Clock was a game, everyone would win.

Unaware that Rosalind Krauss referred to the same film in her 2011 essay “Clock Time,” at multiple points during the hour I turned to thinking about Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and the commonly held idea that it is a forty-five minute zoom. Reductively speaking, this is true. Nevertheless, the image advances from a wide shot to a close-up with a movement that is neither smooth nor continuous; so many things happen in between. The Clock screens over twenty-four real hours, but reducing it to being about synchronicity ignores Marclay’s deft simulation of seamlessness. It’s like he is keeping time with a very convincing fake Rolex. Stop looking for clocks and the artist’s intervention becomes quite apparent, particularly when focusing on the soundtrack and noticing his technique of utilizing music to bridge disparate clips. He also crops square 4:3 aspect images of yesteryear into 16:9 rectangles to create more fluidity and less distraction between footage from different screen-size eras. Time does not just unfurl; it is continually being reformatted and shuffled into place. Observing these sly moves made me feel as if I were actually spending my time looking for Marclay’s hovering hand outside the frame, readying the next switch.

Although it concocts associative connections that span the expanse of cinema history, The Clock could not have been completed on celluloid film. It is the product of three years of manual research, cataloging and editing, and the end result is an entirely digital construction only made possible by access to home movie formats. Completed waaay baaaaack in 2010, The Clock is most definitely one of the last magnum opus artworks produced by human intelligence. It feels completely obvious to point out that the considerable labor required to assemble this megalith could today be accomplished by AI faster than you can microwave a bag of popcorn. I wonder what sort of clips bots might uncover and how they would vary from those Marclay collected. An AI remake will perhaps only be as strong as the directions provided by a prompter, but it seems likely that we may eventually get a fan-made supercut stitched together from pornography, documentaries, industrials, experimental cinema, home movies, and all the other cinematic genres that Marclay conspicuously left out of his day. More than this, what I really hope happens next is that a hip producer involved with the Academy Awards broadcast will be so wowed by The Clock that they will commission Marclay to create next year’s In Memoriam video. I would love to watch that in prime time.