The Brooklyn Rail

A few impressions of Christian Marclay’s The Clock (with apologies to Riff Raff):   

1) It’s astounding.
2) Time is fleeting.
3) Madness takes its toll.

Let’s focus on madness. Clocks run on anxiety. It doesn’t matter if they’re battery-operated, electric, hand-wound or sun-powered; the essential fuel of every timepiece is fear. Feel free to substitute a metronome, billable hours or coffee spoons—measuring time is always fraught. 

Clocks impose order on our day as we hurtle through life. The clock commands when to get up, go to work, eat lunch, go home. And keeping time is a struggle, as every frantic person running late for a plane, job interview or romantic rendezvous can attest. Even the way we talk about time—we waste time, race against it, lose track of it, try to stop it—reveals our combative relationship with it. 

Anxiety is a big part of watching The Clock. I mean that in the best way; watching The Clock is the exact opposite of watching the clock. It’s a film-going experience that is simultaneously disconcerting and thrilling, as viewers sit in the dark, searching for meaning and structure amid the thousands of images used to create a real time, twenty-four hour clock. The human consciousness of time is anxiety-provoking to begin with, and it’s further disorienting to watch a movie that has no discernible narrative.

A narrative of sorts does emerge: each hour of the clock contains film clips that show the human activity typically associated with that time of day. Between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m., the workday begins to wind down and people are freed from their jobs to go to their “real” lives, hurrying home to dinner or to meet friends. A few seconds before 5:00 p.m., Jack Nicholson sits watching the clock hands crawl toward the hour on his last working day before retirement (About Schmidt [2002]); as 6:00 p.m. approaches, a man demands his tea, and for the hour in between, people exit factories, punch time clocks, hurry onto commuter trains, cook dinner or make plans for the evening.

Those are the domestic details of the hour. In addition to all this workaday activity, however, are terrible slivers of menace—John Lithgow prepares to strangle a woman (Blow Out [1981]), the formidable Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson, Rebecca [1942]) appears, snippets of For A Few Dollars More (1965) suggest imminent gunplay. Various James Bonds appear, there’s a flash of The Usual Suspects (1995), some Hitchcock material, a glimpse of Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense (1999) and—perhaps most alarming—a nanosecond of Vincent Gallo in The Brown Bunny (2003). Likewise haunting are flashes of The Evil Dead (1981) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975); there’s heartbreak available in moments from Brief Encounter (1945) and The House of Mirth (2000). Mechanical clocks indifferently move their hands through the hour, but underpinning it all is a sense of unease, not to mention disappointment, betrayal, murderous behavior, and villainy. What are we to make of this? That seems to be up to each viewer; perhaps once the masses are no longer “on the clock” at work but free to go into the night and be themselves, all hell breaks loose. 

What’s interesting is how this elusive narrative affects an audience. You can hear people react at The Clock, whispering and rustling around in the dark when there’s a scene they can identify from a well-known movie. A ripple of communal recognition moves through the audience.

That recognition is important. Any film lover feels immediate pressure to name the films flashing past; it’s like being on some warp-speed edition of Jeopardy! with a faulty buzzer. Your brain just can’t keep up. Turns out forty years of writing film criticism offers me no advantage either, just more gobsmacked anxiety as the footage zooms past. It all seems to leave an audience on high alert throughout.

As for the audience, it helps to be middle-aged or old. The Clock is a cultural artifact, representing a century of movies; it will have particular appeal to anyone who grew up in the heyday of American film, which is to say baby boomers (such as Marclay, who is seventy.) 

People of that age went to movie theatres regularly. They had the transporting communal experience of sitting with others in the dark, immersed in storytelling. The Clock came out in 2010, around the time online streaming (and the time-keeping iPhone) really took hold—the beginning of the end for movie-going, with a death blow delivered via pandemic. 

Boomers will likely recognize many of the film snippets (and the actors); moreover, they are the movie generation educated by Hollywood, ever attuned to aural and visual clues as to what is about to happen. They need only two musical notes from Jaws (1975) or Psycho (1960), one fogged-up bathroom mirror, a half-second glimpse of a speeding driver in profile… someone is going to die!

All of us, it turns out.