WATCHING THE CLOCK TICK at SFMOMA

As I joined the long queue at the Museum of Modern Art at San Francisco to watch the film “The Clock” by Christian Barclay, I was wondering what was in store after that interminably looong wait. My doubts were dispelled within the first few minutes…The Clock is a cinematic wonder: a twenty-four hour film that unfolds in real time. A deftly edited montage of film segments, it consists of thousands of appropriated film clips in which a clock or watch is usually visible somewhere in the shot. It is synched to the real world time in such a way that each minute of his film corresponds to a 24 hour live cycle. For example, as we started watching it around 7.45PM the sequence of shots in the film included timepieces displaying the same time! It's a 24-hour movie digitally synchronized to local time.

It is a mesmerizing masterpiece…but also much more. Rather than a traditional film in which there is a suspension of real time, time’s unfolding here becomes a palpable part of our filmic experience. It offers no story; not in the traditional sense at least. There is no plot, no single narrative, no sustained conflict and no resolution. Our experience makes the story. Each of us, each individual viewer, completes the narrative. We decide when it starts, when it stops, and what matters in between. As the scenes unfolded, I was constantly scanning my memory to recollect the movies from which the snippets have been sourced. As The Clock advanced, time was also where I have been…like Aureliano in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude when he realizes that the mysterious parchment he is trying to decipher is, in fact, the story of himself.

It is a surreal experience when the cinematic and real time merges into each other seamlessly. The Clock is running before we enter the theater and continues on in our absence. There’s no beginning and no end. It simultaneously creates a sense of being carried forward while living in exactly the moment you’re watching it. It is very much akin to standing in the banks of a river and watching it flow….the same water never passes twice. As Thoreau commented “time is a stream where I go for fishing.”

I was also reminded of a very evocative poem of Kay Ryan…

The Edges of Time

It is at the edges
that time
thins.
Time which had been
dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
apparently
coming
from stacks of
put–off things or
just in back. A
racket
of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat.

When we walk out of the screening, it isn’t the end of the movie…it goes on repeating itself which left me wondering whether The Clock was also alluding that time is not just linear but also cyclical, constantly rejuvenating and rediscovering itself.