Watching The Clock: V. 3:35 a.m.-8 a.m. / VI. Missing Midnight / Conclusion (?)

NEW YORK—

V. 3:35 a.m. - 8 a.m.

Saturday morning on July 28, after having spent a Friday night watching that excellent Sydney Theatre Company production of Uncle Vanya and then going up to a beer garden in Queens to say goodbye to a friend visiting from out-of-town, I decided to pull an all-nighter and try to check out some of the early-morning hours of The Clock (this past weekend was the last in its current Lincoln Center Festival run in which the film ran nonstop from Friday morning to Sunday evening). I got to the David Rubinstein Atrium at around 2 a.m. and waited about an hour and a half on this line:

Yes, even at 2 in the morning, I had to wait more than an hour to see Christian Marclay's video timepiece. (And judging by the wait times that were being tweeted over at @LCAtrium in the last few days of this run, the lines had only gotten longer.)

I have to admit, I felt my eyes getting heavy as I neared the Atrium door. A fellow line-waiter theorized that I'd probably feel less tired once I got into air conditioning, as the air that night was quite humid. When I finally got into the theater and sat down, though...well, when you're watching movie characters sleeping, however quick the editing is, it's difficult to completely avoid thoughts of drifting off to sleep yourself. Even then, though, Marclay builds in "alarms"; 4:30 a.m., for instance, brought a panoply of alarm sounds that were enough to perk me up in the moment. (In addition, there was always a guard sitting in the front of the theater to keep an eye on us patrons; the guard took it upon him-/herself to wake up sleeping Clock-watchers. Boy, if only I had a guard doing that whenever I started nodding off at other movie theaters!)

Actually, it's not quite accurate to say that these overnight hours of The Clock featured characters mostly sleeping. More accurately, many movie characters were being roused from slumber by phone calls, knocks on doors and so on. Every so often, of course, there would be the stray character still very much awake and working (Emilio Estevez in Stakeout (1987), for instance, or Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks). And, of course, being that this is the nighttime and that, under cover of darkness, a lot of violent and surreal things tend to happen in movies, so it goes in Marclay's Alternate Cinema World, with its monopoly of horror and sci-fi clips compared to other hours.

Vertigo (1958)

Marclay gets into the nocturnal spirit as well; these early-morning hours of The Clock feature some of his strangest and most surreal montages. Clocks feature heavily in some of these dreamlike interludes; at one point, Marclay invokes the famous nightmare sequence of Vertigo (1958) but overlays clock imagery on top of it. In another montage, however, Marclay really lets his freak flag fly when he turns a perfectly normal scene from Gentleman's Agreement (1947) into something more sinister simply by virtue of superimposing it on top of some other clip—a technique that, from what I could see in previous hours, he hadn't used before.

And then 6 a.m. rolls around, rung in alarms a-blazin' by the likes of Groundhog Day (1993), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and even Fright Night (1985), with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy offering a far quieter counterpoint as they sit on the edge of a fountain enjoying each others' company in Before Sunrise (2004). After some of Marclay's feverish overnight visions, this subsequent two-hour stretch felt strangely peaceful. The six o'clock and seven o'clock hours of The Clock has the feel of one long, drawn-out waking-up session, instilling in a viewer the feeling of a whole world arising from bed and getting ready to start the day in various ways.

Shoot the Piano Player (1960)—note the clock on the table next to the bed

My day, however, was just coming to an end at 8 a.m. that morning. After I left the David Rubinstein Atrium, I breathed in the morning air, got myself a breakfast sandwich and some decaffeinated coffee from a nearby Starbucks, went back home and tried to get some sleep (though I pretty much only managed about an hour and a half of solid sleep, at best). All the while, I couldn't help but wonder: Wait, what is that split-second clip from About Schmidt—a blink-and-you-might-miss-it snippet from the same scene Marclay uses at around 5 p.m.—doing at 5 a.m.? Let it not be said that Marclay's playfulness doesn't sometimes get the better him over his self-imposed 24-hour span.

VI. Missing Midnight

There was one final stretch of The Clock I most definitely wanted to see before this current run came to a close: midnight. Only after my first Clock-watching session about two weeks ago did I start hearing from others that Marclay had come up with something truly impressive to mark that all-important turn to a brand new day—and only then did I realize what a mistake I had made not sticking around until midnight my first night at The Clock, leaving just half an hour before (at the moment, I was thinking more about both having gotten a less-than-ideal amount of sleep the night before and having to go to work the next day). Thankfully, though, Feng Yi Ting, the modern Chinese opera I saw this past Saturday evening, started at 7:30 p.m. and was less than an hour long—thus giving me enough time to get on line to get into the David Rubinstein Atrium in time for midnight at The Clock.

