Companion piece to this article.
You might be lucky and get right in, but chances are you'll have to wait in line when you try to see The Clock. In Museu Berardo, during the early evening hours of the days the work was shown in full, waiting times reached one and a half hours, and lines were also constant during weekend afternoons. Once inside you will be greeted by a setting very similar to any other presentation of the video installation: floor-to-ceiling dark fabric curtains, four rows of white and bright IKEA couches over a black carpet and a 6.4- by 3.6-meter screen (which neatly accommodates the 16:9 aspect ratio). Those, and at least three or four 24-hour screenings, are Christian Marclay's specifications and conditions for the piece, and it ends up as a mix between a dark and organized movie theater and a comfortable and informal living room, although the way the couches are spread around brings to mind an American drive-in. Like everywhere else as well, due to its lawsuit-sensible material, in Lisboa you don't have to pay for a special ticket to watch The Clock.
You might be lucky and get right in, but chances are you'll have to wait in line when you try to see The Clock. In Museu Berardo, during the early evening hours of the days the work was shown in full, waiting times reached one and a half hours, and lines were also constant during weekend afternoons. Once inside you will be greeted by a setting very similar to any other presentation of the video installation: floor-to-ceiling dark fabric curtains, four rows of white and bright IKEA couches over a black carpet and a 6.4- by 3.6-meter screen (which neatly accommodates the 16:9 aspect ratio). Those, and at least three or four 24-hour screenings, are Christian Marclay's specifications and conditions for the piece, and it ends up as a mix between a dark and organized movie theater and a comfortable and informal living room, although the way the couches are spread around brings to mind an American drive-in. Like everywhere else as well, due to its lawsuit-sensible material, in Lisboa you don't have to pay for a special ticket to watch The Clock.
The way visitors usually approach the work is becoming a cliché: you become aware of what it's all about, you find the concept interesting but think it's probably going to get dreary and repetitive after some time, you plan on watching it for 10, 30 or 60 minutes, you end up staying for (way) longer than intended... while it tells you exactly how long you've been rapt ("Is it about sex?", "No, it's about 10.30"). My first experience ended up being different only due to my work assignment on the night of the opening, and I watched dozens of brief snippets for two or three hours as I was constantly getting in and out of the room. That was enough to second-guess my prejudices, as even just those quick clips would grasp my attention and leave my hanging by the door for longer than I should. In the meantime, a row of people was forming and not moving by the entrance, as most of the audience inside (including Marclay, who was particularly happy with the setting as it was the first time the projector wasn't visible) showed no intention of leaving. After one in the morning or so I was able to watch for a longer period and any remaining doubts vanished: there was nothing tedious about The Clock. By dawn, having seen probably less than 4 hours in full, I knew that you could take most of what there is to take out of the piece after watching it for any 20 minutes. I also knew I wanted to watch the whole thing.
I ended up being in and out of that room countless times during the two-month-long screening, and pretty early on I started writing down the hours I had watched to guarantee I could really take it all in. I never had to wait in line, but I ended up planning part of my life around what I had left to see, which is a similar experience in the sense that The Clock grabs hold of you and the time you devote to it, even when you are not in front of the screen. Some people kept asking "when does it start", and with my experience of re-starting watching it at dozens and dozens of different points I can verify that it really doesn't matter. The film effectively starts when you get inside the room and ends when you leave. The duration is more truly the time you spend with it than the 24 hours, as I don't even consider it to be 24 hours long. The Clock is shown in loop, and this loop has meaning. Even when the museum closes and the projector is turned off the film keeps going, as the software keeps running. There's just no one watching it. It works like so to keep it synchronized, but the implication is that it continuously tells the right time, which also doesn't stop. Our watches don't lose their function when we are not looking, do they?
