7) The 39 Steps. (The 1978 version with Robert Powell as Richard Hannay smashing his way through the glass on Big Ben to ensure the minute hand doesn’t reach 11.45, thus preventing a bomb exploding at the Houses of Parliament – not in the original John Buchan story).
8) Peter Pan. (Disney version where Peter and the Darlings walk along Big Ben’s minute hand en route to Neverland.)
But there is another movie where people hang from clocks, and viewers do too, and that is The Clock by Christian Marclay. Here are six reasons to see it:
1) It’s a perfectly executed idea. It consists of about 12,000 clips from famous old films showing clocks, watches or the anxiety of timekeeping, and they are pieced together to last 24 hours.
2) It won the main prize at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and its reviews were laudatory. The novelist Zadie Smith judged it ‘sublime’ in the New York Review of Books; the Times Literary Supplement found that ‘his extraordinary achievement is philosophical, elegant, hypnotic, frequently hilarious’.
3) It will be free to view. Marclay didn’t obtain copyright clearance for the use of his clips, believing they would constitute ‘fair use’ as an artwork. Accordingly, the institutions that purchased copies to screen the film (six copies in all including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Canada) agreed not to charge the public an admission price to see it.
4) You can leave your watch behind. The time shown on every clip – many are just a few seconds long – is synchronised with the outside world. If you are watching it downstairs in the White Cube gallery in Mason’s Yard, London, where it was first shown in October 2010, and an alarm clock or grandfather clock on the screen shows 8.40 a.m., then the rush hour is still roaring in Piccadilly up the road. If a clock on a prison wall is showing 1.18 p.m., then you may be watching in your lunch break. The Clock is a clock: that is its gimmick and template, and also its unique genius.
5) You can see it at four in the morning. Although most screenings will be during regular museum hours, a stipulation of purchase stated that there would also be a handful of 24-hour screenings. On many occasions there have been queues to get in before daybreak. When Daniel Zalewski put in a night shift for the New Yorker, he found the experience akin to reading the novels of Haruki Murakami, ‘when characters cross over into another universe’. He advised readers to visit between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. The film then ‘tugs on your body – especially after midnight. The longer you stay up – after Klute, Mr and Mrs Smith and dozens of other characters have gone to bed – the more giddy and delirious you feel, and you become one with the blearily agitated characters onscreen.’
6) It’s mesmerising. You may plan to watch for an hour or so, but three hours later you will be struggling to pull yourself away. The Clock casts a spell far more powerful than its feats of research and editing and artistic endurance might suggest. It is a celebration of film and the representation of time within its borders (one is reminded just how willingly we suspend time when watching a movie, and how time is so frequently the unnamed character in the drama). You will emerge from it with a heightened sense of time, reminded, as if you need to be at this late hour, what a dominant role it plays in our lives.
I was late to The Clock. I saw it at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when the film was already five years old, but of course it was timeless. The sign outside the room where it was screening suggested that the work casts time as ‘a multifaceted protagonist . . . revealing each passing minute as a vehicle for dramatic possibilities’. It spoke of the clips as ‘found footage’, which they were, but only in so far as Marclay had employed a team of seven researchers to watch tens of thousands of hours of film to find the suitable material for him to splice together. The sign also said, ‘All forms of photography and audio and video recording are prohibited.’
Inside there are white IKEA sofas (Marclay was quite specific about these), and the film is already well under way when I enter at about 11.30. In fact, the film has been underway all the time since this particular screening opened five weeks before, running behind locked doors all night so as not to upset the synchronisation: to turn it off would be like stopping a clock for the hours one doesn’t observe it.
There are two other people in the room. The first sequence I see is from Falling Down, with Michael Douglas as a man experiencing a day where his whole life appears to be collapsing around him; at about 11.33, in one of the lighter scenes, he is told that McDonald’s has stopped serving breakfast at 11.30. Then there’s I Want to Live, a woman strapped to a chair awaiting execution – the second hand of a clock moves towards her fate as the scene cuts to a telephone that doesn’t ring to pardon her. Then there’s a clip from an episode of The Twilight Zone called ‘A Matter of Minutes’, in which an American couple have slipped forward two hours into a time loophole in which every minute in history represents a different world that must be continually rebuilt; as one character tells them, ‘It’s the sound of actual time approaching!’ Then it was Easy Rider, with Peter Fonda realising his watch was broken, and at 11.42 it was The Thirty-Nine Steps. A nice surprise at 11.44 to see another man hanging from a clock in the film My Learned Friend, and then perhaps the longest scene of the whole 24 hours – Christopher Walken’s wonderful four-minute much-travelled wristwatch monologue from Pulp Fiction.