After another hour-and-a-half-long wait, I got in at 10:30 p.m. on the dot. Of course, I had already seen the 10:30-11:30 stretch two weeks ago...but hey, at least it's only an hour's worth of material I've seen already. No biggie, I thought.

But then, at around 11:15 p.m., the lights suddenly came up, The Clock shut down and we were all told to evacuate the theater! Outside of the left side of the Atrium, we were treated to this:

I heard a stray remark about an "electrical fire" being the cause of this interruption. Well, I certainly did smell something burning as I exited the theater, so I had no reason to doubt that remark.

At around 11:30, we were told to go around the corner to the front of the Atrium and wait for further instructions. For a few moments, there was hope that maybe this situation would be resolved in time for the video to resume just before midnight. But as the real-world clock ticked closer to midnight, such a hope slowly drained away, later officially quashed at around 11:50 when some of the volunteers relayed word that police officers would know more in about 10-15 minutes—in other words, after midnight.

At around 12:20 a.m., all of the patrons that had still been in the theater before the alarm went off were allowed back in. Me, however, I just decided to go home. 

And thus, with that disappointing miss, ends my current journey with Christian Marclay's The Clock.

VII. Conclusion (?)

Overall, I ended up watching approximately 16 hours of The Clock. Is even seeing more than half of Marclay's video work enough to really make a fully informed judgment? The completist in me says "no." That, however, hasn't stopped many other critics from weighing in, basing their praise and/or condemnation on a mere précis of the whole (New Yorker film critic Richard Brody weighed in just the other day with a pan of Marclay's work based on seeing a mere two hours of the 24). But, as I suggested in above, regardless of what kind of clips Marclay uses, his style doesn't remain consistent through all 24 hours; as is the case with any other normal-length film, the tension rises and falls given the circumstances, and, with an artist as seemingly intuitive as Marclay is, and given how much duration he has given himself with which to work, there are bound to be moments that are more inspired than others—a lot of which one will surely miss by simply focusing on one stretch of time.

So I choose to reserve judgment until I actually see the entirety of The Clock, which, alas, I was unable to do during this just-ended Lincoln Center Festival run. I will say, however, that, through all of the 16 hours I watched, I was consistently entranced and enthralled. For me, the real-time aspect of The Clock is really only a hook for something larger: a period-spanning celebration of the power of motion pictures to access and represent the full range of human experience. Time is certainly a major part of that experience, and at its best, The Clock helps reawaken an awareness of just how much we all are bound—whether reasonably or unduly—by what is essentially just an abstract concept. It's fitting, in that regard, that a frequently recurring image during the daytime hours of Marclay's video is of characters looking down at their wrist-watches—a perfect sum-up of a certain always-on-the-go mindset prevalent in modern society.

Last I heard, the Museum of Modern Art had acquired Marclay's 24-hour video installation, so this may not be the last New Yorkers have heard of The Clock. I, for one, look forward to hopefully catching up with the eight hours I missed this time around. For now, though, the movie is over and time marches on...

Watching The Clock: II. 2:37 p.m.-6 p.m. / III. 11:04 a.m. - 2:37 p.m. / IV. 8 a.m. - 11:04 a.m.

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—My quest to watch as much of The Clock as possible continues on (check out my first post on Christian Marclay's video installation here to get you up to speed).

II. 2:37 p.m. - 6 p.m.

After seeing The Dark Knight Rises last Friday morning, I decided on a whim to walk over to the David Rubinstein Atrium and try to take in some of the afternoon hours of The Clock. It wasn't the most pleasant of waits: rain started to fall pretty heavily, and my big umbrella wasn't quite strong enough to prevent some rainwater from getting through and dropping onto my clothing. 

Taken while waiting on line to see The Clock on Friday, July 20

But after about 45 minutes of waiting, I finally got out of the rain and got indoors.

I walked in to clips of people in various states of waiting—the two titular children of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1982) waiting to see their mother during a funeral service; the titular 12-year-old drug-runner of Fresh (1994) waiting around in his room; and so on. The midday hours of Christian Marclay's Alternate Cinema World of The Clock, it seems, is a time of stasis...at least until 3 p.m., when children all over the movie world are getting out of school (Marclay prominently features the 1987 high-school comedy Three O'Clock High to lead up to and then punctuate the moment The Clock turn 3). 

