By luck, the first time I saw The Clock, at Paula Cooper Gallery in 2011, it was very early in the show’s run and hadn’t yet gotten much attention. It took me a little while to see that it was unspooling in real time. The delight I experienced at the recognition is rare; I felt I had fallen into some wondrous secret rhythm of the visual world.
Part of the pleasure of viewing it in 2025 is teasing out the ways that The Clock is now additionally time-stamped. In 2011, it seemed plausibly comprehensive, or at least representative, in its sampling of popular filmmaking. It reached back to the medium’s birth and forward to the present. Now, it feels like a decidedly closed circle, its daylong loop shaped like a clock face, or an old-fashioned can of celluloid. It seems an artifact of a period when the media circus was just a little quieter, jump cuts slower, and the boundary between fact and fiction more secure. Of course, my temporal position has shifted too. Time does hurry us along, progressively.
That is not to say that The Clock’s fairly miraculous internal propulsion has stalled; its fluidity—its negotiation of arresting incident and tempering continuity—remains mesmerizing.
I expected my allotted late-morning hour to be on the quiet side, but the period between 11:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. is a steady crescendo of anxiety. Toward the end, there are several clips from caper films of men dangling perilously from the arms of huge clocktower clock faces, desperately attempting to slow time as noon and some (unseen) calamity approach. Soon, Leonardo DiCaprio, having won a card game, rushes to board the Titanic, its noon departure minutes away. Ultimately the footage builds to a kind of opera buffa of drum rolls and shoot-outs, culminating, inevitably, in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952). Fatefulness, it becomes inescapably clear in this hour, is a basic premise of Marclay’s project.
Perhaps needless to say, The Clock’s themes also include mortality. Funerals are plentiful. Along with the films sampled, we watch actors age. The pre-noon hour features younger and older versions of Charles Bronson and Richard Gere, and catches Gary Oldman as a slender, feral-looking Sid Vicious—an especially arresting turn if you’ve seen him in the current series Slow Horses. In addition to the many featured actors who’ve departed, recently or long since, there are some who have come under clouds since 2011, including Johnny Depp, shown repeatedly in the hours around 11:00 a.m., and Woody Allen, glimpsed quickly and looking characteristically—if now with new meaning—disheveled and stupefied with alarm.
