Marclay’s film

I watched 1 hour and 10 minutes of his well-known 24-film “The Clock.” It was interesting enough that I could have watched 4 or 5 hours of it under different circumstances.

For those who haven’t heard of it, he had a large staff scour through what must have been thousands of films and television episodes, looking for scenes showing clocks and watches. They managed to find all or virtually all possible times on the clock, and then wove all the neighboring scenes together into a unified film. This works better than it sounds, partly because Marclay often did a good job of weaving scenes together that have at least some visual relation (even when there are abrupt jumps between color and black & white footage) and also because the sound from the preceding scene is generally carried over a bit into the new scene to help create additional continuity.

During the hour and ten minutes that I was watching (from 11:20-12:30) there were some familiar things (Laurel & Hardy, “Easy Rider,” Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, “The Breakfast Club”), some unfamiliar things, and some downright bad scenes from television episodes.

Overall, I agree with Francis who said last night that the film was not just technically stunning, but also interesting in its own right, and moreover that you start to feel emotionally invested in certain characters and their dilemmas after only 30 seconds or so, only to see them vanish right away into some completely unrelated scene.

And yes, whenever a character says something like: “It’s 11:23!,” you can look at your watch and it’s exactly 11:23 (I found myself checking every time a character said the time, and quite often when a clock or watch was merely shown). This phenomenon obviously brings the viewer directly into the work as well.