About Schmidt

What 3 p.m. is to children (except for the children of François Truffaut's Small Change, who seem to get out of class at 4:30), 5 p.m. is to most adult working stiffs. For 5 p.m., Marclay chooses a clip from About Schmidt (2003), in which Warren Schmidt basically stares at the clock in his office until it turns 5, then quietly gets up and leaves. Certainly compared to the lead-up to 3 p.m., the lead-up to 5 p.m. is a considerably quieter, drama-free affair, without Marclay's usual increase in tension. It's just this one clip—and then, it's 5.

During this nearly three-and-a-half-hour viewing session of The Clock, I decided to try to take some notes this time around. One random thing I noted on a few occasions: Even though it's the afternoon, some of the black-and-white clips Marclay uses practically look as if they're at night, so shadowy are the interiors. Maybe black-and-white photography can just have that effect in general, without color to offer more concrete indications of time of day? (Or, of course, it could just be careful studio lighting. Either one.)

Another thing I noted is Marclay's sense of playfulness from moment to moment: how he sometimes uses a certain clip as a jumping-off point for a seemingly spontaneous montage of similar clips. So, in my notes, I note that at around 4:10 p.m., Marclay has a clip of someone picking up a phone and making a frantic call; then he throws in clips of other movie characters making frantic calls, binding them all together in a quick-edited flurry. I doubt this moment has anything in particular to say about 4:10 p.m.; it's just a bit of momentary inspiration that Marclay ran with. 

Miami Vice

Marclay also gets a bit cute with some of the clips he throws in that stretches his every-clip-with-a-timepiece-showing-the-time concept. During the 5 p.m. hour, Marclay treats us to a clip from one of the closing scenes of Michael Mann's 2006 feature film of Miami Vice, in which Isabella asks of Crockett before they part ways forever, "Remember when I said 'Time is luck'?" From what I remember, I don't recall there being any indication of the specific time in that scene (though the skies in the backdrop have enough light that, if one didn't know better, one could plausibly assume it was taking place in the afternoon)—but hey, time is a "theme" of that clip, fitting into Marclay's larger mosaic, right?

I offer that last point as an observation more than as a criticism. Time is, well, the essence of The Clock—a work which, among its many achievements based on what I've seen thus far, does have the ability to make us aware of just how much power film editing can have as far as eliding and compressing real time goes. During the 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. hours, for instance, there are clips from some film (I'm not sure which) featuring a character tied to a bomb with a clock attached to it. Marclay cuts back to those clips whenever there are shots of the clock showing specific times—a potentially revelatory contrast to the way those clips were edited in the original source material, without strict regard for adhering to "real time" the way Marclay does.

Army of Shadows (1969)

As I left the David Rubinstein Atrium at around 6 p.m., many of the characters in Marclay's Alternate Cinema World were getting ready for dinner. Only a half hour or so later, I found myself waiting for dinner in a nearby restaurant. If that isn't a classic example of life imitating art, then I don't know what is.

III. 11:04 a.m. - 2:37 p.m.

Taken while waiting on line to see The Clock on Saturday, July 21. A much better day for waiting, weather-wise!

 
The next day, I woke up early to catch some of the early morning/early afternoon hours of The Clock. Honestly, I wasn't even thinking about how Marclay would handle things as The Clock approached noon...but if any of you Clock skeptics out there want to understand why Marclay's video installation isn't a mere gimmick, you ought to try to at least check out this stretch to see how brilliantly he increases the tension, playing more so than usual on our desire to reach that all-important midpoint of our day. It's fitting that he uses music from Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1999), with its steady disco beat adding "suspense" even to the ensuing non-Run Lola Run clips...

...and then noon finally hits...and The Clock just about explodes in sounds of alarms and images of clocks, seemingly one for each second. That stretch may be just about the most joyous moment I've experienced in a movie theater all year! (I do hope to get a chance, before this current run of The Clock is over, to see what he does for midnight.)

Christopher Walken in Pulp Fiction

The only other comment I have to offer regarding this particular three-and-a-half-hour stretch of The Clock regards clips used (and let's face it, one of the most appealing aspects of Marclay's video for us cinephiles comes in playing "spot-the-reference" games, though that's definitely not its only appeal). For one thing: It is during this section that Marclay includes the monologue Christopher Walken delivers in Pulp Fiction (1994) about the origin of the watch that Butch Coolidge values so highly. Personally, I always thought the punchline to this speech was pretty puerile (if you don't know it by now, then your head is clearly under some pop-culture rock), so I can't say I partook in the delighted laughter this moment garnered from most of the audience.

On a more positive note, a cut from Humphrey Bogart to Idris Elba—two actors who have made reputations taking us pretty deeply into tough guys—was pretty awesome, I must say.

