Go Now Quick Before Time Runs Out

As in Life, Timing Is Everything in the Movies

 

Timepieces of all kinds are the stars of the Christian Marclay video “The Clock,” at the Paula Cooper Gallery.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: February 3, 2011 The New York Times

Christian Marclay, the wizardly visual artist, composer and appropriator has done it again, and then some. “The Clock,” his latest excursion into extreme editing and radical sampling, is a 24-hour timepiece that ticks off the minutes — and sometimes the seconds — of a full day, using thousands of brilliantly spliced-together film clips from all kinds of movies. All of them feature clocks or watches or people announcing the time, or more obliquely conjure up the passage of time.

Thus “The Clock” is also a 24-hour valentine to the movies. It samples film from around the world and throughout the last century, from silent movies to the present. It is like a history of film for our ADD times, or the greatest movie trailer ever made, as well as the ultimate work of appropriation art, a genre that owes so much to the movies.

It might horrify movie buffs. Watching it, I kept wondering what the late, great, film critic Pauline Kael would make of it — and also how many of the often-obscure scenes she would recognize. Yet it conveys an almost unbelievably visceral sense not only of the historic sweep of the medium — the most pervasive, avidly consumed of modern art forms — but also of the passions that making movies requires, not to mention those they express and inspire.

A labor of some two years, “The Clock” was hailed as a masterpiece when it made its debut at the White Cube gallery in London last fall. Now it is ensconced in a theaterlike installation at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, where it should not be missed.

That timepieces crop up everywhere in movies is no surprise: Film was the first visual art form to capture and package time, and every movie is an elaborate manipulation of time. Time is the form and content, and, above all, the material. Moviemakers have developed endless devices to make us aware of time’s passage in their films, and to hold us in thrall, or suspense, within that artificial time — while we forget about the real kind outside the theater.

Central to the power of “The Clock” is its strict adherence to real time and its manic compression of movie time. When a clock on the screen reads 11:15 in the morning, it does so at exactly 11:15 in the morning Eastern Standard Time. The same for 11:15 in the evening, as can be experienced on weekends, when the gallery stays open and runs the piece continuously from 10 a.m. Friday to 6 p.m. Saturday. Otherwise it tells time during regular gallery hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

But while “The Clock” is accurately parsing real time, movie time goes nuts, rushing past in an exhilarating, surprisingly addictive flood. A door opened in one movie leads into another movie. Questions asked in one will be answered in the next or the next after that.

And there are, of course, clocks galore. This includes clocks of the wall, mantel, grandfather and bedside-table variety; clocks on steeples, towers, dashboards and bombs; and clocks in train stations, shop windows and spaceships as well as the occasional hourglass and sundial. And then there are watches, which are smashed, pawned, handed down from father to son, and used as weapons. (All the James Bonds are here.) They slide down the wrists of murder victims, turn up at crime scenes and even provide forensic evidence.

It is hard to say why this panoply of timepieces and plot twists is so gripping, but it is. After watching “The Clock” from around 7:30 p.m. last Friday to past midnight, I dragged myself away, despite the desire to stay and see exactly how the time would be told, how different hours would be rung in.

In addition to asking the time in a full range of emotional tones, people check, wind or synchronize their watches, shake and listen to them to see if they are working. They argue about what time it is. With mounting tension, they mutter or shriek that time is running out. They pace, they fidget, they point furiously at clocks. Occasionally they pause to talk about the meaning of time with a capital T, segments that briefly slow the piece to a snail’s pace, seemingly on purpose. Live time. Don’t discuss it.

The hours usually arrive with crescendos of sound and image. High noon brings a bit of “High Noon.” At 4 in the afternoon, Robert Redford, as the sensitive baseball player in “The Natural,” shatters the face of the scoreboard clock with a home-run hit. Starting at 5 o’clock, multiple images of quitting time unfold. (Time clocks here.) At 8 in the evening a succession of orchestras start playing; theater curtains rise, or don’t. At midnight, Big Ben — of which we’ve already seen plenty — explodes, and Orson Welles is skewered on the sword of a life-size knight on a giant cuckoo clock in “The Stranger.” Amid all this, Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in “Gone With the Wind” rushes to comfort his small daughter, wakened by a nightmare — signaling the advent of dream time.

There is also television time, specified by moments from “The Simpsons,” “The Office” (British version), “Sex and the City” and, most memorably, “The Twilight Zone.” Sorry Trekkies, but for me, William Shatner will forever be the guy on the airliner reduced to babbling by the gremlin that only he could see dancing on the wing. He’s here, but I left before discovering if the gremlin shows up in the wee hours.

Mr. Marclay frequently sprinkles in several clips from the same movie, for example, “The Time Machine.” (The 1960 version with Rod Taylor and Alan Young.) The key moments of “Laura,” with its Rococo hall clock and murderous newspaper columnist, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) are all here. Bit by bit, you’ll also see mini-retrospectives of actresses like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, aging in real time as they pass from role to role. Single scenes are interrupted by segments from other movies, intensifying their suspense and making us aware of the shot-by-shot approach to the time-related denouement.

It is fun to try to name the movies, the actors and the few TV shows as they flash past, but the piece is much more than a trivia contest. It conveys the oppressive weight of time and a cinematic version of life, encapsulated in an encyclopedic array of human interactions played out in snippets of emotion and plot — love affairs, crimes, hostage crises, death and destruction. The rapid-fire labor-intensiveness of Mr. Marclay’s effort also emphasizes the laborious, collaborative nature of films — that they are themselves elaborate clockworks of actors, directors, cinematographers, set and costume designers and makeup artists.

The presentation at the Paula Cooper gallery reiterates the synthetic nature of “The Clock.” The combination of carpeted floors, walls hung with velvet curtains and a dozen long couches lined up in four rows, with the screen high and large on the wall, evocatively conflates living room, screening room and movie theater, while even hinting at drive-in movies (the couches as parked cars).

Given that Mr. Marclay is known for artworks that incorporate music in numerous ways and often serve as musical scores, it is not surprising that “The Clock” is as much an intensely rhythmic aural compilation as a visual one, full of racing and swelling music, ticking sounds (of course) and rushing footsteps, hooves, trains and cars. And there are also recurring shots of records on turntables, unspooling linear time much the way a film reel does. Similar to the endless clock faces, these might almost be taken as portraits of the artist; they evoke especially his role as an early adapter of turntablism, the record-spinning, music-sampling technique that, starting with hip-hop, has become a staple of popular music.

Watching “The Clock,” I found myself wondering if Mr. Marclay has a computer for a brain. (He had six assistants culling movies for time-related sequences but apparently did all the editing himself.) The sense of his mind at work, piecing everything together — thinking endlessly of time and timing, of sight and sound — is one of the work’s constants. But so is a kind of anonymity: a diffuse, inclusive love of movies, the joy of movies, which he spreads before us in an immense, ceaselessly moving, pell-mell, two-timing feast.

“The Clock” by Christian Marclay is on view through Feb. 19 at the Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 West 21st Street, Chelsea; (212) 255-1105; paulacoopergallery.com.