A Clock: An Online Remake of Christian Marclay’s The Clock
Christian Marclay debuted his 24-hour film The Clock 15 years ago. The film is made up of thousands of clips from movies and TV shows that show timepieces or otherwise make reference to the time of day. I’ve seen chunks of it in a few museums & galleries and it’s wonderful.
Using this extraordinary minute-by-minute timeline of nearly all the scenes that make up The Clock, one person is attempting to reverse engineer the entire film. It’s not The Clock, but it’s A Clock. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Says the creator:
So, when I stumbled upon this Fandom Wiki, where the mysterious user ElevenFiftyNine had seemingly started the task of listing all the movies in The Clock, I couldn’t help myself; I started remaking the whole thing from scratch.
So, since I can’t really say this is The Clock, it is my best attempt at making a Clock, by following the excellent effort by ElevenFiftyNine.
A ten-minute excerpt is free on the website but you need to join the Patreon to watch the entire work-in-progress. According to their most recent update, the film is finished but the final version isn’t online quite yet; October 15th is the release date.
BTW, here’s the creator’s definition of “finished”:
I spoke some months ago about what 100% means for this project, and it is not that it is a fully perfect copy of Marclay’s work. The information available online is incomplete, and new information might appear in the future. For now, 100% means that all available information, is in a Clock.
And incredibly, they have never actually seen The Clock in person:
Unfortunately I have never had a chance to see The Clock, as it is only visible when exhibited at a museum. This is increasingly a rare occurrence, and even then, apparently the queues when it is on show, are monstrous. Never mind that it might be anywhere in the world!
Aside from the clips, I haven’t watched any of this yet, but it is a very tempting alternative to waiting for a rare showing somewhere I happen to be.
Comments 4
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I think a good barometer for measuring the quality of something is how much it gets parodied or ripped off. Like the Apple iPhone ad cribbing Marclay's Telephone piece.
The Clock is such an incredible idea that it inspires countless odes and tributes. And, of course, I love them all too.
In some capacity, I think of Radiohead's Daydreaming video to be connected too. The doors as portals in repetition taking us into other worlds, the same way Marclay's Clock does.
I would even categorize the Bootleg Barts similarly. Each shirt offers another peek into the alliterative world of a different Bart lover with another interest or idea placed on top.
Us talking about this makes me want to make my own Bootleg Bart shirt. Now I must think about what should be on it.
This continues to not sit right somehow. With respect to CW Moss's thoughtful comments, it seems merely like a rip-off. It's using the *same footage* in the same order and format as The Clock. It's not an homage or a parody or in some way a borrowing of the concept for another medium (a book of quotes from novels about every hour of the day, say) — it's just making the same exact thing. (And asking for money.) I dunno.
I was lucky enough to see The Clock in person more than once here in New York and it is an incredible achievement, both as a movie-watching experience and as a work of creation. Daniel Zalewski's profile of Marclay in The New Yorker describes how back-breaking it was to make. It is a wonder.
Sure, if you can't see Guernica in person you should be able to see images of it, but these are understood not to be the same — apologies for butchering Walter Benjamin. A Clock isn't an image of The Clock, it's just someone trying to repaint it exactly. Anonymously, no less.
You make great points and I largely agree with everything you're saying, Sam.
I think the reason I was open to this facsimile is simply because of how much I want people to see the astounding piece. As I understand it, since its release, Marclay has made requests for the piece that have made it much more difficult to see.
For example, when I saw it for the first time, it was screened in the wonderful and large Bing Theater (R.I.P.) at LACMA in Los Angeles. The second time I saw it was also at LACMA, but in a much smaller gallery room that could probably fit 20 people max. And, if my memory serves, this was by design. Marclay had requested they no longer show it in theaters — which sorta breaks my heart.
It's Marclay's piece and he is allowed to make the rules, and I assume he's made those rules intentionally. But The Clock fucked my shit up because of its scale as an idea and also its scale in actual projection.
Obviously, putting it out on a computer screen isn't going to give people a wow-via-scale either, but part of me is happy cause it gives 11-year-old midwestern kids a chance to see, what to me is, one of the Seven Wonders of our post-everything world. And that's something that Marclay seems to be making harder and harder to do, by his own design.
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