We regret that we couldn’t stay for all 24 hours of The Clock in Minneapolis some years ago, so while in Boston it was easy to catch all 60 minutes of Doors, which plays on a loop with no beginning or end. People from classic movies (with some modern-auteurist exceptions: Phantom Thread, Lost Highway) enter doors, then we cut to the opposite angle and they’ve transformed into somebody different. I thought the cuts were going for maximum contrast (old person to young, man to woman, black/white to color), and I thought he was purposely choosing cheapie Brit dramas so we’d never recognize a clip/actor, but every time I thought I’d found a pattern he’d switch it up. Very funny to me that it’s 95% G-rated harmless scenes (some light gunpoint threats) except for the two minutes a class of small children was being ushered in, then it switched to Fire Walk With Me / Scream horror, and the kids were ushered right back out. We also saw Sara Cwynar’s Alphabet exhibit and her giant awesome mural in the lobby, where the desk people told me it’s pronounced “swinn-arr”. Katy watched Rose Gold with me when we got home, and felt eight minutes was long enough so she didn’t want to check out Glass Life afterwards.
Tag: Christian Marclay
The Clock (2010, Christian Marclay, 12:37pm-2:16pm)
I’ve read a couple of great articles about The Clock – never thought I’d have a chance to see it, but we were in Minneapolis while it ran at the Walker, so we watched almost two hours of it, which seems like a lot but is only seven percent of the total. And we could’ve easily kept watching (yes, Katy liked it too) – it’s not only a great conceptual achievement, it’s also very entertaining and ingeniously edited. To my great pleasure, as much care was given to the sound mixing as the picture, so audio will overlap in interesting ways. And the picture isn’t as clock-obsessed as I’d assumed. Clocks aren’t always onscreen, sometimes in just one fragment of a scene, or sometimes not at all, instead with characters speaking (usually in English) about the time or its passing (Nick of Time with Johnny Depp and Chris Walken got some repeat play), and clever connective shots will be used to fit scenes with similar times together. Plenty of humor – we got a confused phone conversation between two different movies, and Karl Malden in Baby Doll honking his horn to annoy characters of a whole different era.