Christian Marclay's the Clock: The Cinema and Real-Time

Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American artist. He is mostly known for his work in experimental music. Marclay pioneered the art of turntablism in the seventies, and has worked with avant-garde musicians such as John Zorn, Elliot Sharp, and Yoshihide Otomo. The Clock combines clips from thousands of films into a 24-hour collage that also functions as a working clock. The film took over two years to make. It was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biannale in 2011, and has been screened at numerous major art galleries around the world. It will be screened at Toronto's Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in the fall. Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010), the film that won the Golden Lion at this year's Venice Biannale and was quickly snapped up by a number of major galleries (including MOMA and the National Gallery of Canada) is literally a clock, or a perfect simulacra of one. Having found a clip for every minute of the day, Marclay spliced them together to form the moving-image of a 24h clock, which, as if to make the likeness complete, is projected in real-time. The discovery that there is an image for every minute of the day served as a reminder that the cinema has always been concerned if not obsessed with time. However, the concern has not always been with real-time. One could even say that the cinema has always presented us with the opposite; with invented, imaginary time, which makes us oblivious to the realities of the day. Bur the escape for the present--The Clock reminds us--is never complete. Real-time goes on; passing along with the time of the film. Marclay's work raises questions about the relation between these two times and how it affects the experience of cinema. On first impression, the film not only gives us an identical representation of real-time, but constantly serves to remind us of its presence. Functioning as a commentary on the cinema, it seems to say that no matter how hard they try, the movies will never make us oblivious to the present and to all the anxieties that are wrapped up with it. Considered more metaphysically, The Clock seems to argue that real-time is reality itself; the light, as it were, behind the play of shadows; which the cinema serves as its master. This is how a number of commentators have seen the film. (1) Real-time, however, is simply an abstract frame of measure. The 24h dock (the minute or the hour) for example, serves as a common denominator by which a variety of events, irrespective of their differences, can be objectively quantified and measured. Real-time, in other words, is a homogeneous medium. Modern philosophers, beginning with Henri Bergson, have argues that while treating time as an object that can be measured can be very useful, it fails to account for the creativity of time, by virtue of which every moment is different. (2) Is the cinema a homogeneous medium, which reduces every moment to a common measure; or does it, rather, make a difference in time, transforming the world by way of the image? This is the question that The Clock raises. It seems to me that when we assimilate the time of the film to real-time, the image (past) to the real (present), we miss the play of difference that really makes Marclay's film tick. In fact, in every image of The Clock the distinctive mark of a moment comes strikingly into view. The film is a moving spectacle of time-pieces of the most diverse kind. Each time-piece marks the present time of the narrative as well as the real-time of day, as thought they were one. But the images are marked historically. Not only the grandfather clocks, even the wrist watch, the leather-strap variety (for example, on the hand of Sean Connery as James Bond) will appear retro for the young viewer, who is likely to check his cell phone for the corresponding time ... The mark of history is also revealed by the fashions and styles of filmmaking, which distinguish the images from one another. The spectacle of time-pieces therefore also functions as a spectacle of the history of the cinema; wherein one and the same theme, time, appears in innumerable variations. …

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