Once you seat on the couches you realize they were a clever choice. They are comfortable, have plenty of legroom and can accommodate four people, although the few the better, especially if you are staying for long. Like any couch though, after three hours you can't find any comfortable position, unless you have fallen a sleep by then, which I never did but was really common as the days turned into nights, but that's just a testament to the immersive environment of the room. The space has a sense of communal living-room like I had never experienced before, a place you are happy to share and where you feel easy enough to lay on the floor when the seats are all taken. As you start watching, pretty soon you will know what time it is, but you don't actually really feel it going, you just get involved and lost in the endless flow. There's lots of different ways to watch The Clock, and you end up effortlessly experiencing all of them: in any other movie it's not a good sign if you start wandering what time it is, but here most will probably start just looking for the clocks in the procession of micro-narratives; you'll laugh at some odd transition and feel the suspense a few moments later, then some line of dialogue or dramatic music will get your attention and you'll genuinely start trying to follow the plot, as it seemingly "progresses" from one clip to the next and fools you into thinking something coherent is happening, even if the language or color scheme changes; then, without noticing, you'll be watching as if half-consciously zapping, until the time is more emphatically stated and you wake up. Some people are not aware beforehand of the correlation between fictional and real time and it's hilarious to witness their awe when they realize it, showing their watches to their partners with dumbfounded expressions.
Some small narratives do take place. There's as much as twenty and more clips in any minute, and not all of them state the current time. Some of the snippets used only refer to time in a more general sense, either with symbolic representations or with depictions of behaviors somehow associated, like someone punching the clock at a factory, a
young girl inheriting a watch, a person nervously or disappointingly
waiting or a clock being attacked by
someone trying to stop time. There are also shots whose action fits neatly with what
precedes or follows them, like an actor having a funny reaction to a
previous indication of time, and these can build up into more complex sequences. My favorite happens around 10 minutes before midday, when a chase is extended between three different movies, with three guys
in NY going after Antoine Doinel in Paris (in Truffaut's Baisers
volés), while you can only guess at the allegiance of a long-coat
wearing gentleman in a black-and-white alleyway. At 20:38 a woman
hilariously gets really frightened by a shot from the previous clip, while at 16:31 visitors in a fancy art gallery praise eloquently a porn image, and there are multiple instances reminiscent of Marclay's "Telephones". The weird contrasts and the nonsense
are what you'll laugh at more and remember later, and owe a debt to Bruce Connor's
seminal collage "A Movie" (1958).
It's in these kind of moments that you recognize how masterfully and precisely the fragments are spliced-together, how painstakingly tight the editing really is. But the work does go on for 1440 minutes and the flow is spotless throughout, images and sound are worked in such a way that the film appears seamless even when the pace changes or an old movie has been stretched or cropped to fit the aspect ratio, with some clips changing without you even noticing. The smoothness of the transitions is hidden in the mindful expertise with which the audio was articulated: instead of just using fade outs, soundtracks from different clips are merged, dialogue or diegetic sounds from one movie are used as background noise in the next, scores are extended or striped off, sped up or down, their pitches are shifted, etc. I didn't remember to do it, but close your eyes for a while and just listen to it. To guarantee this Hollywood feel, the artist showed restraint by not including only sensational and rampant clips, using commonplace sequences galore, which besides helping in keeping the illusion and preventing the film from turning into a weary gimmick shed some light into how the industry fakes reality.
It's in these kind of moments that you recognize how masterfully and precisely the fragments are spliced-together, how painstakingly tight the editing really is. But the work does go on for 1440 minutes and the flow is spotless throughout, images and sound are worked in such a way that the film appears seamless even when the pace changes or an old movie has been stretched or cropped to fit the aspect ratio, with some clips changing without you even noticing. The smoothness of the transitions is hidden in the mindful expertise with which the audio was articulated: instead of just using fade outs, soundtracks from different clips are merged, dialogue or diegetic sounds from one movie are used as background noise in the next, scores are extended or striped off, sped up or down, their pitches are shifted, etc. I didn't remember to do it, but close your eyes for a while and just listen to it. To guarantee this Hollywood feel, the artist showed restraint by not including only sensational and rampant clips, using commonplace sequences galore, which besides helping in keeping the illusion and preventing the film from turning into a weary gimmick shed some light into how the industry fakes reality.
