Christian Marclay’s 'The Clock'

I went to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock at the LACMA a few days ago. Screened from noon on Saturday March 24th to noon on Sunday March 25th, The Clock is a 24-hour, single-channel montage created from thousands of clips from cinema from its beginning to the present. Each clip is connected with something related to clocks, and synchronised to the viewer’s real time.

Time marked the shift from one scene to the next. It was conveyed through different things like clocks, watches, sundials, towers, speech, horns, etc., and different channels like audio, video and suggestiveness. The different ways time was told was one of the things that kept the film so interesting throughout.

Another novel aspect of The Clock that I had never before experienced (and I think I always wondered how this would be like) was that the time in the film was the same as the time in real life. Although the Bing Theatre was pitch dark, you could tell what time it was outside based on what was going on in the film (and I checked the time on my phone to confirm, just in case; the movie time was accurate).

The film had scenes of various famous characters, actors, scenes, eras, films, from the classic films to the contemporary ones, all connected in their interactions with clocks. I am not sure whether I found this a celebration of cinema or Hollywood though. I think the celebration was more for the clocks in cinema, or rather how clocks were communicated, which in turn has broader meaning in cinema and communication design. It seems like a great accomplishment by Marclay who managed to complete this task of selecting, cutting and clipping all these videos together to make something 24 hours long. The variety in the way the time in each scene was captured by each director was refreshing, reminding the viewer of the different degrees of creativity that spans the length of cinema’s history. Marclays seems like he has an eye for such things. It was funny how I was seeing the principles of design like balance and proportion in many of the scenes, from those that were shot decades ago to barely a few months ago.

I feel kinda bad though: I saw it for about two hours and I couldn’t take it anymore because I got irritable and frustrated for some reason. But I guess I’m lucky to have experienced it.

Rather unrelated, but if you’re into design and film things, watch L'eclisse by Michaelangelo Antonioni. Every scene is shot like a work of art and it’s awesome :O.