TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

The Clock (Christian Marclay, 2010), by Annaëlle Winand

The Clock is a video installation consisting of a montage of more than 1,000 video sequences from films and television programs featuring watches, clocks and other objects indicating the time. The result is a twenty-four-hour-montage, sometimes described as a supercut, projected in real time: the images on screen reflect precisely the time when the viewer watches them. The linkage of images joins sequences from different eras and genres, all found and organized by a team of assistants, who were tasked with watching films on DVD, extracting every scene with a reference to the time and, finally, describing them in a document. At the same time, Marclay organized the montage by selecting and assembling the sequences (and adapting all of them to the same screen format) using Final Cut Pro software. Drawing on the way Bruce Conner employed montage in A MOVIE, by playing on the cuts and connections between sequences, Marclay used this technique digitally even as he replicated “hegemonic Hollywood continuity and production.”^[19] The research and assembly process took three years. The sound was edited using Pro Tools and with the help of Quentin Chiappetta. Screenings of The Clock were prepared using a computer program developed by Mark Grierson, which made it possible to synchronize the work’s sequences with the precise screening time.^[20]

The content and scope of Marclay’s project pose the question of montage on several levels. Beyond the mere linking of sequences, Marclay foregrounds the constructive quality of montage:

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. But, if the first clip is in black-and-white and the next is in color, you know you’ve been fooled.^[21]

Because of its scope, the project could have only been carried out in digital fashion. With respect to having access to films and viewing them, to gathering, aggregating and sharing information, to duplicating and excerpting clips and assembling them in a work twenty-four hours in length, The Clock is one of a number of new approaches through which re-use and its possibilities for montage have developed in a manner specific to the digital context and the imaginary around it.