The Brooklyn Rail

I did not expect the most poignant moment in the 1:00 p.m. hour of The Clock to come from the Hollywood blockbuster Spider-Man 2 (2004). With only minutes to deliver pizza before the strike of 2:00 p.m., when the twenty-nine-minute delivery guarantee expires, Peter Parker (played by Tobey Maguire) screeches away on a motorbike. He pauses to glance up at a street clock as it clicks to 1:57 p.m., long enough for us to notice the phrase inscribed on its face: “tempus fugit.” Time flies.

Christian Marclay’s twenty-four-hour video montage—a thrilling barrage of film and television clips that synchronizes fictive and actual time—incorporates this and all manner of timepieces. It somehow manages to collapse time while also increasing the awareness of its unrelenting pace; time slips away, despite a keen awareness of its presence. Over a single hour (1:00–2:00 p.m., to be exact), one might observe the minutes elapsing on a grandfather clock, wristwatch, alarm clock, stopwatch, cuckoo clock, or hourglass. Time’s passage may be registered through ticks, beeps, rings, chimes, church bells, and school bells, measured through metronomes (Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? [1966]) and hash marks on a prison wall (Down by Law [1986]), or validated through optical devices like binoculars and magnifying glasses. One’s sense of duration is innately tied to these visual and aural means of confirmation, to the glance at a watch and the tick of an hour. The Clock (and its manifold clocks) communicates time in these ways.

But more than that, it highlights communication, its technologies, and their obsolescence as critical themes, particularly through references to telephony. Machines for transmitting the voice, such as walkie-talkies and telephones (of the car, brick, rotary, pay, corded and cell variety), appear in the 1:00 p.m. hour and throughout The Clock to announce the time or its imminent arrival. Phones picked up in one film are put down in another. Marclay cleverly underscores film itself as a medium of mass communication by incorporating numerous references to this technological tool. For those in the know, the abundance of telephones are a self-referential nod to Marclay’s short video Telephones (1995), a kind of precursor to The Clock, for which the artist edited together more than one hundred film clips into a seven-minute montage structured on the narrative arc of a telephone call, from dialing to answering, speaking, and hanging up.

There is a long and peculiar historical relationship between cinema and the telephone. In 1933, the British General Post Office Film Unit produced The Coming of the Dial (1933), a film aimed at promoting the automation of the telephone system in the UK; artist László Moholy-Nagy contributed several abstract sequences of his “Light-Space Modulator” sculptures, their whirring steel forms evoking the materiality and movement of electromechanical switches and exchanges. Even earlier, in 1926, the US firm AT&T/Western Electric developed the Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc technology used to produce films like The Jazz Singer (1927), the first feature-length film with synchronized sound, which became a major commercial success and was credited with launching the era of sound film in America. At the time, AT&T/Western Electric was still primarily known as a maker of telephones; a 1929 advertising campaign boasted that “It pays to go to theaters equipped by makers of your telephone.”

The link between these technologies—cinema and the telephone—might seem tenuous, given the different ways in which they direct perception and attention. Cinema produces sounds and images within the interior space of a darkened hall but directs aural perception out of the body towards a frontal screen, correlating the direction of sight with that of hearing. The telephone, by contrast, distributes sound outwards across vast communication networks while at the same time directing perception inwards. Yet the notion of visuality was inscribed in telephonic communication from its very beginning. The first intelligible words uttered into a telephone, by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, announced a visual desire: “Mr. Watson—Come here. I want to see you!”

Marclay’s Telephones emerged during a period of advancement in mobile technology (Motorola introduced the flip phone in 1996, revolutionizing the industry), and his sweeping montage reads like a retrospective catalogue of industrial telephone design and a celebration of engineering’s progress. The Clock was made in 2010 during a similarly transformative moment in film with the rise of streaming services, which radically altered the viewing habits of consumers and dealt a thunderous blow to movie theaters and the collective film-watching experience. In this context, watching The Clock feels like not only a tribute to cinema but also to the cinematic space, where we assemble in the dark to watch the flicker of moving images on a silver screen. Then as now, with cinemas at risk of disappearing, Marclay invites us to watch his twenty-four-hour tour de force in a purpose-built movie theater—so long as we mute our cell phones.