I thought I’d be ready to leave after a couple of hours, but after three I was still feeling the pull that Zadie Smith and many others had experienced. With most video art shown on a loop in a museum one sits on a hard bench and expects a medal of endurance after five minutes, but this had a hold on me as great as anything I had seen at my local cinema. It was a bit like the early days of MTV: even if you didn’t like or recognise what was going on at that moment, you knew that the moment after there would probably be something thrilling. And so it was. At 2.36 two scenes from Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander were bisected by one from Woody Allen’s Interiors, and then it was Harold Lloyd just hanging there.
One may appreciate this huge collage in many ways, from the surface to the subterranean. Every viewer will have his or her own expectations and favourites, and perhaps sigh when that clip appears. But after a short while a more expansive picture emerges: how actors age through their careers (sometimes backwards – look at Jack Nicholson move from wizened wash-up in About Schmidt to wild-eyed buck in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Michael Caine, Maggie Smith and Al Pacino come in for similar cinematic Botox). We also witness the maturing material possibilities of film itself, from the bouncing jagged life force of the silents to the huge swarming vistas of CGI. The trickery, the manipulation of time that permits our escape into make-believe, has been with us for a century; the technology to make this possible has advanced in sync with our capacity to disbelieve it. (And of course the advance of technology has enabled Marclay to put a film lasting 24 hours on a computer file and access it at random, a concept that would have left Harold Lloyd, Fatty Arbuckle and Stan Laurel with sorer heads than any attainable in slapstick. The relative physical properties of celluloid and digital film, particularly as they relate to time, have quite altered the potential artistic landscape.)
I did finally leave for a bit of sun at around 3. But then I felt compelled to go back in, experiencing a new sensation: the film was in charge. Because it would always be running, it had no need for an audience. No one was there to count the box office, and no one would make a loss if no one watched it. It was time without money: a rare thing in both the entertainment industry and the art world.
Marclay himself, in an interview with Jonathan Romney for Sight & Sound, explained that beyond the precise alliances of time between those displayed in his found footage and the timing of his film in the real world (which he pieced together hour by hour), he was also interested in more general notions of time, ‘so someone waiting has a body language that expresses impatience or longing or boredom. Sometimes it can be more symbolic – memento mori images, like a flower wilting, a petal falling,
the sun setting.’ One reason the viewer is so compelled by The Clock has to do with how the fragmentation and deconstruction of its contents are rendered whole and harmonious. Perhaps only in the cinema will we comfortably surrender our regular expectations of space and time. ‘The false continuity that I was trying to create is, to me, more connected to the way time flows,’ Marclay says. ‘There can be a seamless flow and momentum of a gesture from one film to the next, but it jumps from colour to black and white, and you know it’s not true, but you still believe in it.’ (It may be no coincidence that Marclay, though born in California, grew up in Switzerland, which trades on the unarguable commodity of time as if there was no tomorrow.)
Romney observed that The Clock ‘is poised between scholarly focus and fetishistic obsession’, which is true, and it does this without losing its sense of playfulness. When he’s not making films, Marclay spends much of his time as an artful DJ manipulating recorded sound, and his experience in mixing is here brought to blend and mock the narrative of film: thus Romola Garai, driving a car in Glorious 39, which was set in the 1930s but made in 2009, is chased by Burt Reynolds in the 1970s. And Jean-Pierre Léaud in 1970s Paris pursues Alan Wheatley as ‘Kolley Kibber’ in 1940s Brighton Rock.
World cinema beyond Europe and Hollywood is only moderately represented: Marclay’s researchers noted how seldom a watch or clock appears in Bollywood, an indication of a society concerned with higher things than punctuality.
