The Brooklyn Rail

Four to five in the afternoon is a hinge point, one of the day’s border zones. For much of the world, as Marclay’s excerpts demonstrate, work ends, classes finish, commutes begin, and darkness arrives. Trains and automobiles, teeming stations (one featuring a smitten Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper), and crowded sidewalks are markers of this hour. A time of endings and transitions to other things, a time to mark the day’s gradual demise and to recall its promises, regrets, and disappointments.   

Time’s passage is central of course to Marclay’s work. As is our own passing. When a haggling pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment (2002) disparages a pocket watch, we hear, “your time limit has run out.” Samuel L. Jackson wails to Ben Affleck, “I need you to give my time back to me! Can you give me back my time?”

In 2010, Marclay explained to an interviewer that this work was in essence a memento mori. Remember we must die, artists have told us for centuries. From four to five the Vanitas message is repeated as pendulums swing, birds cuckoo, time clocks are punched, and alarm clocks sound, warnings that a moment must be recognized and will not come again. Danger is everywhere. An assassin removes the face of his watch to reveal the piano wire that serves as a garotte. Games of chance and gambling once represented frivolous earthly pleasures. Early in this hour a chess player arranges his seat so that he can see a clock more clearly; he reappears five more times as the hour progresses. In other clips cards are played and dice are rolled. Signs of ephemerality proliferate. Incense burns. A single petal drops. A young boy places a flower on a casket. Instead of the traditional pipe, dozens of cigarettes are smoked, at one point overwhelming an ashtray. In a 2012 profile for The New Yorker, Marclay labeled cigarettes “the twentieth-century symbol of time.” And with their life-threatening impact well established by scientists, they do more than hint at time’s revenge. 

Anxieties throb. Marclay’s masterful editing emphasizes the tensions accompanying time’s passing. Transitions from one film to another are sometimes abrupt, rough, jagged, and invasive. Soundtracks bleed into succeeding excerpts, pulses continue their beat even when new clips appear. Percussive rhythms add to the metronymic stress—fingers tap; clocks tick. A street merchant repeatedly hits one of his watches against a metal bridge. But almost nothing stops time.

Marclay’s sense of irony does allow for counter themes and momentary relaxation. In several extracts from François Truffaut’s L’argent de poche (1976), an ill-prepared schoolboy successfully outsmarts time, waiting out his turn to be questioned by the teacher until he is literally saved by the bell and class adjourns. In another semi-comical scene, a couple having sex culminates in what the French call la petite mort.  

Running through The Clock like an untamed river is the presence of death. Indeed, death is a major focus in ten of the fourteen (!) films that occupy the one minute between 4:00 and 4:01 p.m. And it asserts its prominence throughout the hour, sometimes directly, and sometimes in disguise. At 4:05 p.m., and again at 4:32 p.m., an uneasy father attempts to placate his daughters with modest bribes of food and entertainment. Without further information the scenes appear innocuous. In fact, he is attempting to find the right moment to tell them that earlier that day he learned that their mother was killed in combat, in Iraq. In Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981), young WWI recruits face almost certain extinction. This film reappears several times.  

But while death is pervasive, its inevitability is not unchallenged. Two of the longest episodes, at one minute each, complicate and even dilute its role, from two movies probably familiar to much of this audience. Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford), the hero of The Natural (1984), is about to strike out in the late afternoon when his former lover rises from her seat in the ballpark, clad in white, her picture hat suggesting a halo. Hobbs’s next swing not only smashes a home run but shatters the clock. Time destroyed. A hint of the film’s redemptive ending: Hobbs playing catch with his newly discovered son.

As the hour ends, just before 5:00 p.m. completes it, we witness Casablanca’s (1942) wrenching moment as Rick (Humphrey Bogart) reads Ilsa’s heart breaking farewell in the frenetic panic of a Paris railroad station, the Germans approaching. But more will come. Their later reunion and sacrifice restore his life force. The Clock’s constant reminder of death’s inevitability is leavened by alternate promises of redemption. Amor vincit omnia, as Sam Goldwyn might have said, if he knew Latin. Perhaps the whisper of a Happy Ending.