Marclay was interested in the way any viewer's individual, sometimes long-forgotten memories
became fundamental to the experience. One
of the aspects he found more "moving" about this was recognizing actors
in different stages of their careers, sometimes decades apart. This can
happen with Catherine
Deneuve or Michael Caine, Tom Cruise or Maggie Smith, and for the Swiss
it also worked as one of the many manifestations of memento mori he felt
the piece transmitted (on a sundial you read "Do not squander time. That is the stuff life is made of"). There are also more symbolic and subtle
reflections on mortality, like burning
cigarettes and candles, wilting flowers, hourglasses, cartridges
advancing on record players, sunsets and Laurence Olivier speaking to a
skull in his version of Hamlet. The act of remembrance worked in a
different way as well: you'll notice that some movies are present with
more than one scene, and you'll wonder how far you'll be able to follow
the action. "3:10 To
Yuma" gets it's first appearance just after 13:30, and then again
less than an hour later, and you obviously wonder what will happen at
15:10. And, unlike James Mangold's movie where the climax gets resolved
in 20 minutes or so, here you'll really have to wait until then, and
when screen times is real time chances are you'll forget about Bale and
Crowe. Johnny Depp is one of the most frequent actors in "The Clock",
from "A Nightmare on Elm Street" at 2, getting soaked in milk 6 hours
later, interacting with Scarlett O'Hara at 10:28. and robbing a
bank immediately after, but you get more anxious about him in the
multiple sequences he's being harassed by Christopher Walken in "Nick of
Time", after midday. The motion pictures shredded and spread around the
piece end up being even more enthralling than the absurd sequences.
Most of the set-ups you witness, like Depp and other actors from "A Nightmare on Elm Street" getting into bed, robbers getting ready for a heist being, bombs being prepared and hostages getting threatned, won't get a denouement though. Freddy Krueger is not in The Clock. But that gives the film a quality any other movies lack after you've been going to the cinema for a few years: you can't foresee at all what's happening next. It's an unexpected, and sort of naive, movie experience that's hard to get otherwise once you became accustomed to Hollywood conventions and recurring devices. That's one of the reasons you get so tangled up in what's happening, you just want to know what happens in the next scene... and the next... and the next... The only thing you can always look forward to is the inevitable crescendo and increasing sense of urgency that happens as you get close to the hour. It's not that strange that Marclay found more movies where something happens at 3 or 7 or 11 o'clock, and right before, than at 13:37 for example. Some of these moments are still simple anyway, and from 16:00 I only remember a cuckoo clock that instead of striking the hours has a bird calling "Hey dude!".
The apex of the movie is midnight. Some 20 minutes before it plays My Bloody Valentine, over Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson sharing a car ride, and then there's a giant gorilla next to the Big Ben (in "I Was a Teenage Gorilla"). At 5 to midnight you get "The Untouchables"' homage to "Battleship Potemkin", people having sex to dancing alarm-clocks, Gary Oldman as Sid Vicious. The intensity continually increases as a countdown is shared by several timepieces in a firework-like, rapid-fire display of clips. The wonderful mayhem comes to a stop when Orson Wells meets his fate at the hands of a clock and the Big Ben explodes with the rest of the Palace of Westminster in "V for Vendetta". This is particularly significant because if there is one protagonist in the work it is Big Ben. He has more screen time than any person or place, perhaps even more than the Empire State Building in Andy Warhol's movie, his role more that of a villain than of a hero, due not only to the oppressive nature of time but more specifically to when the tower threatens to explode in Don Sharp's version of "The Thirty Nine Steps" and a man has to hang from the minute hand to try to stop it (and time), more than 12 hours earlier. So, when V manages to destroy Big Ben, does time finally stop? Not really, it features again a few clips after, in "Gone with the Wind".
Finally, there's something truly questionable, with cultural repercussions: the work features, as expected, thousands of different movies, but the vast majority of those are not only English-speaking, but also clearly Hollywood products. There are a few French and German movies, some Japanese and Chinese, Portuguese at 10 to 20 and a couple from languages I couldn't identify. What about the Indian film industry, undoubtedly one of the largest centers of film productions? Apparently Marclay had one researcher focusing on it but they found almost no time references, which he attributed to a cultural trait*. But that same excuse cannot certainly by applied to the very active Italian or Nigerian film industries though, and the film ends up with but a trifle of non-English speaking drops in a huge sea (at least you'll get some old movies that feature crazy stereotypes, like the colorful "The Thief of Bagdad" at 16h44, which I must watch soon).
