Go See ‘The Clock,’ The 24-Hour Film That By no means Ends

Every movie is totally different; totally different tales, totally different actors, totally different characters, totally different languages, totally different genres. The nice fixed in all of them is time. The time it takes to make them. The time it takes to look at them. It is the uniting consider each single movie, as it’s in all of our lives.

Onscreen characters can generally journey by way of time or cease it completely, and the creators of movies can use enhancing to change the stream of time. But for the viewers within the theater, the clock by no means stops ticking. That’s one of many ideas effervescent by way of The Clock a one-of-a-kind, 24-hour video essay.

Director Christian Marclay (plus a workforce of researchers) compiled hundreds of movie clips involving clocks, watches, and references to particular times of day, then edited them collectively right into a chronological loop that additionally capabilities as a working clock. Whatever time it’s whenever you watch The Clock, that’s the time it’s onscreen.

Marclay developed The Clock over a interval of 5 years and first confirmed it publicly in 2010. It’s at present on show at MoMA — however solely in the course of the museum’s working hours. (They held one 24-hour screening of the entire thing again in December. It bought out immediately.)

I missed The Clock the handful of times it’s performed in New York City up to now, so I was decided to catch it this time. The screening room the place it’s on show in MoMA isn’t massive, and accommodates simply three rows of cramped Ikea couches. Once the room reaches capability, you need to be a part of a digital queue and wait for somebody inside to go away earlier than you get your flip. Once you’re inside, you possibly can watch so long as you need. But if you need to stand up for a loo or meals break, you’ve received to attend on line once more if you wish to return in. Hoping to keep away from a big wait time, I confirmed up at MoMA proper they opened at 10:30 AM. Thankfully, I used to be in a position to stroll proper in.

A movie compiled completely from snippets of movie scenes involving the passage of time may sound boring or repetitive. (The girl who sat down subsequent to me turned to her companion and whispered “Wait, this is it?” when the fact of what she’d signed up for absolutely dawned on her.) In reality, the 100 minutes I spent watching The Clock handed quicker than any others I’ve spent in 40+ years of going to the movies (or to large black rooms stuffed with Ikea furnishings). I couldn’t imagine how rapidly 10:30 changed into 12 PM. If I didn’t have a job and obligations I might have sat there till MoMA kicked me out. (If MoMA didn’t kick folks out once they closed, I might have gladly sat there for twenty-four hours.) Paradoxically, plainly calling consideration to the passage of time in a cinematic context solely makes it transfer quicker.

Certainly The Clock accommodates its share of superficial pleasures. It’s enjoyable whenever you immediately acknowledge a movie.(Some of the movies that appeared within the excerpt I watched: The Breakfast Club, Once Upon a Time within the West, Big Daddy, The 400 Blows, The Bank Job, The Game, Sideways, Falling Down, The Quick and the Dead, High Noon, Bad Santa, Easy Rider, and Dressed to Kill.) I additionally noticed a clip from one tv present, which felt a bit of bit like a betrayal of Marclay’s pact with his viewers. Then once more, on condition that the clip in query was from the episode of The Twilight Zone entitled “Time Enough at Last,” maybe its thematic hyperlink to The Clock’s central conceit was sturdy sufficient to benefit its inclusion.

It’s additionally enjoyable whenever you don’t acknowledge Marclay’s movie picks, which occurs very often in a video essay comprised of some 12,000 movie excerpts. A viewing of The Clock is certain to encourage a viewer to go monitor down (or at the very least Google) among the stranger scenes. As quickly as I left the theater, I regarded up the sequence wherein a person climbs out onto the face of Big Ben to delay a bomb explosion. (It’s from the 1978 remake of The Thirty Nine Steps, directed by Don Sharp.) Even stripped of context, that sequence was suspenseful; watching a person dangle lots of of ft within the air will at all times make your palms sweat, even for those who don’t know who the person is or why he’s up there. Funny how that — and all movies — work, one thing you get loads of time to ponder watching The Clock.

But there’s much more to The Clock than that. Its construction calls consideration to how time works, each on and off display; how so many thrillers use a literal ticking clock as a storytelling crutch, and the way so many others use it to boost a punchline. Maclay features a ton of scenes that function recognizable actors, whose presence has a stabilizing impact on our consideration. (A well-recognized face in a movie immediately aligns us with that character even when, as within the case of The Clock, their actions and motivations are unclear.)

Recurring cameos from well-known movie stars additionally permit the viewer to ponder the impact of the passage of time on the human physique. In the feature-length section I noticed this week, Charles Bronson popped up three totally different times at three completely totally different ages; as soon as as a younger hunk, as soon as as a weathered, assured star, and as soon as as a fading motion hero. Photography captures a second in time, however for those who string sufficient of these moments collectively you begin to see time stream and ebb and slip by way of the proverbial hourglass.

Sadly, I might solely keep for 100 minutes of The Clock earlier than I needed to give up my seat to a different prepared participant on this illuminating and barely hypnotic experiment. As I received as much as exit the theater, the movie shifted to a horrible site visitors accident from a movie I didn’t acknowledge. Then all of the sudden Humphrey Bogart was onscreen; continuity enhancing gave the phantasm that he had regarded out the window in his movie to spy that automobile accident someway.

Whatever occurred subsequent, I don’t know. I left, and The Clock stored going. Time marches on.

The Clock is on view on the Museum of Modern Art in New York City by way of February 17.