The Clock

A man sits under a pendulum clock smoking, a boy plays chess by himself, and a teenager gives his fingerprints to a cop in one minute of Christian Marclay’s The Clock.

The Clock, presented by the Winnipeg Art Gallery is a 24 hour video compilation, which acts as a clock. It uses thousands of film clips to document hours and minutes, in real-time.

The Clock plays in a room at the WAG filled with comfortable white couches, which can seat three people. Only two people sit at each couch, except for one where a man is sleeping. Several viewers were uninterested, staying for a couple minutes. Others watched for hours. One woman said she spent four hours watching, and she had come to see it from 2 a.m. until 4 a.m.

The Clock is more than pieced together bits of film. It also explores human perception of time. In one scene, from a slap-stick movie, a man falls out of a window. He manages to hold onto a clock, it saves his life. Marclay may have included this because it acts as a metaphor. The image of the man dangling, holding onto the clock seemed like something most people do, though not so literally.

 In another scene, a man and a woman talk about how everyone experiences time differently. The man says “time is a personal thing. It’s an emotional thing. Time feels different from when you’re in love, to when you’re doing something you hate.”

Watching moment after moment, snapshots of time created a bigger picture. At any point in time, people are having fun, people are bored, and people are dying. The Clock brings attention to that, with quick cuts between drama and lightheartedness.   

Watching The Clock, just like watching a clock, is an experience in being acutely aware of time, and how fast or slow it passes. It was interesting how often in the film clips a clock is present before death or near death.  

Marclay added a sense of flow with atmospheric music. It ties the scenes that had nothing in common together. Another way Marclay created flow with audio was by using sounds from one scene in the next, such as a train whistle.

One of the few negatives about The Clock, is that dramatic and passionate scenes have a lot of thrilling buildup, but then the scene ends, and the next scene starts. That’s the purpose of The Clock, but at times it was unsatisfying, there wasn’t enough resolution.

At 3:30 p.m., a classroom of children finish school, a young Robert De Niro flips a table because of an over cooked steak, and a man and woman exchange a tearful goodbye.

A 24 hour screening of The Clock starts on December 31 to January 1. The exhibit ends on January 5.