Christian Marclay - The Clock review: The timepiece that's a masterpiece

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Ben Luke17 September 2018

The Tate bought The Clock jointly with museums in Paris and Jerusalem in 2012. Given the extraordinary response it’s received when exhibited in seemingly every corner of the world, it’s remarkable that Tate Modern has waited this long to show it. But it’s worth the wait.

It’s a homecoming of sorts, because Christian Marclay made The Clock, a 24-hour looping sequence of film and television clips featuring all manner of timepieces, synced with real time, here in London in an intense period between 2007 and 2010, when it premiered at White Cube. It’s also quietly a portrait of a part of this city: Marclay’s researchers gathered their material from video rental shops in the years before people began downloading everything. So, quietly, The Clock records their demise and, with it, the diminished availability of many obscure British movies.

This is just one of the myriad ways in which the film ruminates on time and memory. Marclay’s conceptual discipline is clear: here is clip after clip telling us what the time is. And if they were just crudely shoved together it would be a startling enough feat. But he coaxes mini-narratives from them, even when leaping from distant to recent past: curtains open in one film seamlessly onto a window from another, for instance. There’s also a knowingness to the whole endeavour: “Let’s just sit here and watch the clock,” says a character in one clip.

And watching The Clock is a kind of enchantment. Inevitably, there’s a fragmented history of cinema within it; somehow the spirit soars at the appearance of Richard Burton, Humphrey Bogart and other long-dead stars suspended in a perpetual present as the clock or watch in their scene tells the correct time here in 2018.

And these collective epiphanies are married to deeply personal ones: clips from films you know appear, and send you into reveries about the place and time you saw them like Proust’s madeleine; memories of all of our lives are triggered, we’re reminded of the steady passing of our own short existence.

With its ebbing and flowing rhythms, the tense build-ups to the hour, the more meditative lulls in between, it’s agonising to tear oneself away from. Marclay’s sublime ticking masterpiece has me hypnotised.

Until Jan 20

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