IV. 8 a.m. - 11:04 a.m.

Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction

Speaking of Pulp Fiction: At around 8:17 a.m. or so, Marclay includes the clip of Jimmy going off on Jules in a panic fearing what will happen if his wife Bonnie happens upon their corpse-cleanup operation. Regardless of the fact that Marclay cuts out all of Jimmy's "dead nigger storage" dialogue within that scene, thus technically violating the "real time" of Tarantino's film, I also note that just a few minutes earlier, Marclay included this exterior shot of the Hawthorne Grill...

...the diner that Jules and Vincent eat in after they've cleaned up the bloody mess in their car. So basically, Marclay placed a shot that, chronologically in its source material, took place after that scene, and placed it before that scene in his video. 

There's an even more flagrant instance of this kind of fudging in the way Marclay breaks up the sequence seen above from Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably (1977). The sequence in question is one in which two of its main characters are riding a bus, and Bresson throws in a montage of rear-view mirrors, hands clutching railings, feet stepping off the bus and so on—basically, a montage of everything except bodies and faces. (Consider it a modern-day variant of that abstracted joust in his previous film Lancelot of the Lake.) Marclay uses a snippet from this montage sometime during the 8 a.m. hour as part of his own montage of movie characters on their way to their day jobs. If memory serves, however, Marclay already used a different part of this sequence much later in his video—sometime within the early afternoon hours, during my 2:37 p.m. - 6 p.m. viewing session! But in the film, this happened, one assumes, in one stretch of time, not across two separate incidents!

Is Marclay "cheating" here? I'm inclined to think of this kind of thing as an indication of the poetic license Marclay feels the freedom to take even within his self-imposed "concept" for the work. There were already indications of this in my previous experiences with The Clock, as I suggested in discussing that Miami Vice scene above: clips here and there that didn't technically have a timepiece in it, but which made for a fitting emotional/thematic prelude to another clip or series of clips that did have timepieces in it. He's interested in making those kinds of intuitive connections in the way he strings clips together more than he is in producing a well-oiled machine. Besides, not everyone will have that same familiarity with the source materials and will thus be able to enjoy those clips in Marclay's repurposed context, free of prior knowledge. (On the other hand, I can't say having such prior knowledge necessarily enhances The Clock; if anything, it may detract from it, depending on your perspective.)

After that aforementioned Pulp Fiction clip, Marclay indulges in a, to my mind less problematic, bit of manipulation via sound editing as he allows the soundtrack of that clip to continue, with the sound dialed way down, as he moves onto his next clip, of a girl waking up and getting out of bed. It's as if the girl was overhearing the argument in Pulp Fiction from her closed-door bedroom; it most certainly is not in Tarantino's film. Yeah, it's perhaps a bit cutesy, but also I think it speaks to a kind of democratizing spirit underpinning Marclay's project. In his Alternate Cinema World, all films are equal; whatever the time zone, time period or setting of the individual films, they are all united by that one grand constant in all of our lives: Time Itself.

***

 

Thus, so far, I have seen almost half of The Clock. How much more of Marclay's work will I be able to see before its current Lincoln Center Festival run ends on Aug. 1? Keep on watching this space...

Watching The Clock: Introduction / I. 9:45 p.m.-11:30 p.m.

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

INTRODUCTION

 
I remember the time I first heard about Christian Marclay's The Clock: February of last year, just one day before it ended its blockbuster run at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Manhattan's art-dominated Chelsea district. That sounds like such an awesome idea, I remember thinking to myself. Why didn't I hear about this before???

The idea, by the way? The Clock is a video installation in which the Swiss-American visual artist amassed thousands upon thousands of film and television clips and assembled them into a real-time, 24-hour-long collage in which each scene corresponds to the actual time of day in which it is occurring in real life. So, for instance, if you were watching Marclay's work at, say, 4:15 a.m., during that minute you would most likely see images of clocks, watches and other timepieces onscreen indicating that it was indeed 4:15 a.m. And so on.

What, that doesn't sound like a deliriously awesome feat to you? It sure did to me...but, when I realized that I had only one day left to go see it at the Paula Cooper Gallery and no time on that one day to fit it in, I vividly remember the regretful feelings I had, in addition to the big question that loomed in my mind: Would I ever be able to have another chance to see this again?

A year and a half later, guess what? The Clock is back in New York for an encore engagement! This time, instead of at a gallery in Chelsea, Marclay's massive video piece is unfurling in the Upper West Side, at a David Rubinstein Atrium specially repurposed for this event.

