What is time if not the greatest social construct? It is capable of not only aiding mundane everyday ac-tivities but also the discovery of the science of life itself. For centuries, the grandeur of time as a concept has been examined by writers, playwrights and poets alike, each promising a different meaning for its relevance to life and, subsequently, to art.Time is highly prevalent in cinema and a fantastic creative inspiration. Films like Interstellar, Midnight in Paris and The Time Traveler’s Wife, among others, use time as a major cinematic element; however, time rarely makes it into the craft and technicalities of creating a moving series of images.The fundamental idea behind cinema—derived from decades of trial and error—is that a shot leads to a scene, which leads to a sequence; the length of a shot is as long as the filmmaker needs it to be. A shot could be less than a second long or the duration of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, which gives the illusion of a single shot. Christian Marclay’s The Clock, however, challenges this notion of a shot-based timeline—when content determines the shot—for one in which time of day determines the content, nearly a reversal of the typical formatting of cinematic conventions. After three years of footage sourc-ing, sequencing, cutting and editing, The Clock debuted at London’s White Cube gallery in 2010.Marclay collected footage from film-based media throughout the last century, from silent movies to The Office, breaking the idea of reel-time by expanding the experience into real time. Every minute of every hour in the installation simultaneously corresponds with the actual time of day. The shot, or fragment of film that lies between two cuts, no longer remains the fundamental unit in the film; it is now minutes and seconds, where time manipulates the content of the creation. The process of depicting the passage of time through cuts, dissolves and other editing tools is a hard one to forget. A masterpiece in editing, The Clock depicts the passage of time with literal depictions of time itself—taking an abstract concept and making it physical with clocks, ticks, watches, dialogues, sundials and shadows, all of which break out of the three dimensions and into the fourth.Reel-time, on the other hand, goes into manic overdrive. Reel-time is usually a distorted version of real time, manipulated to aid the visual narrative. A shot from one movie cuts into a shot from a dif-ferent one, all while maintaining perfect continuity. Dialogues are exchanged between characters who range across the century of filmmaking, often ricocheting back and forth. Even though time is rendered

CHRISTIAN MARCLAYi t ’s about t ime

Portrait, Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Following images, still frames from, The Clock, 2010. single channel video with stereo sound; 24 hours, looped; © Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

by Labanya Mai t ra

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uniform–a rarity in cinema–the pace has a life of its own. Marclay makes the film jump from an exhila-rating frenzy reminiscent of Battleship Potemkin’s “Odessa Steps” to complete tranquility.While there is no apparent narrative as we would typically understand, the storyline of The Clock is, in truth, the one we are most familiar with and often overlook–our daily cycle as dictated by all 24 hours. It strips away the art from filmmaking to leave pure craft in its place. This abandonment of artistic ide-als negates itself elegantly and, in fact, elevates the craft into an artform. As Marclay abandons the expected forms of filmmaking, he falls back on societal norms to push the narrative forward. While editing, he arranged the footage according to the hours, with each hour de-picting a different activity, state of mind or emotion: the work day ending at 5:00 pm, theatres and

orchestras opening at 8:00 pm, the melancholic end of the night at 10:00 pm, entering the REM cycle in the middle of the night.The willing suspension of disbelief is destabilized as shots and scenes are wrought to fit into a unique timeline, leaving the mind unsure of what to think. The human emotions, the concept of love, life, creation and destruction are depicted through time and yet maintain a surreal quality. Losing track of time, however, is not an option.Marclay takes the Soviet montage, of fast-paced and abrupt cuts, and molds it into something com-pletely different, leaving behind a beautiful mosaic of a century’s worth of film. He breaks the films apart to demonstrate that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

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Featuring great actors and characters–including Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, Clark Gable, Dustin Hoff-man, Sophia Loren, Al Pacino, Catherine Deneuve, Julia Roberts, Leonardo DiCaprio, Katharine Hep-burn and Bart Simpson—he created something so familiar yet different. The masterpieces never stopped coming as Marclay snaked his way through Tokyo-Ga, Inception, Run Lola Run, Twilight Zone and more. Time moves linearly through the hours in The Clock, the same hours as real time. The hours pass along with the day—9:52 am, 11:16 am, 11:52 am, 2:25 pm—all coming to a deafening crescendo at midnight. Orson Welles is flung off a clock tower, and Big Ben explodes into flames. But this is not the climax of this visual masterpiece; there simply is no climax. A new day begins and time continues on with its endless ticking, almost poetically with a scene from Gone with the Wind.

The intricate, perhaps even aggressive, editing completely transforms the visuals into not only a com-pelling narrative-like structure but also maintains incredible continuity. The infectious charm of this installation, however, is not just in the sight. The sound creation, re-creation and mixing replicate the experimental nature of the visuals. Both of which are seamless, demonstrating true brilliance.This is not the first time that Marclay has played with the idea of deconstructing something in order to construct a new meaning or narrative around it, and it certainly is not his only medium of expertise. The Clock embodies the idea of creating the film world’s most daunting piece of craft, molded beauti-fully into art. It is not the element of surprise that makes this installation so gripping. Rather, it is the painful awareness of, quite literally, watching time pass.

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