I set myself to watch the full work, and from 10 to 19 (or right after Natalie Portman in "True" all the way to 15 minutes after a cat is attending a party in "Breakfast at Tiffany") it was easy enough, as those are the museum opening hours. But I had to watch the remaining 15 in the four nights it was open all night. I watched about 3 or 4 in the first and about the same in the second, but I didn't go in March 28th (the weekend the hour changed, and the work was stopped for 5 minutes to be corrected). By the last full day I still had approximately 8 hours left to watch. On screen, most of the night, Amélie Poulain and other people were sleeping, so it's only fitting that at 4 a large group got there mostly just to sleep off their hangovers, each in a different couch, and a couple arrived in their pajamas. I went out of the room to rest and eat during the moments I had already watched, but by 6 sleep deprivation was slowly encircling everyone. Fortunately, late-night presented some of the most memorable clips, including a black-and-white Titanic sinking, french sex at 10 to 3 (the more explicit mature scene happens at a family-friendly hour, 16:18), Paris streets being cleaned while the sun rises over Los Angeles, some weird snippets from "Le Fantôme de la liberté", an alarm-clock with a moving rooster and a chick and appearances by Kirk Douglas, Captain Hook, Hitchcock, Tom Cruise, RZA and GZA. The sequences get longer as the hours wear on, clearly due to the diminishing quantity of clips, and there are some particularly extended dream sequences, including Ingrid Bergman's Dalí nightmare in "Spellbound". At 4 people also start waking up, beginning with Clint Eastwood, followed immediately afterwards by... Clint Eastwood... and also Heath Ledger, Scarlett Johansson and Marilyn Monroe. Harrison Ford starts his milking duties at 4:30. Woody Allen wakes up some three and a half hours later, "late for the robbery", and the smell of napalm is felt 20 minutes after that.
It feels a bit surreal to leave The Clock after an all-night binge: you are as frantically aware of time as one of the most desperate characters from the work or Mary Poppins' employer and for some time life feels like one of its longer sequences. From now on you'll notice clocks in movies much more and maybe feel a sudden urge to smash some, either because you suspect trouble follows them (as well as James Bond, who is featured at least a dozen times), or you know they are almost never synchronized (Petter Sellers even has to call Agent Mulder to get the time), or they just tell you time keeps running out. But it's mostly just one of the most rewarding and wonderful works you'll ever experience in a museum. As Zadie Smith said, The Clock "is neither bad nor good, but sublime". For me, as I revise my "hours watched" list, I feel that... oh my... where's 18h59 to 19h08?
Most of the set-ups you witness, like Depp and other actors from "A Nightmare on Elm Street" getting into bed, robbers getting ready for a heist being, bombs being prepared and hostages getting threatned, won't get a denouement though. Freddy Krueger is not in The Clock. But that gives the film a quality any other movies lack after you've been going to the cinema for a few years: you can't foresee at all what's happening next. It's an unexpected, and sort of naive, movie experience that's hard to get otherwise once you became accustomed to Hollywood conventions and recurring devices. That's one of the reasons you get so tangled up in what's happening, you just want to know what happens in the next scene... and the next... and the next... The only thing you can always look forward to is the inevitable crescendo and increasing sense of urgency that happens as you get close to the hour. It's not that strange that Marclay found more movies where something happens at 3 or 7 or 11 o'clock, and right before, than at 13:37 for example. Some of these moments are still simple anyway, and from 16:00 I only remember a cuckoo clock that instead of striking the hours has a bird calling "Hey dude!".
The apex of the movie is midnight. Some 20 minutes before it plays My Bloody Valentine, over Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson sharing a car ride, and then there's a giant gorilla next to the Big Ben (in "I Was a Teenage Gorilla"). At 5 to midnight you get "The Untouchables"' homage to "Battleship Potemkin", people having sex to dancing alarm-clocks, Gary Oldman as Sid Vicious. The intensity continually increases as a countdown is shared by several timepieces in a firework-like, rapid-fire display of clips. The wonderful mayhem comes to a stop when Orson Wells meets his fate at the hands of a clock and the Big Ben explodes with the rest of the Palace of Westminster in "V for Vendetta". This is particularly significant because if there is one protagonist in the work it is Big Ben. He has more screen time than any person or place, perhaps even more than the Empire State Building in Andy Warhol's movie, his role more that of a villain than of a hero, due not only to the oppressive nature of time but more specifically to when the tower threatens to explode in Don Sharp's version of "The Thirty Nine Steps" and a man has to hang from the minute hand to try to stop it (and time), more than 12 hours earlier. So, when V manages to destroy Big Ben, does time finally stop? Not really, it features again a few clips after, in "Gone with the Wind".
