As my colleague Daniel Zalewski documented more than a decade ago, in his Profile of the artist, “The Clock” is as simple in premise as it is sublime in scale. From a century’s worth of movies and television, Marclay and a crew of diligent assistants tracked down moments with timepieces showing (or characters mentioning) the time of day. Then Marclay edited this reservoir—more than ten thousand clips logging all (or very nearly all) of the fourteen hundred and forty minutes of the day—into a film that unfolds in perfect synchrony with time itself, projected in a perpetual twenty-four-hour cycle. It is both a cinematic collage and a working clock, of a kind, displaying the current time, day and night, whether or not the museum is open. To describe the work in this way is to make it sound obsessive but not necessarily interesting—something that, like so much video art, one might drop in on for a drowsy few minutes and then abandon. Yet the single most extraordinary thing about the long whole is that, independent of its sources, it is so compelling. People arrive expecting to sample, say, half an hour and end up sitting for hours. And it’s not just a handful of avant-garde completists who get sucked in: when the museum stayed open all night, offering the rare chance to see the piece in its entirety, including the usually hidden nocturnal and early-morning hours, tickets for late-night admission were so in demand that people started lining up at five-thirty in the morning (for an eight-thirty sign-up). Those of us who rushed over at what had seemed the impossibly early hour of seven went home disappointed. At one level, the film offers a comic commentary on the repetition of certain dramatic contrivances down the years. Marclay himself confided as much to Zalewski: “You become aware of how film is constructed—of these devices and tropes they constantly use. Like, if someone turns abruptly, you expect someone else to be in the next cut. An actor looks down at his watch and, suddenly, you have a closeup of the watch.” One is reminded that moviemaking clusters its effects familiarly and predictably around key hours: Noon is, of course, the time of “High Noon,” when gun duels are fought, and also often when banks are robbed and bombs go off. Yet what makes “The Clock” such an astonishing work of art is the inventive subtlety with which the old clips are woven together. As with the birds in Audubon’s ornithological books, the simple additive intensity is compelling, as minute piles upon minute. The most unremarkable appearances of time—the actor staring at his watch—can be entrancing when catalogued. Witnessing time pass can be fun in itself, whether seen on the face of Big Ben—whose many appearances, often in early Hitchcockian black-and-white, make it one of the heroes of the whole—or heard in a piece of dialogue (“Jesus! It’s eight-fifteen! We better get going”). The conventionally dramatic moments of the day, noon and midnight, are interwoven with the mute, inglorious ones—two-thirty-one, eleven-thirty-two—all permanently mucilaged together. While staying true to his relentless minute-by-minute mission, Marclay puts together little suites of overlapping action, ten or so minutes long. Themes and figures return. In the half-hour after 7:35 P.M., we witness three James Bonds (Sean Connery, Daniel Craig, and Roger Moore) all dealing at dusk with different Bondian dilemmas: Connery in “Dr. No,” brooding in his Jamaica hotel room; Craig in “Casino Royale,” trying on a new tuxedo before the night’s game of poker; and Moore in “Moonraker,” throwing an absurdly kung-fu-ing Asian villain out of the glass front of the great clock on the Piazza San Marco in Venice—a neat clustering of Bond styles, from straight to slightly campy to hyper-campy. Not long after nine in the morning, we get Cary Grant, in the space of a couple of minutes, both being ingratiatingly seductive on the phone, with Ingrid Bergman in “Indiscreet,” and, disguised as a bellboy, getting off the morning train in “North by Northwest.” Other moments build quietly: in multiple snippets from between nine in the morning and noon, Susan Hayward, in “I Want To Live!,” awaits the gas chamber and is eventually executed. Still others are nice in-jokes to anyone with a taste for movies: at 9:13 A.M., there’s an unusually long scene of a shy post-wedding breakfast in New York between Judy Garland and Robert Walker, which comes from Vincente Minneli’s lovely 1945 romance, titled, well, “The Clock.” A few familiar friends keep coming back from the cinematic past: Steve Martin and John Candy, in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” return regularly, since theirs is a world made to the clock, with home and Thanksgiving looming. Others are surprising: Johnny Cash, of all people, appears several times as, evidently, some kind of bad guy in some kind of black-and-white film noir, in which people keep checking their watches and saying things like: “You didn’t even look.” “I don’t have to look—I just check my watch. It’s seven thirty-five. At seven thirty-five every morning, Mrs. Wilson comes out.” There’s no official published anatomy of “The Clock,” but enthusiasts have compiled inventories online, and a little digging reveals that the scenes come from a 1961 film called, irresistibly, “Five Minutes to Live.” The key comment, perhaps, comes in one moment from the Johnny Cash film, as Cash sits gloomily in the front seat of a car with Vic Tayback Leonard, planning their ugly caper. “You mean everybody around here eats and sleeps by a clock?” the Cash character inquires, with disgust. “Exactly,” Tayback replies, “some people like it that way.” “The same thing every day?” “That’s our whole plan. Their daily routine, our split-second timing.” It is in the play of daily routine, the relentless, unchanging drumbeat of time, and split-second timing, the sudden magnifying glass of eventfulness laid over a particular moment, that the whole finds its life. This doubleness is the foundation of all drama. We recognize that, perhaps unconsciously, when we talk about the need for a screenplay to have a ticking clock, or, more formally, about the urge to “preserve the unities,” the ancient Aristotelian desire to make fictive representations, in a stylized way, conform to the arrow of time that drives all life forward. The seismic, up-and-down exigencies of life sound against the background of a fixed, unchangeable ticking, and this is what gives drama its pathos. In “The Clock,” we are made newly and doubly aware of this truth, as the stylized forms of time are suddenly recast as the absolute form of time. The little moments introduced into movies for storytelling effect are made subject to the longer, impassive, unstoppable, all-day-long motion of time itself. Onto the dramatic necessities of storytelling—“We better wake up!” “Has there been a call from the governor?” “What time did you set the fuse for?”—descends the slow, imponderable impassivity of one unchanging and stoically sympathetic trajectory. Judy Garland and Robert Walker have breakfast just after nine—when else could they have it?—as a climax to their story. But nine o’clock passes, and they are left behind. The clock ticks on indifferently, dramatic necessity recedes, and time resumes its reign. The waves rise briefly, the ocean remains. Time, as Shakespeare pointed out, runs at different paces at different times for different people. It is also as imperturbable, classical, and equipoised a force in life as light or sound. No work of art engages both the jumpy relativity of our inner experience of time and the implacable absolutism of its passage beyond us so engagingly as “The Clock.” We shape time to our own needs, but time is inexorably shaping us. At a moment as troubled as this one, to escape from this time into time itself is somehow salubrious. Even in the worst of times, it seems, we cannot help but live by the clock. Time must take its time. This simple truth, right now, is somehow soothing. ♦