A friend of mine back in my old East Brunswick, N.J., stomping grounds is gearing himself up for the spectatorial feat of sitting through all 24 hours of The Clock in one marathon sit. (He's not the first one to do it; these two guys have already pulled off this coup.) I was actually considering joining him in this extreme movie-watching endurance test until I remembered previous commitments I had already made. So it looks like I'll be taking in Marclay's video the way I imagine most people will be approaching it: piecemeal, at various times of the day and night.

I'd certainly like to try to see all of The Clock. Whether that will happen will depend on things like, you know, life, time, previous commitments, in-the-moment inclinations, and so on. I will do my damnedest to try to pull it off, however...and I figure, maybe blogging about the quest will give me motivation to make the extra effort. So here I am.

I. 9:45 p.m. - 11:30 p.m.

The line in front of the David Rubinstein Atrium for The Clock on Saturday night

My Clock-watching journey began more or less on a whim Saturday night. Astral Converted, the Trisha Brown-choreographed dance piece that I saw at Park Avenue Armory that evening, was only about an hour long, and since it started at 7:30 p.m., it was over by about 8:30. In my world, at least, that's considered an "early" time for which to end a day. So I decided to take a cross-town MTA bus to get to the David Rubinstein Atrium and wait on the line to see however much I felt like seeing in The Clock, which was running continuously from Friday at 8 a.m. to Sunday at 10 p.m. (during its run from this past Friday all the way to Aug. 1, it'll be running all day and all night on weekends).

Because I invited a friend to see it with me, I waited for him before I got on the line at around 9:10 or so. As you might have guessed, I ended up waiting a little more than half an hour before I finally was able to get into the Atrium to see The Clock. According to the Atrium's Twitter feed (@LCAtrium), that was about par for the course for the wait times this past weekend; I can only imagine how much more insane the wait times will be as it nears the end of its run!

So at around 9:45 p.m. my friend and I was in. We weren't immediately seated in one of the comfy couches offered for Clock-watchers, though; instead, we sat on a bench towards the back, waiting for the possibility of spots in one of those couches opening up for both of us. Eventually, a couple of adjacent spots did open up...but by then, I, for one, was already fully immersed; a change of "scenery," so to speak, made little difference to the experience.

My snap reaction to entering Marclay's world was one of confusion: Wait, I thought this was going to be, like, images of one timepiece after another. Why are these clips going on longer than I was expecting? The Clock, it turns out, isn't just about running images of timepieces together, as I had assumed going in; Marclay also wants to include what movie/TV characters are actually doing during a given moment in time.

Night on Earth (1991)

What are most movie/TV characters doing during 9:45 p.m. - 11:30 p.m.? Many of them, it turns out, are getting ready for bed. For some of these characters, adventures are just about to begin (for instance, Marclay includes a clip from Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991): the opening of the second New York-set taxicab episode, with Giancarlo Esposito loudly expressing his frustration at being unable to successfully hail a cab). Others are still hard at work—journalists, for one thing (thus an inclusion of a clip from Ron Howard's The Paper (1994) during a "Eureka" moment Michael Keaton's newspaper-editor character has in the newsroom). And, of course, FBI agents like that beloved duo Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are still doing their investigating late into the evening (yes, Marclay has seen it fit to throw in a brief shout-out to The X-Files sometime during 11-11:30 p.m.). 

But it isn't all just normal, everyday cinematic activities Marclay includes. What better time for some of the ripest of horror-genre horrors to flower than during nightfall? In one memorable juxtaposition, Marclay puts together two different clips of two different movie characters falling prey to swinging saws while chained to gurneys. This moment is not only an amusingly intuitive bit of editing, but it could also be seen as a kind of implicit satirizing of a popular horror-movie trope.

Based on the 105 minutes of The Clock that I saw, at least...well, sure, The Clock can certainly be described as a "love letter to cinema"—but how so, exactly? Through his editing juxtapositions, Marclay seems to be trying to paint a kind of alternate world as presented through the movies. How does Cinema as a whole get through 24 hours normally? As is surely the case in Reality, a wide variety of things happen in Cinema on any given day. The Clock is, in many ways, an epic tribute to cinema's ability to encompass the full range of human experience. That it sometimes also functions as visual film criticism, as in the bit of editing I cite above, only increases its awe-inspiring richness.

What happens in the world of Cinema at 4 a.m., when most real people, I imagine, are fast asleep? How about lunchtime or dinnertime? What about when the clock strikes midnight? I've only seen, like, 7% of The Clock, and I'm already dazzled enough that I'm chomping at the bit to see what other insights and playful juxtapositions Marclay has in store for us.

Stay tuned for more as The Clock, and my experience of it, ticks on!