When watching, I sometimes thought of The Clock as a kind of
"ultimate film", in the sense Ad Reinhardt gave to his "Ultimate
Paintings". But the film doesn't strive for that, and over time I came across some situations that don't allow for such an encompassing and absolute label. There's an inherent limitation to the piece, and Marclay put it best when he described it as "a
document of a certain time and place at the beginning of
the 21st century". There are no movies from 2010. That's pretty obvious of course, but right now we are still too close to that date to not feel weird about it. In the last five years more and more people have started to use their phones to check the time, and that has been changing in movies too, but in the work it happens once, at 18:20. But it's even more clear than that, you simply don't see any of the last movies you saw in the cinema. The piece does also appear as a history of cinema, because it shows most of it from our perspective, but in reality it doesn't go all the way back to the beginning of the moving pictures, featuring "only" 80 to 90 years (as far back as Metropolis, at least). This is an unsurpassable particularity but I'm sure it will be less apparent as the years go by, as it won't look as much incomplete when the audience stops thinking about it as a study on the complete past of the medium.
The other "problems" are more a matter of some of the artist's decisions being pet peeves for me. The picture with the widest breath of propagation over the hours is from a Twilight Zone episode, "Ninety Years Without Slumbering". I had never actually seen that episode, but the TV show's plots are very idiosyncratic and therefor easy to spot. An old man is showed in several clips, from midnight to midday and back around, obsessively worrying about the potential demise of a grandfather's clock, because "If the clock stops I die". That episode, while extremely relevant as a memento mori and providing many interesting quotes, caught my attention mainly because it was the first time it became apparent to me that the film is not composed only of movies. I ended up realizing not only are there more episodes of Twilight Zone (in "A Matter of Minutes" you hear "the sound of actual time approaching", which turns out to be Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper ridding their motorcycles in "Easy Rider", and there's William Shatner classic scenes form "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"), but from other TV series as well, like Sex and the City, MacGyver, Prison Break, The Office and 24 (of all things, used only once, at 19:10). I found those odd sequences distracting and tainting to the aesthetic of the work - the visuals and mechanics of TV are discernibly different from cinema, but they don't account for even 1% of the whole thing, making it too obvious when there's a cut into one. And then, if material from TV is included, why the utter lack of cartoons? I kept hoping I would watch some obscure black and white movie segueing into X-Men: The Animated Series or having Road Runner fused together with Eyes Wide Shut, but you only get a scene of a family briefly watching The Simpsons' episode "Bart Gets Hit by a Car", just before 20, and several Mickey clocks. It was personally disappointing and just seems like a tremendous lapse given the potential... During the exhibition I happened upon the character Clock Face (Adventure Time's episode "Wake Up") and it just seemed so perfect.
The other "problems" are more a matter of some of the artist's decisions being pet peeves for me. The picture with the widest breath of propagation over the hours is from a Twilight Zone episode, "Ninety Years Without Slumbering". I had never actually seen that episode, but the TV show's plots are very idiosyncratic and therefor easy to spot. An old man is showed in several clips, from midnight to midday and back around, obsessively worrying about the potential demise of a grandfather's clock, because "If the clock stops I die". That episode, while extremely relevant as a memento mori and providing many interesting quotes, caught my attention mainly because it was the first time it became apparent to me that the film is not composed only of movies. I ended up realizing not only are there more episodes of Twilight Zone (in "A Matter of Minutes" you hear "the sound of actual time approaching", which turns out to be Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper ridding their motorcycles in "Easy Rider", and there's William Shatner classic scenes form "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"), but from other TV series as well, like Sex and the City, MacGyver, Prison Break, The Office and 24 (of all things, used only once, at 19:10). I found those odd sequences distracting and tainting to the aesthetic of the work - the visuals and mechanics of TV are discernibly different from cinema, but they don't account for even 1% of the whole thing, making it too obvious when there's a cut into one. And then, if material from TV is included, why the utter lack of cartoons? I kept hoping I would watch some obscure black and white movie segueing into X-Men: The Animated Series or having Road Runner fused together with Eyes Wide Shut, but you only get a scene of a family briefly watching The Simpsons' episode "Bart Gets Hit by a Car", just before 20, and several Mickey clocks. It was personally disappointing and just seems like a tremendous lapse given the potential... During the exhibition I happened upon the character Clock Face (Adventure Time's episode "Wake Up") and it just seemed so perfect.
