I had the great fortune of being in Lisbon when a local art museum was showing Christian Marclay's "The Clock" The film, which lasts 24 hours, is a collage of film excerpts built around the notion of showing time telling devices in narrative films, with the additional stipulation that the clock times in the film must correspond to the actual time in the venue where the film is being shown. (This is one movie you don't have to check your watch in.) I saw from about 12:15 to 2:15 PM. (I had previously seen a later part in New York at a gallery. When I first watched the film, I was often concentrating on finding the clock in the scene. Sometimes they are really in the background. But, in fact, there are many excerpts from films where you don't actually see clocks; for example, Marclay includes the famous scene from "The Third Man" where Harry Lime talks about the Swiss and their cuckoo clocks. Often, people are just looking at their watches, or obviously waiting or thinking about time. So the movie is about time, or how it is represented in films?
But it is just as much about editing; Marclay makes constant quick cuts in the classic Hollywood style, but with the difference, for example, that a phone ringing in one film is answered in a different film. And he also edits by riffing on non time related themes, as well; there were segments connected by the theme of rain in the part I saw. And some excerpts recur at different times in the film, often without any specific time attached to them. And the segment I saw included quintessential time tension scene, the classic misanthropic Hitchcock scene (spoiler alert!) when a little kid is unknowingly carrying a bomb on a bus at which blows up at 1:45 PM, killing the kid.
Even more striking, though, is the audio editing, which is often asynchronous with the visual editing. Thus the music or sounds from one film excerpt continue when the visual excerpt has changed, and often for a significant amount of time. And sometimes excerpts from two different films are layered. In addition to film dialogue and scores, there of course many sound effects of ticking clocks and sound that mimic them. In fact, I think the audio track in itself would make for a fascinating composition on its own (though not for 24 hours, thank you).
I doubt that this film will ever be viewable outside of gallery and museum spaces, though I would certainly love to have it watchable on a DVD. Who knows what goes on in the 3 AM parts of the film? It would also be wonderful to try to analyze in a more precise fashion exactly how the continuity and structure work in the film.
Perhaps the film will eventually show up in Vancouver some time this century....
