The Brooklyn Rail

I first encountered The Clock in Venice at the 2011 Biennale, at the far end of the Arsenale’s 350-yard long Corderie. The vast hall was hot and packed, and The Clock appeared like Shangri-La. I don’t know what time it was when we settled into one of its couches in the cool, dark space, or how much time we spent there, despite the fact that The Clock keeps perfect time. It also quite effectively and gently wastes it. It is completely absorbing but not in the way we think of being absorbed or transported by a film. It’s probably more accurate to say that The Clock is a diversion: it attracts your attention away. It’s easy to keep watching and, in a way, easy to stop. The Clock is indifferent to your comings and goings. I wasn’t on the clock in Venice. It was quite another thing to see The Clock at MoMA with a deadline and an assigned hour. I had to pay attention differently, to try to arrest or at least understand its insistent forward motion. Walter Benjamin’s 1936 description of the experience of film fits here: “No sooner has he seen it than it has already changed … the person contemplating these images is immediately interrupted by new images.”

6:00 p.m. starts with Mary Poppins (1964) at 5:59 p.m., as Glynis Johns, Hermione Baddeley, and Reta Shaw prepare the Banks’s drawing room for the impact of Reginald Owen’s 6:00 cannon. Mr. Banks arrives home moments later, and the bit of “The Life I Lead” David Tomlinson sings continues to mark the time: “At 6:01, I march through my door / My slippers, sherry, and pipe are due at 6:02.” The scene as filmed doesn’t unfold in real time; here it is filled out by a montage of clockworks, from bell towers and grandfather clocks to digital alarms and pocket watches. Not surprisingly, the hour features a number of such quotidian returns, a few precisely on schedule, but most fretfully delayed. Cary Grant arrives home at 6:01 p.m., as does a tense and preoccupied Fred MacMurray at 6:03 p.m. But there are more people stuck in the office than have made it home: Sarah Michelle Gellar is still in her cubicle in a darkening office at 6:27 p.m. in Suburban Girl (2007), and Kevin Spacey’s attempt to leave the office is waylaid by Jack Lemmon at 6:51 p.m. in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Much of the hour takes place in between work and home: we are in multiple railroad stations and in the San Francisco airport with Bullitt (1968) at 6:51 p.m., 6:52 p.m., and 6:56 p.m. Bullitt is one of several films that appear multiple times in the hour, as though they had continued to unspool just underneath the surface of The Clock, breaking in at intervals. 6:00 p.m. is also cocktail hour, and The Clock acknowledges it with an extended sequence from Audrey Hepburn’s house party in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) interrupted by a neon clock lifted from Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) at 6:45 p.m.. Gallery openings from Basquiat (1998) (6:48 p.m.) and Cocktail (1988) (6:49 p.m.) follow, far snootier and less fun than Hepburn’s crammed apartment. The hour ends with Michael Hordern as Jacob Marley still at work in the 1951 Christmas Carol, admonishing Mervyn Johns’s Bob Cratchit, who has set his quill down, prematurely, at 6:59 p.m.

There are over a hundred different films assembled in the 6:00 p.m. hour of The Clock, but it flows as though seamless and carries us along with it. Its success rests with Marclay and his team, but it is made possible by the fact that the segments they have amassed were always already made—blocked, directed, and filmed—to be combined. The Clock depends on the conventions of narrative film; first and foremost, continuity and the tools that assemble a continuous narrative space out of fragments: standard shot-to-shot camera rotation, matching on action, eyeline matching, field/reverse field, and the like. In film after film, in any given melodrama, procedural, thriller, or romcom, these are the devices that absorb us, that allow us to identify with the characters, and, more importantly, with the film as a place. They make us feel as if we are elsewhere—that we have been somewhere and someone else. But The Clock does not bind us to individual characters, we are not inside one story. A door opens in one shot, an interior reveals itself in the next; a phone rings in one shot, it is answered in the next; an actor looks up and to the right in one shot, we see the clock she is looking at in the next. All of these follow as if given, even if, in The Clock, each opens into or is answered by a different film—another one that speaks the same formal language. The Clock is an insistently horizontal, metonymic, and diversionary work that strings us along as it unspools one scene, one shot, one image after another.