Brooklyn Rail: "Keeping Time with Christian Marclay’s The Clock"

It’s not as if I had time on my hands, but when I was approached by the Brooklyn Rail to be the Guest Critic for the May issue, I relented. “Ok!” I said, “if I can do it on Christian Marclay’s The Clock” and have twenty-four writers, each to cover an hour.” There have been many single-author pieces on The Clock, but I wanted to juxtapose different voices, expertise, and ages (spanning six decades) in response to its montage fabric and temporal structure. Call it “chronographic criticism,” a time-based approach for time-based media. It adds up to a cumulative coverage of the entire twenty-four hour work. Yes, the structure submits to the diabolical demands of the industrial clock, but such are the creative constrictions of time. As Alfred Hitchcock drawls towards 4:00 a.m.: “We must start on it. We must finish on it. And, appropriately enough, we occasionally kill it.”

Our contributors include historians, critics, curators, and filmmakers, as well as a watch designer, sound artist, neuroscientist, obituarist, tennis champion, and an expert on artificial intelligence. As the essays reveal, professional insights are leavened by visceral responses and contemplations of mortality, as was Marclay’s want. The Clock seems to function as “everybody’s autobiography.” The auteur’s own self references circle around midnight, with the appearance of a pocket watch felicitously engraved with his initials, “C.M” and a heightened flurry of rotating LPs and clips of back-and-forth telephone talk, both alluding to his previous work. Many contributors recall exactly when and where they first saw it. Marclay himself accounted for its immediacy and staying power: “You become part of the piece with your life, your own story, your own schedule.” He made those remarks in 2011 when he won the Golden Lion for The Clock at the Venice Biennale. That was where I first viewed it with my husband and two young sons, who were enthralled. A year later, twelve people were killed and fifty-eight injured by gunfire at the movie theatre in Aurora Colorado during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. I have rarely gone to a commercial movie theatre in the US since. One of the things I appreciate about The Clock and the controlled conditions in which Marclay insists it be shown, is that I can worry less about getting shot.

Gun violence occupies many of the thousands of scenes in The Clock. It's not that Marclay is trigger happy. His source clippings comprise the history of the most successful American movie genres—film noir, Hitchcock thrillers, Westerns, war epics, spy intrigues, and urban crime dramas—and the paramount role of guns in agonizing plotlines (a reality first captured in his 2007 film montage Crossfire). What Marclay makes explicit is how American cinema reflects and encourages the country’s obsession with firearms, heroic outlaws, and its civil liberties-eroding Second Amendment. Time’s progress is the inevitable, natural agent of death, as we see with aging on the screen; filmmakers have ingeniously symbolized this antagonistic role of time in human affairs with vignettes of death by actual clocks—persons impaled by clock hands, crushed by clocktower gears, decapitated by razor edged pendulums, strangled by wires sprung from watch faces. But gun deaths violate the biological clock–they cut life short, kill before one’s time. In this masculine, clock-driven world of twentieth-century cinema, pocket and wristwatches frequently provide the ritualistic panacea, handed down from the once-warm bodies of the fathers to the sons, heirlooms both sentimental and practical that guarantee patriarchal and social order.

Clocks and guns: the countdown is integral to cinematic suspense and Marclay’s own frequent strategy of building up to the hour. Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon is a synecdoche for The Clock and its appearance around midday is likely an homage to its real and diegetic ninety-minute running time. Repeated background shots with clocks, cuts to clock faces, and characters checking and announcing the time, drive the action and the anxiety over the impending arrival of the gunslinging villain on the noon train. Meanwhile, Gary Cooper is the only good man (along with one good woman) who will stand up to the threatening bully and his henchmen: the rest of the town’s citizens shrink from confrontation in fear and complacency. The controversial film was seen by many as allegory for McCarthy-era blacklisting. A favorite of Eisenhower, Reagan and Clinton, it was repeatedly screened in the White House as a panegyric to upholding the rule of law (“Wild West” style, alas). But with the lack of reasonable gun control—and the Aurora movie theater massacre (to name but one)—time was up for American democracy a while back. Readers will find much nostalgia in this issue, but perhaps The Clock is more politically loaded—and up to the minute—than we realize.

Please find the entire article on Brooklyn Rail's website.