Running time is 24 hours, and every minute is accounted for
I knew my obsession with Christian Marclay’s The Clock had gotten out of control when I starting paying attention to timepieces in other films.
At a preview screening of Frankenweenie last week, when young Victor Frankenstein’s tick tock suddenly tuckered at 8:45 p.m., I thought, “Ah! This would be great for The Clock!”
I had a similar reaction a week earlier, when Joaquin Phoenix’s drunken sailor Freddie Quell staggered past a clock reading 9:55 p.m. He didn’t notice the time, but I sure did.
I also paid more attention to the clock than the telephone in Hitchcock’s Dial Mfor Murder, now in revived 3-D at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
Marclay’s 24-hour film, screening at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery on Queen’s Quay, exerts this kind of hypnotic effect upon its beholders.
The time on screen during The Clock always matches the hour of the day. The film seeps into your consciousness, forcing you to consider how much we are all bound by time. Do we look at our watches, or do they watch us?
The Clock doesn’t simply tick along, although it does this too, with incredible fidelity. Marclay, a California-born collage artist, spent years compiling thousands of film and video clips in which time is indicated on clocks both analog and digital, from Big Ben to the tiniest ticker.
Most are exactly on time.
Others are frantically trying to catch up, just as people do. More than 100 years of cinema advance before our eyes, along with “more stars than there are in the heavens,” as MGM’s Louis B. Mayer used to boast.
Humphrey Bogart, Sophia Loren, Marlon Brandon, Laurel and Hardy, Al Pacino, the Johnnys Depp and Cash — we see them and many others tangling with time in all its vexations.
I’ve seen about seven hours of The Clock in five visits since it debuted Sept. 14 (it runs through Nov. 25). I’ve been fortunate, because the free exhibit is just a few blocks from the Star. I’ve been able to drop in at different times, without having to wait in line for a spot on one of the nine white couches that Marclay stipulates must be used in lieu of conventional theatre seats. He’s aiming for a living room experience. He succeeds.
Another bonus, for me, is that the Power Plant exhibit hasn’t yet attracted the block-long lineups that greeted The Clock during its initial runs in London and New York in 2010-11. That’s probably because it opened quietly during TIFF, and also because all the construction out in front of the building often makes it very hard to find the entrance (go in through the south doors, adjacent to Lake Ontario).
The more time you spend with The Clock, the more you realize the profound effect time has on our lives. It’s also the driving force of many a narrative, and not just the ones where the action heroes are fighting to defuse a bomb with a ticking red LED timer (oddly enough, there have been very few scenes of this).
The clips past 10 a.m. tend to show people who have slept in, and who are now frantically trying to get their days back on track, like Wile E. Coyote attempting to run back to the cliff he just ran off.
A naked couple wake up at 10:30 a.m., post-coitally, and take hits off a crack pipe before the guy realizes he has to run.
Closer to 11 a.m., Marlon Brando scolds Sophia Loren in the Charlie Chaplin-directed A Countess from Hong Kong: “You should have been up an hour ago!”
There are all kinds of admonishments like this. Marclay and his team include not just clips of film showing the correct time, but also clips where the clocks are running fast or slow, and people correct them. Time marches on, but not always in a steady parade, as we all know only too well. I often find myself looking not at the famous actors on the screen, but at the clocks in it, some of which are diabolically hidden and take a few seconds to locate. Stories take on new meaning when time becomes the essence. The scene in The Natural where Robert Redford’s baseball star hits a home run becomes important not for the bases and score attained, but for the stadium clock that the dinger accidentally destroys. Profundities issue from the mouths of the least-profound people, because they’re on the clock. “Life all comes down to a few moments. This is one of them,” says Charlie Sheen in Wall Street. Marclay plays tricks on your eyes, too. Chase scenes in subways are often from multiple films. There’s a fast cut from a man dialing a telephone to a scene in Changeling where Angelina Jolie is putting calls through an old-style switchboard. I can feel my heart starting to beat faster when the hour is about to chime, especially when it’s a significant time like noon or midnight. Then the clips seem to run faster, and people on the screen begin to look more frantic. They somehow seem less crazed after lunch. Isn’t that always the way? The more you pay attention to The Clock, the more some of its very small cheats and imperfections come to the fore. It’s billed as a collage of film clips, but Marclay also uses TV footage, from shows such as The Twilight Zone, Mission: Impossible and The Prisoner. Contrary to what many reports have said, the film doesn’t show every last minute of the 24 hours. It always shows the correct time — or time about to be corrected — but it doesn’t show all of the time.
And it’s almost impossible to watch all 24 hours of The Clock in a single sitting, even if you had the stamina, because the Power Plant is currently open only during office hours (check the schedule for special weekend marathon times).
Marclay also fudges a bit with a.m. and p.m. A scene from L.A. Confidential where Guy Pearce’s character is manning the graveyard shift of his Hollywood homicide detachment is shown just after 2 p.m., not 2 a.m.
Often there are multiple scenes from the same movie — The Breakfast Club, for example — that help nudge the clock along.
I don’t have a problem with this. It’s actually a backhanded compliment: I’m so caught up with The Clock, I want it to be perfect.
But that’s really beside the point, isn’t it? The film pulls us into the warp and woof of the invisible cloth that is time, and all cloth has a few dropped threads. Time becomes one between screen and life. As the hour approaches 5 p.m., a stern librarian in the film tells a reader, “The library is closed. You have to leave.”
This is followed by a Power Plant employee telling Clock watchers: “Hi there — the gallery is now closed.”
Is that The Twilight Zone theme I hear in my head? Follow on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm