I regretted leaving my gloves at home when I stood in the freezing cold with the light drizzle twinkling on my winter coat on a mid November’s day in London. It was 3.10pm on my wristwatch. I had left home at 2.15 pm. The glass doors were pulled at 3.43 pm. I found myself in a big room with huge white empty walls. I scrutinized each doorbell picture while I crept every centimetre towards the staircase leading towards the basement. Having descended a few short steps, I was then carefully lead by torchlight to help navigate my way into the packed room. The silver light reflected on so many bodies all totally enchanted, engaged and engrossed, sitting on the floor, standing against the walls, buried in sofas watching Christian Marclay’s latest video installation “The Clock”. I checked my watch, it read 4.10pm corresponding exactly the same time as on the screen!
The master of collage, Christian Marclay: Californian born American artist in this new work has constructed a chronological 24 hour film, piecing and slicing moments of cinematic narrative when time is shown on camera or checked by a character in selected film footage. Splicing these together and synchronizing it to local time zone makes it an accurate clock telling the right time. Localization of the time zone to the fictional event replaces fantasy with real time. As the famous Russian filmmaker Andrey Taarkovsky said, “Time is strange thing in cinema -perhaps the most mysterious thing about cinema. It resembles ‘real time’ but is always compressed, cut up, manipulated, expanded, mediated, abstract”. However, in Marclay’s case it has been cut, compressed and manipulated to create “real time” using contributory footage from some 300 films painstakingly worked on for three years, making it a technical marvel of perseverance.
Having every clip linked to actual time allows the spectator follow a somewhat unlinked narrative with total comfort in a very strange manner, merging fictional and reality in an unusual way. The link, of each event happening on screen during the spectator’s actual living time does not leave any space for distraction but total involvement and brings in existence an astonishing bond between film and spectator.
What makes this piece so extremely engaging is the seamless editing making each scene flow effortlessly from one mood/theme to another. Rhythm is the main formative element of cinema according to Tarkovsky. Editing puts together these pieces carrying different time, bringing a new existential awareness of the intensity of the stretches of time, already present in the segments. Time must flow independently and with dignity enabling ideas to find their place without hassle coinciding with the rhythm in the spectator. Tarkovsky writes in Sculpting in Time; “but there is still a dichotomy; for the director’s sense of time always amounts to a kind of coercion of the audience, as does his imposition of his inner world. The person watching either falls into your rhythm (your world) or becomes your ally, or else he does not, in which case no contact is made. And so some people become your ‘own’, and others remain strangers; and I think this is not only perfectly natural, but alas inevitable”. In ‘The Clock’, wiping out the time difference between reality and fiction creates an altogether new narrative, as the hypnotized spectator experiences a peculiar awareness of time and is unable to prevent him/herself from sliping in to its rhythm. The real time parallels, infiltrating and coinciding with the fictional blurring of the boundaries as well as questioning the reality of time itself.
Within the space of a few minutes the spectator experiences one narrative encompassing a vast range of time fractured narratives, moods, places and characters making time stream in to limitless directions all at once, yet preserving the real temporal sequence suggesting a continuing link between the fictional events depicted but which are infact narratively utterly disconnected. One can sense the simultaneous construction and rupture of temporal chronology.
An art critic wrote, “the central concept, certainly, is grand: the relentless passage of time, the moments of reality that infiltrate cinematic fantasy. Presumably, the idea is to instill in the viewer a kind of temporal awareness, a sense of mortality, even. And yet, if this really is Marclay's aim, then his decision to use sampled film clips backfires. Ultimately, the sheer spectacle of it all, the pleasure of recognizing cinematic episodes, becomes so distracting that there's no time for serious contemplation. 'The Clock', for all its technical proficiency, ends up simply as the artistic equivalent of one of those TV-clip shows, an exercise in viewing nostalgia”. As an Asian novice to western cinema, I had the luck of escaping distraction caused by indulgence in recognizing fragments of cinematic episodes, which would indeed not be the case with vast number of audience.
Zettle wrote, “The essence of dramatic effect is irreducibly linked to time: anticipation, expectation, hope, looking forward; regret, remorse, historical perspective etc philosophically require a sense of the measured passage of time to render them meaningful. Time is part of the warp and weft of memory: without the linear conceptual thread that time provides, the perpetual present of our immediate experience and the endless flow of events and experiences that constitute it have neither sequence nor coherent connection. Language itself is irreducibly temporal. Time we might say is part of the grammar of sense and memory”.
Marclay sows the seeds for such speculations. Disorientation sprouting out of juxtaposed real and fictional time proves to be strangely amusing and making it difficult for the spectator to leave the 24 hour long work.
“The Clock”, was shown at White Cube Mason’s Yard Gallery in London, 15th October till 13th November, 2010.
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