There is no directory or index of all the films used in The Clock. There is, however, a crowd-sourced Wikia page which takes a decent shot at minute-by-minute compilation.3 At the top of the list, which begins at midnight with Big Ben exploding in V for Vendetta, contributors are encouraged to ‘Feel free to add movie titles and perhaps short scene descriptions if you want. Take care not to confuse A.M. and P.M. Remember, A.M. is morning and P.M. is evening.’ And then one of the contributors pointed out that Marclay and his team had done just that, mistakenly slotting a scene from Billy Wilder’s Fortune Cookie in at 7.17 p.m. rather than 7.17 a.m. The wider point, perhaps, is not that The Clock got it wrong, but that anyone noticed.
Five weeks after seeing The Clock in LA, I drove to Cambridge, England, to attend the UK premiere of another film that lasted 24 hours. These ambitious films were becoming a genre, a durational art form: to examine the notion of time they had to be about time themselves. Night and Day drew much from the idea of The Clock, for it was also a collage of old footage, but this time it was drawn not from the fathomless possibilities of every film ever made, but from one source – the archives of the BBC television series Arena.
Arena began as a fairly straightforward arts documentary programme in October 1975, but now, 600 or so episodes later, stands not only as one of Britain’s most unpredictable and inspiring entertainments, but also (as one would reasonably expect from the longest-running arts documentary series on television) one of its greatest creative resources. It was celebrating its fortieth birthday at the Cambridge Film Festival with an original thought: what if film was tied not to an exact time but a vague one – the idea of breakfast or lunch, or of a rush hour or a Sunday morning. Night and Day is a more contemplative endeavour than The Clock, a voluminous moodscape rather than a strict tempo, and it makes similarly seamless and compelling viewing. As before, one watches for hours, and time is both central and irrelevant, a magnificent obsession.
The film’s subtitle is The Arena Time Machine, and it’s a battered and well-travelled one. Between noon and 1 p.m., the Rolling Stones arrive in Morocco for a drumming masterclass and Luis Buñuel explains how to make the perfect dry Martini. Between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. Francis Bacon and William Burroughs take tea, while Jude Law performs in a matinee of Pinter’s The Lover. Between midnight and 1 p.m. Ken Dodd is still on stage and John Lydon remembers punk. Between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. Nico is in the Chelsea Hotel and Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra are crooning. Between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. both Don McCullin and Sebastião Salgado like the light, while Sonny Rollins plays sax on a bridge in New York. Between 11 a.m. and noon, T.S. Eliot considers The Wasteland while Peter Blake paints the wrestler Kendo Nagasaki. The talent on offer is immense on both sides of the camera, and one is swept into a rousing tide of optimism for the arts. This is their value. If we spend our time wisely we can both make and appreciate the worthwhile things in this world.
I took a break from the screening to talk to Arena’s series editor Anthony Wall, who has been involved with the programme almost from the beginning and is now responsible, with film editor Emma Matthews, for this new grand tour. Wall told me that he saw no reason why Night and Day couldn’t now run on digital demand continuously and for ever, both online and as an app. Whenever you tuned in, a past subject of the programme would be in step with you. But unlike The Clock, Night and Day is not a fixed or completed work, and so Wall and Matthews will adapt their choice of material to the seasons (nightfall will be earlier in the winter than in summer) and to the days (when the film is screened at weekends it will have a slower pace and fewer scenes in offices). Wall says:
I’ve always wanted to find a documentary that never needed to end, and I think I’ve found it. The extraordinary thing is, you take a sequence that had a predetermined intention, and you cut it up and put it in a different place in time, and it has a whole new meaning. I think as a viewer looking at something over a long time we’re attracted to a combination of order and chaos. But the key thing is that you can’t stop the film and corrupt the timing, any more than you can stop Big Ben. The film will work on any platform, but my ideal would be to have it on one of those corny picture-frame things where you show your photographs, so you could actually have it as your clock.
