The Brooklyn Rail

Four to five in the morning is threshold territory. It can be the flapping end of a night, the opening of a day, the winding down of a graveyard shift—if you’re awake. Most people aren’t, even in the city that never sleeps, where the Museum of Modern Art kept the doors open for all-night access to Marclay’s The Clock. At a quarter after 3:00 a.m. I hailed a taxi. The driver cruised along quiet avenues and beneath skyscrapers where floor after floor of glass windows illuminated the dark night. I kept watch for people. I didn’t see many. The commotion of the metropolis was in a state of suspension. Stillness was on my mind as I passed through the museum doors and entered the dark, near-empty theater.

The Clock is a motion picture collage. What could it have to do with stillness? We use the idiom “time standing still” to denote feelings of intense absorption, like being in a state of rapture. The opposite is perhaps also true. When Andy Warhol filmed John Giorno sleeping soundly for more than five hours, he created a durational image of stillness. But it’s hard to be absorbed by that film. Paradoxically, it’s easy to feel time suspended, to let go of time in The Clock, even as the shots and sequencing are anything but still.

The first thing that happens in the 4:00 a.m. hour? A group of musicians take a break. And so the hour begins with a moment of interruption, or pause. Of course, it only lasts a beat, and then the scene cuts. One alarm clock after the next clamors explosively, blasting sleepers out of slumberland. It’s violent in the most appropriate way, when you consider the arms of the clock aren’t appendages, but weapons of disturbance. Then we are lulled back in.

Still lifes of bedside tables predominate throughout the hour, which takes place mostly in bedrooms. These little set pieces communicate so much with their smoldering ashtrays, half-empty glasses of wine, and landline phones with chunky cords. The camera holds for just a moment on these things, an illusory moment of repose. But in the hour between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m., nothing remains peaceful for long. The implacable alarm clocks, the preternaturally still symbols of memento mori—all illuminated by noir lamplight dramatically cast downwards—set a viewer on edge.

The soundtrack enhances the effect. It creates a sense of foreboding that is never fulfilled, like a fog of anxiety that won’t lift. Hallucinatory dream sequences exacerbate the mood with frenzied movement and ambient noise. We are treated to a fantastic range of clocks in these scenes, some of the most arcane examples (automatons included) of the entire hour. The number of nightmares creates the impression that the past haunts the present, or that time itself haunts the sleeper. With arms spinning too fast and bells wildly sounding off, the old clocks become aggressive, even demonic, possessed.

A lot of people are woken up in the still of the night; they are generally unhappy about it. Notably, the passage from a calm, horizontal position into an upright one tends to occur spasmodically. Sleepers are brutally jolted into consciousness in their own bedrooms. When it happens to a troop of soldiers in a crowded barrack (Heartbreak Ridge [1986]) we watch the group tumble into formation and it’s funny. The scene may not be something to chuckle about in its original setting, but it is transformed here into a moment of levity.

Second only to alarm clocks are wrist watches. One signals interiority—bedrooms—the other its opposite. When we see actors checking their watches, they are outside, often looking in, shadowy figures on the window ledge or on the street. Multiple surveillance scenes take place. Emilio Estevez sits in his car, just waiting for something to happen in Another Stakeout (1993). You’d think an image of waiting would be an image of stillness; it tends not to be. Those who wait seem nervous, and the nervous are fidgety. They twitch and squirm. They check their watches.

Yes, one can become so absorbed by The Clock as to experience time standing still. No, one cannot have the experience of time standing still while watching The Clock. How is it possible that both statements can be true? How is it possible that one can watch something measure time and become so entranced by the measurement as to lose touch with what’s being measured?

When I departed The Clock, I knew exactly what time it was—5:22 a.m. I knew exactly how long I’d been in there—ninety-six minutes. But for all that precision, despite a beginning and end, I felt the state of rapture prolonged. I bought a coffee and sat for a little bit, watching the blue light of dawn illuminate the skyscrapers of midtown. The city was waking up, people moved with intention. Shortly I would return to my apartment and rouse a few sleepers.