Sitting in the audience as three, four, five hours elapsed and somehow my attention never wavered, I considered this proposition again. Maybe you could do it wrong. Should I be paying attention to the plot of each clip, the characters and dialogue, or should I be paying attention to the timepieces? 11:22, 11:23, did I miss the clock on the screen showing 11:24 because I was trying to figure out what movie that last scene was from? (I’d discover afterward there was an entire wiki devoted to “The Clock” with each clip’s provenance identified — 11:24 includes scenes from “Shanghai Knights,” “Malice in Wonderland” and “Se7en.”) Can you do time wrong, by paying either too much attention to its passing, or not enough?
“The Clock” forces you to meditate on time, the way we compulsively turn the consecutive scenes of our lives into a narrative, project a cause and effect onto everything that happens, assume everything has meaning and decide if that meaning is positive or negative. We’re the artists and architects of our own lives, surveying the day or year ahead and trying to figure out what story we’re going to tell. Is this going to be a good year? Is it going to be hard? Who decides?
I stayed at “The Clock” until I started to doze off and dream some time Sunday morning. Marclay supports falling asleep during the film: “That’s what you’re supposed to do — let go and absorb it and feel like you’re part of this thing,” he told my colleague Marc Tracy. If I had remembered that, I might have stayed longer. Instead I stumbled out during the wee hours of the first day of winter into Midtown Manhattan.
That was two weeks ago. In the time since, the sun has risen and set 13 times, one year ended and another began. I’ve been trying to pay attention to time, but not too closely, to notice that it’s passing without getting too attached. This year is spread out before us, lots penciled in but nothing for certain. It could be difficult, as my friend predicted for herself. And, in the words of a Morning reader who wrote in to offer their best advice — the question mark to me is what makes this good advice, as if the idea of things not being terrible is a revelation — “It could be great?”
For more
THE WEEK IN CULTURE
Film and TV
