THE CLOCK

RESEARCH

The Clock, 2010, by Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay, is a 24-hour video installation montaged from untold hours of cinematic footage. The idea is brilliantly simple and completely audacious.  Following several years of rigorous research and production, Marclay excerpted thousands of these fragments from films and edited them so that they flow in real time. The Clock premiered at White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London in October 2010. The video lasts 24 hours and functions as a working timepiece in itself, synchronised to the local time zone.

The final artwork contains around 12,000 moments from different films. The Clock tells the story of humanity rather than a series of characters. 

The Clock becomes a homage to cinema that deals with and represents time. It shows dialogue that might seem insignificant, but in this new context emphasises how these characters and the writers of these films are influenced and framed by time.The film has the ability to make you think about past, present and future. It is composed of moments from the past, but the ever-moving clock that matches your own real time places an emphasis on the present. Knowing that time continues to tick, it asks you to consider the future. Marclay asks what you will do with it in your restricted time frame. The Clock has the ability to make us present in the moment. It asks us to consider time, rather than misuse it. For that reason, it is perhaps the most important timepiece we will ever encounter.

TECHNIQUE

Entitled The Clock and lasting 24 hours, the world’s most popular piece of concept art is a gigantic collage of film clips – old and new, black-and-white and colour – showing thousands of glimpses of clocks, watches, sundials and snatches of people telling each other the time, all set up to correspond to real time wherever it is shown, right round the clock.

I took a one-minute movie by studying the filming skills in for this film. My film is a series of fragments that build a whole. The film was completed using the method of fragment editing. Different types of clocks appear in each clip. Such as electronic clocks, watches and clock towers. My movie is my day, I use the clock I met in the day to show my day. Coherent time and no characters imitate the clock