The Clock (at the Walker Art Center)

Like many works of experimental art, Christian Marclay's 24-hour long film, "The Clock," is based on a gimmick,.  But, in the case of "The Clock" (2010), the gimmick is ingenious, simple, and, even, profound.  Here is the concept:  "The Clock" is an anthology of film clips, seamlessly edited together, and featuring innumerable shots that show timepieces.  The anthology is 24 hours long and projected so that the time displayed on the screen is the same time experienced by the audience.  If a harried mobster consults his watch and the camera shows the time as 10:45, an audience member looking at his or her cellphone would see the exact same time displayed on the phone's screen.  The effect is startling:  the coincidence between the real time experienced by the audience as measured by their timepieces and the images of clocks and watches (and snippets of dialogue:  "It's about 11:00") projected on the screen dramatizes the passage of time -- somehow, the film makes time's steady march seems suspenseful, even, melodramatic.  As you watch the film, you experience time as a remorseless machine, an infernal device that manifests itself through sullen waiting, synchronized watches, being either too late or too early, a variety of small suspenseful micro-narratives:  will we reach the airport on time?  when does the burglary or heist begin?  how long can we tarry at this place?  What is this meaning of the silent man standing on the sidewalk and gazing, as if hypnotized, at the clock on the building across the street?  I attended the film at the Walker Art Center between 10:35 and 11:40 in the morning.  The movie is shown in a darkened room with big, comfortable sofas arranged in rows.  The showing in which I participated (and, for some reason, the viewers have a sense of participation in the film) was part of the Minnesota premiere of the picture, a 24 hour screening that had began at 5:00 pm the preceding evening and was scheduled to conclude at 5:00 pm on that Sunday afternoon.  The movie is brilliantly edited and, about a third of the shots don't involve clocks or timepieces or dialogue about time -- these images knit the shots featuring clocks together and provide tiny and surreal mini-narratives:  Angie Dickinson is planning to go to the museum, but first she must see her doctor, Michael Caine (Brian DePalma's "Dressed to Kill").  The doctor hears a sound and looks out the window:  the film cuts to a shot of a train-station.  Some people are looking up at a big clock that displays the time.  One of the people takes a call on her cell-phone.  We see a man in black and white film stock standing in a phone booth, nervously looking at his watch and grimacing. The next black and white image shows a warden waiting for a call on a phone.  Cut to shots of people preparing for an execution in a prison's gas chamber.  A priest reads the Bible.  Cut to a funeral procession of men and women solemnly carrying a casket from an old church, the procession marching across a courtyard under a large clock that tells.us the time.  Sometimes, the footage is arranged to simulate narratives between the different films sampled to make the mix -- eyelines are matched between different movies:  a man racing to get to the train-station ends up, instead, in an airport where we see planes taking off and landing according to schedules shown on big screens that display the time.  In other cases, the soundtrack overlaps between scenes to create the illusion of continuity.  A country-western singer croons "Always late with your kisses..." while the camera slowly tracks away from a huge close-up of a man's sinister eyes, then, a shot of a dangling crucifix, birds fluttering into the air, then, a corpse with a clock visible in the background of the morgue.  A young Johnny Cash with a wolf-man haircut threatens a woman and says that he will kill her in ten minutes if his demands -- which we aren't shown -- have not been met.  We see Marlon Brando arguing with Sophia Loren about her eating breakfast too slowly; Adam Sandler says that there's still time to get breakfast at McDonald's; Stan Laurel marches toward the camera in a 1930's hospital, with the time displayed over his shoulder, then, we see Johnny Cash again threatening the woman with his gun, the hostage's husband bellowing something over the phone while a clock is ticking behind him.  On the evidence of the film, the period of time between 10:35 and 11:40 involves lots of people rising late from bed with hangovers, men and women concerned that they have overslept, lovers cuddling in the morning sunshine, lots of people rushing to airports and train-stations, a church service conducted in Swedish (from Bergman's "Winter Light"), Susan Hayward being executed in the gas chamber with elaborate preparations intercut with images of Japanese businessmen conferring under a huge abstract clock, a sick woman languishing in a hospital bed, some gangsters synchronizing their watches in preparation for a big heist, then, the gas chamber again, the film remorselessly returning to that event.  The picture induces a weird sensation of urgency in the audience -- people are always anxiously looking at their watches and Big Ben, probably the most photographed landmark in all of cinema, hovers over many of the streets, long vistas of pedestrians and traffic that always seem to be menaced by a ticking time-bomb, an explosion set to go off at some specific but unknown time.  Since the viewer recognizes many of the clips, you watch the picture with a curious sense of deja vu -- we have been  in this moment of time before.  We have seen how this comes out.   I suspect that the film would be impossible to watch after a couple of hours, but it certainly held my attention for the 65 minutes that I attended the showing.  Movies that I recognized that were "sampled" by "The Clock" were TV episodes of Columbo, "The Innocents," "Bad Santa," "L'Avventura," Tarkovsky's "Solaris" (Shots of traffic on the Moscow freeways),  "High Noon" (of course), Kris Kristoffferson as Billy the Kid in Sam Peckinpah's Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, "Il Divo," "Sid and Nancy", "The Breakfast Club", "Berlin Alexanderplatz."  In one scene, Peter Fonda rips off his watch and pitches it into the dust.  The dropped timepiece shows us that it is 11:38 -- this is a scene from "Easy Rider".  A man shouts at other men, hysterically crying out:  "You're just sitting here uselessly as your lives are ticking away...." A beautiful woman who has risen late from her bed of love is luxuriating in her bath.  A corpse that has just been autopsied rests on a slab.  Too late...or too early:  this is the human condition.