Finally, there's something truly questionable, with cultural repercussions: the work features, as expected, thousands of different movies, but the vast majority of those are not only English-speaking, but also clearly Hollywood products. There are a few French and German movies, some Japanese and Chinese, Portuguese at 10 to 20 and a couple from languages I couldn't identify. What about the Indian film industry, undoubtedly one of the largest centers of film productions? Apparently Marclay had one researcher focusing on it but they found almost no time references, which he attributed to a cultural trait*. But that same excuse cannot certainly by applied to the very active Italian or Nigerian film industries though, and the film ends up with but a trifle of non-English speaking drops in a huge sea (at least you'll get some old movies that feature crazy stereotypes, like the colorful "The Thief of Bagdad" at 16h44, which I must watch soon).
I set myself to watch the full work, and from 10 to 19 (or right after Natalie Portman in "True" all the way to 15 minutes after a cat is attending a party in "Breakfast at Tiffany") it was easy enough, as those are the museum opening hours. But I had to watch the remaining 15 in the four nights it was open all night. I watched about 3 or 4 in the first and about the same in the second, but I didn't go in March 28th (the weekend the hour changed, and the work was stopped for 5 minutes to be corrected). By the last full day I still had approximately 8 hours left to watch. On screen, most of the night, Amélie Poulain and other people were sleeping, so it's only fitting that at 4 a large group got there mostly just to sleep off their hangovers, each in a different couch, and a couple arrived in their pajamas. I went out of the room to rest and eat during the moments I had already watched, but by 6 sleep deprivation was slowly encircling everyone. Fortunately, late-night presented some of the most memorable clips, including a black-and-white Titanic sinking, french sex at 10 to 3 (the more explicit mature scene happens at a family-friendly hour, 16:18), Paris streets being cleaned while the sun rises over Los Angeles, some weird snippets from "Le Fantôme de la liberté", an alarm-clock with a moving rooster and a chick and appearances by Kirk Douglas, Captain Hook, Hitchcock, Tom Cruise, RZA and GZA. The sequences get longer as the hours wear on, clearly due to the diminishing quantity of clips, and there are some particularly extended dream sequences, including Ingrid Bergman's Dalí nightmare in "Spellbound". At 4 people also start waking up, beginning with Clint Eastwood, followed immediately afterwards by... Clint Eastwood... and also Heath Ledger, Scarlett Johansson and Marilyn Monroe. Harrison Ford starts his milking duties at 4:30. Woody Allen wakes up some three and a half hours later, "late for the robbery", and the smell of napalm is felt 20 minutes after that.
It feels a bit surreal to leave The Clock after an all-night binge: you are as frantically aware of time as one of the most desperate characters from the work or Mary Poppins' employer and for some time life feels like one of its longer sequences. From now on you'll notice clocks in movies much more and maybe feel a sudden urge to smash some, either because you suspect trouble follows them (as well as James Bond, who is featured at least a dozen times), or you know they are almost never synchronized (Petter Sellers even has to call Agent Mulder to get the time), or they just tell you time keeps running out. But it's mostly just one of the most rewarding and wonderful works you'll ever experience in a museum. As Zadie Smith said, The Clock "is neither bad nor good, but sublime". For me, as I revise my "hours watched" list, I feel that... oh my... where's 18h59 to 19h08?
*Marclay produced "Bollywood goes to Gstaad" in 2013, a 17-minute video montage of a recurring trope in Indian movies popularized by director Yash Chopra, where all of a sudden there's a "cut to Switzerland", which replaced the war-torn Kashmir as the preferred dreamy location.
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