The Brooklyn Rail

In 2023, 92.5 percent of Swiss trains reached their destination on time. North of their shared border, German long-distance trains were only able to muster 64 percent punctuality. This caused problems when they traveled through Switzerland, creating downstream delays in the local system. The Germans’ relative lack of efficiency became a Swiss problem. (Christian Marclay is half Swiss.) The tension reached a boiling point last year, when one in ten trains attempting to enter Switzerland from Germany was stopped at the border and turned away for lack of punctuality. It was clear that these countries operated their railway infrastructure with divergent philosophies of time.

The tension between local and global temporal standards has a rich history, and it was only in the last couple hundred years that basic alignment was achieved on an international level. Indeed, Swiss-German railway scheduling depends first on everyone agreeing what time it is. Collective agreement is taken for granted today thanks to the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in the late nineteenth century. The universal temporal standard was the result of a concerted bureaucratic effort coming to a head at the 1884 International Meridian Conference, in Washington, DC. Maritime navigation and the expansion of rail networks across time zones required temporal standardization for efficiency, coordination, and commerce. If a port trying to keep docks organized expected a merchant at a specific hour, “4:00 PM GMT+5” had to mean exactly the same thing to both parties.

The Clock throws into stark relief the complex relationship between clock time—as a form of measurement and a technology of standardization—and time as a fundamental condition of experience. On the one hand, the work showcases their obvious overlap: digital dials, alarm clocks, and clock towers represent the modal intricacies of time’s passing, providing a mathematized frame for the ordering of action and existence. Marclay utilizes these clock faces to play with tempo and implicitly draw attention to the construction of the work itself, accelerating certain sections while letting others breathe as relaxed intermezzi.

On the other hand, The Clock makes clear the limited epistemic purchase of a given timestamp relative to the sheer force and dynamism of temporal unfolding writ large. While the camera shows characters waking up at 5:00 a.m., we simultaneously learn a lot and nothing at all: we understand that a measurement has been made, grasping contextual implications for the scene, but we need more resources to intuit meaningfully what is being measured. The clock face simultaneously indexes time as an overarching structure of experience and the technologically mediated construction of experience in time. Throughout the 5:00 a.m. section we primarily witness domestic scenes; a torrent of blood gushes forth from an elevator in The Shining (1980), and characters begin to wake up to start their days. It is really only after 6:00 a.m. that characters re-enter the outside world, often traveling by train, guided by clocks issuing reminders that they have somewhere to be.

While there are many films that thematically engage with time, there are few films that give attentional pride of place to specific timestamps. Viewers are directed to concern themselves with things that happen over time, not the exact time at which they happen. While there are edge-cases—we watch action heroes attempt to disarm explosives before the countdown reaches zero, and witness buzzer beaters in sports Cinderella stories—time as duration takes de facto precedence over clock time. A clock face is typically introduced into a filmic sequence in service of a larger storytelling goal: the appearance of a clock might tell the viewer that time has elapsed since the previous scene, or it might reinforce the sense that time is running out. Most commonly, it is used to provide context for the status of a particular character or plot movement. The cinematic representation of time’s measurement according to the twenty-four-hour clock plays an essential supporting role within a given film’s holistic construction, but it is generally introduced as non-conceptual information—to be noticed, not engaged with directly. A wristwatch dial is not commonly afforded particularly rich signifying capabilities.

By repeatedly confronting the viewer with the twenty-four-hour clock face, Marclay draws attention to how the ordering of time functions even—and especially—when it is not afforded the viewer’s attentional resources. After entering the theater, it takes about twenty minutes to become immersed in the specific rhythm of The Clock—spectatorial experience is disjointed at first, and the formal conceit seems gimmicky—but once we lock in, it quickly becomes clear that the clock face persists in the imaginary even when we look away. Its presence is especially felt in the shots where it is not depicted: its absence prompts a search for its ordering authority. The viewer scans the screen for evidence of its suturing power and the affirmation of continuity. Sometimes it can feel good to be reminded of what you already know.