The Brooklyn Rail

Like a reverie within a reverie, Salvador Dalí’s dream sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) peels back the unconscious before a room full of somnambulant spectators dispersed across IKEA couches. It’s just past 2:30 a.m. in Christian Marclay’s The Clock. Twelve hours earlier, alert viewers sat transfixed before larger-than-life Hollywood icons. In the dead of night, the gap between slumbering stars and fatigued viewers has shriveled. And yet, the 2:00–3:00 a.m. hour is no dreamscape. Dalí is the exception that proves the rule. What, then, are the rules that shape the contours of Marclay’s darkest hour? First, we must answer the more fundamental question: What are the rules that shape The Clock?

Three complex modalities of time inform The Clock. The first and most famous is the actual time in the location where the work is shown. When I first saw The Clock at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 2011, I watched the minutes tick by as I abandoned one appointment after another, too riveted to move. 11:30 a.m. onscreen and on my watch. 11:31 a.m. onscreen and on my phone. 11:32 a.m., 11:33 a.m., 11:34 a.m. The Clock is a functional clock—at least most of the time—a clock fully aligned with Hollywood’s vision of daily life: wake up, breakfast, work, lunch, travel, dinner, nightlife, sleep, sex, etc.

The first temporality is actual time, fused with conventional diurnal and nocturnal habits. The second is quite nearly the opposite. Variously called cinematic time, diegetic time, or classical Hollywood editing, the Soviet director Vsevolod I. Pudovkin defined it as follows: “Filmic time is distinguished from actual in that it is dependent only on the lengths of the separate pieces of celluloid joined together by the director.” Lengths of celluloid or video clips, whatever their source, can be edited together to create the illusion of continuity between separate shots—even shots culled from disparate films. The Clock employs savvy sound editing to enhance the sense of continuity as the soundscape of one shot seamlessly blends into the next. (In the wee hours, Marclay renders the untethered soundtrack sinister as we do not know whether the ominous noises belong to the images we’re seeing or to a prior or future clip, a phenomenon Michel Chion calls the acousmêtre.) In The Clock, something is always about to happen, yet nothing ever does. Continuity without progress. Suspended suspense.

Actual time and cinematic time are complemented by a third temporality: film historical time. Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock in 1923, the anxious anticipation of 3:00 a.m. in Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Christopher Walken’s pocket-watch-inspired monologue in Pulp Fiction (1994) are but three of the thousands of clips that rehearse a scattershot history of film. The late, great film scholar Thomas Elsaesser emerged from a visit to The Clock and exclaimed he had just seen his life flash before his eyes. Over the course of The Clock, we watch Harrison Ford and other stars grow old. Many were already dead when Marclay assembled the work. A significant number have died since. Fifteen years after its premiere, The Clock is beginning to show its own age. Then-popular films are now obscure. Once state-of-the-art technological formats (DVDs) appear decrepit. The Clock is more than a memento mori. It is an idiosyncratic and eschatological history of film, a reminder of the programmed obsolescence of media and the end of cinema as a collective viewing experience. A twenty-four hour epitaph for the cinematic century.

The 2:00–3:00 a.m. hour traverses film history as well as any: Gremlins (1984), Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Pretty Woman (1990), and dozens of other films make cameos appearances. But with less available source material—how many movies unfold at precisely 2:16 a.m.? 2:43 a.m.?—the montage slows, the excerpts stretch, and timepieces are fewer and further between. The first two temporalities—actual time and cinematic time—are thus compromised. In the runup to noon or midnight, we watch nearly every second tick by on screen. Around 2:40 a.m or so, minutes go by without a single watch or clock and only the vaguest verbal allusions to the time. After all, does the precise time really matter in the dead of night? In the early hours, The Clock scarcely functions as a clock. Counterintuitively, it also ceases to cohere as a continuous narrative flow. Longer clips retain their integrity and refuse integration into a larger whole. In its peak hours, The Clock paradoxically absorbs us into its fictitious time and simultaneously heightens our attention to every passing minute. Nowhere else does time pass so quickly yet so painstakingly. In the wee hours, Marclay subtly but decisively reverses course and frees us from our fixation with time. On the IKEA couches, even more than onscreen, it is a time to sleep and perchance to dream.