The Brooklyn Rail

If 2:00 a.m. is a time for revelers and regrets, 3:00 a.m. is something else entirely. This is the witching hour. It’s a time of anxiety, loneliness, and dread. The Clock changes pace at this hour: it slackens, occasionally drags, and deranges. The characters on screen are tormented and most often alone—stuck at a train station, waiting in a hospital, or waking from a nightmare. But the most common scene is a prone human figure in bed, unable to yield to sleep.

I was unwinding right along with them. By this point, I’d been watching The Clock since 11:00 p.m., barely moving in my seat. The late shift is a different experience from a day screening; it lacks the mischievous thrills of the hours bracketing midnight. The parties have wrapped, the bars are closing, the dates have ended in sex or fights. The wildness of 3:00 a.m. is not that kind of fever, but the creeping distortion of exhaustion and illness. By now, those who could sleep have already done so. The rest of us remain awake, held hostage by other forces.

It turns out that 3:00 a.m. was also a tough time for Christian Marclay. He’s said that 3:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. were the hardest hours to fill. It’s not a peak time for cinema. The material thins and the pacing downshifts: less action, more dimmed bedrooms. The only workers still awake are janitors, security guards, cops, and late-night radio DJs. Even they seem listless. We see James Mason pace a hospital corridor in Lolita (1962), Catherine Deneuve wake up terrified in Tristana (1970), while Al Pacino in Insomnia (2002) shoves his bedside clock into a desk drawer. In the famous dream scene, Victor Sjöström in Wild Strawberries (1957) stares at a watch without hands, knowing his death is near. Time is out of joint, and nothing is going well.

In a rare moment of warmth early in the hour, the camera finds Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in bed together. It’s the scene from Groundhog Day (1993) when the alarm clock confirms that Murray’s character has finally broken out of his time loop. It’s a sly nod to the temporal logic of The Clock, a loop that won’t end, as long as the hard drive in the back room at MoMA keeps serving up the clips in lockstep with Apple’s time servers.

Marclay’s process is often described as mechanically rigorous, but by this hour it has something more fallible and human to it. You can imagine him scanning through the clips, desperately trying to find something that fits. Everyone is at their limit: the artist, the characters, the handful of viewers still left in the screening room. Because we are tired, the immense labor of The Clock becomes more visible. The painstaking manual effort behind it feels almost anachronistic now. In theory, an AI model could be trained to detect clocks across millions of clips, sorting them into chronological order in minutes, not the three years it took Marclay and his team. But AI is rarely used for such memorable acts of montage. Meanwhile, the history of film has been devalued and decontextualized, reduced to more digital fodder to be consumed by the maw of the tech industry. The Clock reminds us of when appropriation and fair use were creative tools for artists, not legal arguments for AI companies.

Of all that distinguishes the late hours of The Clock, the sound editing takes on a leading role. The ambient mix of room tone, sleepy murmuring, and creaking floorboards is shattered by sirens, rising violins, and the wobbling synthesizers that soundtrack bad dreams from Amityville (1992) to The Twilight Zone (1956–64). The sounds, even more than the images, carry us across the hour and keep us in a trance state. This kind of auditory world-building is distinctly Marclay—meticulous, layered, and attuned to the emotional undercurrents of a scene, where the echoes of one film are carried far into the next.

As the hour draws to a close, the clocks become tormentors. No, it’s not dawn yet. It’s not even close. Even if you are beside someone else, you’re alone. Then, at 3:53 a.m., after long stretches without much dialogue, a familiar voice breaks through. Sitting behind a wooden desk in a brightly lit room, Alfred Hitchcock looks down the barrel of the camera to address us directly: “Time is very important to the characters in tonight’s story. One of them is doing it. For another, time seems to be running out. Time is also very important in television. We fill it. We must start on it. We must finish on it. And, appropriately enough, we occasionally kill it.”

It’s an inside joke at just the right moment. Marclay may have been working with a limited cinematic palette, but rather than killing time, the scarcity becomes a virtue. It’s a delirious hour, full of hauntings and domestic despair. As F. Scott Fitzgerald knew, “in the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.”