The Clock

“What time is it?” The Girl bursts. She’s been holding onto the joke for forty minutes. 

I laugh too over her brazen cheek. She knows what she’s said is totally unoriginal, that everyone in attendance would have thought it and probably said it, but she does it anyway.

We’re laughing because we've gone to see an exhibition on time. Unfortunately this week I don’t – aptly- have the time to go into detail on exactly how wonderful this piece is, but I will touch on it really quickly to give you something of an idea.

Completely free. Comfy sofas when you go in. Old and new movies. What could be better.

In 1995 Christian Marclay produced a video cut of telephone scenes from movies. The piece was only seven minutes long, but pre-YouTube it would still have been an undertaking. Years later, he has an idea to do something bigger and bolder: to reflect human time through film. If a viewer's watch says ’12.00,’ then the film will show a scene from, say, High Noon. ‘That’s easy,’ you might think. ‘Just have breakfast scenes in the morning and bedtime scenes at night.’ But Marclay’s film isn’t an approximation, a loose gathering of a day, it’s time specific. If your watch says, ’12.00,’ then there will be a short clip from High Noon, which will then clip into another movie that has a time piece with 12.00 and so on - until the next minute arrives and the process starts again.

While we were at the exhibition yesterday from 11.10 to 11.50 we saw a drunk Billy Bob Thornton waking up in Bad Santa. About twenty minutes later we were in detention with The Breakfast Club. Towards the end of our time Stan Laurel was trying to pacify a screaming clock; his decision to take a hammer to it segued into Robert Powell smashing through Big Ben in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

We watched this scene at 11.42

This is where the skill of the piece lies. It’s one thing to find scenes that match our time, it’s another to make it work as an interesting whole. There was one clip of Pierce Brosnan looking at his watch that lasted a second, but The Thirty Nine Steps cut was stretched out over minutes. What surprised me was how hypnotically tense the whole thing was. In the forty minutes we were there someone was being sentenced to death row whilst another faced torture. Marclay’s work was always going to be heavier on tension than laughs because in the movies time, more than man, is the enemy. The slacker comedy of Apatow is unconcerned with the clock, raising a middle finger to it, whereas heist movies and dramas constantly make reference to time, to precipitate and escalate drama; the idea being that our heroes might meet their match in the shape of everyday - or mortal - time.

Over the course of forty minutes we saw hundreds of movies, all because of the painstaking research of Marclay and his team (it took years to put together). And it’s wonderful. For movie fans it’s great because you get thrown back and forth through celluloid history, and for everyone else it’s just a fun trick to see. Personally, I was totally drawn in. I can’t wait to go again. At a different time. And see something altogether different.  

The Clock is at The Tate Modern and is completely free until 20th January