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Record W4187013

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

2012· article· en· W4187013 on OpenAlex
Jacob Potempski

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueCineaction! · 2012
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicCinema and Media Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMovie theaterArtThe ImaginaryArt historyPower (physics)Visual artsPsychology
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.275
Threshold uncertainty score0.865

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.217
Teacher spread0.194 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it