The fact that both Night and Day and The Clock last precisely one day is a significant and engaging trick. It is a natural cycle, of course, the Earth spinning once on its axis. But the duration is only one element: it is the films’ internal timings, both precise and emotional, that announce their directors’ greatness, and this is not something you can say for some of the other films that demand our attention due to their length. There is Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, for example, an installation in which the Hitchcock film is slowed down to about two frames a second and thus lasts a day (the shower scene lasts about 45 minutes; disturbingly, Janet Leigh lies motionless with her eyes open for more than five minutes). Or Cinématon, the life project of director Gérard Courant, who has filmed, over a period of 36 years, almost 3,000 people doing silent things (dancing, staring, eating, laughing, fidgeting), each for a period of 3 minutes 25 seconds, thus ending up with a film that lasts 195 hours or 8 days and 3 hours. It is rarely shown.4 For Arena’s Anthony Wall, it is the idea of the extended art project that is important, not necessarily the project itself. ‘I’ve yet to meet a single video artist who thinks it’s remotely important you should continue watching [their work until the end]. So here’s the idea of David Beckham sleeping for 50 minutes – right, I’ve got that, do I actually have to go and see it? If I do, three seconds will be enough.5 When Warhol filmed the Empire State Building [for 8 hours 5 minutes in 1964] he was taking the piss.’
Consideration of time in the movies spools back, as we have seen with the Lumière Brothers and Harold Lloyd, to the dawn of movies themselves. And with the popular success of Memento (Christopher Nolan’s inspired running of twin narratives in different timeframes), Boyhood (Richard Linklater’s 12-year fictional study of growing up) and Victoria (Sebastian Schipper’s nocturnal thriller shot in a single take), the subject continues to fascinate both film-makers and audiences. And then there is Logistics. This is a film lasting 37 days. According to the website of Daniel Andersson and Erika Magnusson, the two proud Swedes who had the idea for it, the film is an attempt to answer the Zen-like question ‘Where do all the gadgets come from?’ The ‘gadgets’ they had in mind included Kinder Eggs, mobile-phone circuit boards and coffee machines. ‘Sometimes the world seems unfathomable,’ they reasoned.
The simpl
e answer to their question, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that these gadgets come from China on huge ocean-bound freighters. Cameras were thus attached to trains, boats and trucks, and we watch in horror as one chosen object (a pedometer) is transported very gradually from China to Sweden. The artists had another question: ‘Would doing the same freight journey as the products enable us to understand more about the world and the global economy?’
The resulting 37-day attempt to find out is very boring, and you’d have to be a complete idiot to watch it all the way through. Days 1 and 2 are comparatively bearable, partly because they take place on a freight truck and a freight train, and partly because they are day 1 and day 2. Unfortunately for the viewer, days 3–36 are spent at sea, with incredibly slow-moving scenery. A gadget to measure walking pace is on a very slow ship. There are one or two beautiful sunrises, but mostly it’s a view from a deck, and the view is of rectangular containers and grey horizons.6 It’s art, and, as the title suggests, logistics; the artists say it is also about ‘consumerism and time’. Andy Warhol would have flipped his wig. Isn’t almost all art these days about consumerism and time?
ii) White People Are Crazy
This is certainly the case in Milton Keynes. Here, at the beginning of 2015 at the MK Gallery, 25 artists were curated under the title How to Construct a Time Machine.7 The show was put together by Marquard Smith, the head of Doctoral Studies in the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, and, as one would hope for, offers some of the classic works on the theme. Visitors are greeted by Ruth Ewan’s revolutionary 10-hour clock hanging above the entrance, and soon afterwards it’s John Cage’s 4’33 from 1952, denoted in the show’s catalogue by blank sheet music (the work, his most famous, a fact that must have rankled the composer at least a little bit, is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. But of course it isn’t total silence, it is undirected sound. The solo pianist or orchestra assembles, and does nothing for three movements, but the piece highlights the surrounding environmental sounds – the concert hall, the hum of lights, the racket inside our heads). When 4’33 was performed at the Barbican in London in 2010, the audience waited diligently for the gaps between the three movements before they coughed; they could have coughed at any time during the nothing, but they waited until the nothing was over to create something. Huge applause greeted its conclusion, and the conductor mopped his brow, and the orchestra smiled as they took several bows. It was a silent comedy. Viewing the piece on YouTube, where it has been watched more than 1.6 million times, one encounters the comments:
Timekeepers Page 24