The Clock | Christian Marclay | Twenty-Four Hour View Cycle | by Ric

The Clock | Christian Marclay | Twenty-Four Hour View Cycle | By Ric... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190379150457658709...

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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT SEPTEMBER 28, 2011 Twenty-Four Hour View Cycle

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By RICHARD B. WOODWARD Boston

A superb movie involves us so convincingly in an illusory world that the more prosaic one never enters our thoughts. The dream factories of Hollywood build stories that offer a brief escape from everyday cares. Once we start looking at our watches rather than the images on the screen, the spell is broken. The director no longer has our undivided attention.

In his profoundly captivating video work "The Clock," Christian Marclay wants us to see and hear the relentless tick-tock going on within the eidetic space of the movies. The thousands of shots he has spliced together from the history of cinema depict little else but scenes of characters checking the time, fretting about it, or surrounded by bell towers or digital clock radios that ground the action Enlarge Image Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Paula Cooper Gallery/White on the screen within the cycle of a fictive day Cube/Todd-White Art Photography and night. Christian Marclay's movie collage is literally and figuratively a timepiece. The result is a functional collage that is figuratively and literally a timepiece. All the images and sounds that the artist (and his six assistants) have scavenged from the archives of world cinema refer to a particular minute and hour. These are then synchronized to the time zone in each venue where it is presented.

For instance, the bitter flashback in "Casablanca" of Rick (Humphrey Bogart) waiting like a fool in the rain with Sam (Dooley Wilson) for Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), so the trio could flee the Nazi occupation of Paris, includes a shot of a clock on the train platform that reads 4:56. The audience for "The Clock" watches this scene, too, at exactly 4:56 p.m. Enlarge Image Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Paula Cooper Gallery/White Cube/Todd-White Art Photography Every minute of the 24-hour video is Christian Marclay's 'The Clock.' constructed with this same precision so that we experience it as a cinephile's mix-tape as well as a working chronometer. There is no The Clock need to check your watch during a Museum of Fine Arts, Boston screening; it tells you the correct time Through Oct. 10 outside the walls, day or night.

Art audiences have been enthralled by "The Clock," even though few have seen the work in its entirety. Crowds lined up around the block when it was shown this spring at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a similar response this summer. (Mr. Marclay made an edition of six along with two artist proofs; the Museum of Modern Art just announced that it has purchased one of these copies.)

Over the weekend of Sept. 16-18, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which co-owns its copy with the National Gallery of Canada, had three special 24-hour screenings and will also be featuring the work synchronized to its normal hours through Oct. 10. There will be one final 24-hour showing on Oct. 9. It was here that I sat through more than seven hours—from 3:45

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p.m. to 8 p.m. on a Friday and from 9 a.m. to noon on a Saturday. (This was a longer commitment than the typical MFA attendees I shared sofas with, most of whom walked out after less than an hour.)

Having viewed less than one-third of the whole, I'm reluctant to pronounce "The Clock" a masterpiece, as other critics have done. But from my sample I feel safe in making a few generalizations about what it does and doesn't achieve.

Among its many virtues is the way it demonstrates (and embodies) the unique qualities of film and video as linear and temporal forms of art. The duration of a projected image is as basic to its "nature" as the substance (celluloid, tape, computer chip) on which it's imprinted. A movie's "running time" is essential to its being. Mr. Marclay has used this structural element to build an ingenious and self-reflexive mechanism.

"The Clock" instructs as it entertains. Only after several hours did I realize how much anxiety about time permeates the movie experience and modernity itself. The numerous panicky characters consulting their watches may be due to lazy screenwriters and directors, who rely on this cutaway shot to inject urgency into a plot.

But the prevalence of such scenes suggests the motif may have a deeper meaning. The industrial age was the first to put time in harness, and Mr. Marclay amply documents that. The dread of forgetting to be somewhere, of arriving late to school or the office, was a common 20th-century nightmare. Clocks are omnipresent in cinematic depictions of railroad stations, banks, airports, public-school classrooms, typing pools and in factories where workers punch time cards.

Except for Quasimodo (Charles Laughton) ringing the noontime bells in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," there are almost no snippets here portraying the Middle Ages, and only a few westerns. Several hourglasses make guest appearances as symbols of the era long before ours.

A surprising number of scenes express rebellion against time's dictates, whether it's the foster child (Michel Terrazon) in "L'enfance nue" who bangs his new wristwatch against the toilet, or Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) in "The Natural," the tragic hero whose mammoth homerun smashes the scoreboard clock at 4:41 p.m. and expresses a wish to transcend time, if not destroy it altogether.

There is hardly a minute in "The Clock" that is not laden with some kind of worry. The hours from 9 a.m. to noon show characters enjoying leisurely breakfasts and wake-up sex. But, at least in the history of American, English and French film, mornings are also the time for funerals, bank heists and prison executions. In "I Want to Live!" Barbara Graham (Susan Hayward) dies in the gas chamber at 11:37 a.m.

"The Clock" is both a triumph of digital editing and of "fair use" copyright law. It cost Mr. Marclay two years and a crippling injury to his mouse-clicking hands to assemble these clips. But at least he did not have to pay for them. Only the art world could reward this kind of obsession. Any commercial theater showing a movie with a running time of 24 hours would soon be out of business.

The piece has affinities with "Artist" (2000), Tracey Moffatt's droll compilation of the clichés that film and television have relied on when portraying the lives of painters and sculptors. Neither work demands much of its audience except that we sit back and wait to identify a beloved actor in a half-remembered part. A strong backside, not a background in cinema studies, is the key to comprehending Mr. Marclay's video in its totality.

"The Clock" further strengthens Mr. Marclay's philosophic ties to John Cage. Both began as musicians and then extended their reach into other arts. Time is the prime material out of which their work is fashioned. Cage's "Organ 2/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)" a solo piece for organ designed to be played over centuries in the Church of St. Burchardi in Haberstadt, Germany—the latest version is not supposed to end until the year 2640—stands behind Mr. Marclay's marathon project. Available to WSJ.com Subscribers The popularity of "The Clock" should not be held against its creator. Mr. Marclay has taken one of the most objective measurements humans have ever devised, one that now strictly governs Disability Cases our working lives, and found poetry and mystery inside hard numbers. Delayed to Meet Goals Each hour of "The Clock" has a unique rhythm. I am eager to go back and sit through midnight to 5 a.m., times that have already become audience favorites. What's not to like about a movie Some Social Security where the star, turning up more often than Cary Grant or Liv Ullman, is Big Ben? Viewing it for workers were told to set aside disability cases this 15 minutes or 15 hours is time profitably spent. Amid Christie week, with the slowdown Clamor, Positions allowing managers to boost Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York. their performance numbers Face Scrutiny for the coming fiscal year. JOIN THE DISCUSSION MORE IN 1 Comment, add yours Arts & Entertainment »

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