Latest news with #Marclay
Boston Globe
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Nothing is ever resolved in this suspense-packed movie, and that is the point
This is 'Doors,' the aptly-named new filmic mash-up by Christian Marclay, making its North American premiere at the ICA (it debuted in London in 2023). One door closes, another opens — over and over in the 55-minute amalgam of in-between moments, across a gamut of film history that lodges you, the viewer, firmly and forever in liminal space. The film manufacturers a perpetual compulsion to anticipate something that never comes. It's unnatural, uncomfortable, and exactly the point: 'Doors' leaves the mind unconsciously searching, scrambling to assemble narrative from fragments unlinked by anything other than its key device: a door and a jump-cut, the central artifice of film for its entire existence. In a heartbeat, viewers can leap moments, or years, mere steps, or miles. Marclay's defiance of expectation, hardwired by generations of film-viewing, is where its power lies: a flatline of edge-of-your seat anticipatory drama, without beginning or end. Advertisement A still from Christian Marclay's "Doors," 2022. Christian Marclay/White Cube Advertisement Marclay, equal parts movie nerd and high-concept formalist (his early creative forays were as a DJ in New York in the 1980s, specializing in radical remixes of music history), has been down this road before. He's best-known for 'The Clock,' his 2010 magnum opus that plundered decades of film history for clips of every minute of a 24-hour day and knit them together in precise 60-second snippets so that the piece actually told the time . It was a bona fide sensation, the rare combination of deep conceptual rigor and broad popular appeal. In 2010, people 'Doors' operates on the same premise. It extracts hundreds of moments from generations of cinema, linked together by the intuitive logic of entry and exit. It's tempting to consider it 'The Clock' lite, but that isn't giving the conceptual challenge Marclay sets for himself the credit it deserves. 'Doors' is virtuosic in its own right, razor-sharp in its rhythm and timing; with such pronounced seams — black and white to color; 1930s to 1990s — it nonetheless appears seamless. Fluidity of motion is matched by sound, the sonic environment of each clip melting into the other, smoothing the flow. 'Doors' could easily be jarring; its core device is abruptness and transition. Instead, it reaches altitude quickly and stays there; the only turbulence is by design. Advertisement An installation view of Christian Marclay's "Doors," at the ICA. Mel Taing Where 'The Clock' was relentlessly linear — minute by minute, not a millisecond out of place — 'Doors' has no such guiding logic. Its rhythm is irregular, but propulsive. In crafting his tease of narrative, Marclay sometimes deploys the same clip twice or more as it suits his narrative tease (I watched Sidney Poitier burst out of his classroom and into a clutch of eavesdropping students in 'To Sir, With Love' at least three times, re-linked to other comings and goings). And narrative — non-existent, impossible — is the central deception of the whole affair: Marclay strings together clips with comparable emotional tenor — furtive, jubilant, terrified — that tempts a mind hungry for story to craft one where none could possibly be. Different viewers will take different things from 'Doors.' Encyclopedic film buffs can take it almost as a trivia challenge: Identify actors and movies by name, score points for all your right answers. Don't get me wrong: Whatever else it is, 'Doors' is great fun. I'm no film buff (though I know John Travolta in 'Urban Cowboy' when I see it, and I did), which makes 'Doors' about something more for me: a sustained emotional state. Advertisement A still from "Doors." Christian Marclay/White Cube 'The Clock' was heady — we go to the movies to be transported from real time, a respite; here was a movie, fantastical and star-studded, that pinned you down, and made real time inescapable. 'Doors' is more visceral, a transporting, immersive experiment in forced hyperacuity. The whole is more — far more — than the sum of its parts. Sidney Poitier bursting into that hallway is dynamic, nostalgic, and stirring. But it's just one element of a more potent brew. Marclay is a master of dramatic tension; he expertly tightens the screws and slackens them off. But there is never respite, or pause. All is motion, transition, an edge-of-your-seat, what-happens-next on permanent lock. It's not normal, or natural. It's also exhilarating. The dramatic core of 'Doors' isn't doors, or film, at all. It's you. CHRISTIAN MARCLAY'S DOORS Through Sept. 1. Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive. 617-478-3100, Murray Whyte can be reached at
Forbes
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
MoMA Is Exhibiting A 24-Hour-Long Movie That Operates Like Clockwork
It's high noon at the Museum of Modern Art. On a screen in a darkened theater, the hands of a clock converge on the number twelve. Cinephiles will recognize this moment as the climax of a 1952 Western starring Gary Cooper. Viewers who linger may subsequently identify scenes from movies such as Mommie Dearest and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Each clip focuses on a timepiece indicating the current hour and minute in Manhattan. The montage, which spans twenty-four hours and runs on a loop, operates as a clock. Christian Marclay. Still from The Clock. 2010. Video (black and white and color, sound). 24 hrs. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift from the Collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. © 2024 Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery and White Cube. The Clock is as complex in execution as it's simple in concept. The multimedia artist Christian Marclay enlisted half a dozen assistants to find the footage, which is sourced from approximately twelve thousand films and TV episodes spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries. Over a two year period, Marclay spliced disparate clips from virtually every known genre to craft a new narrative with time as the protagonist. Initially screened in London in 2010, the work has since become a classic of durational art in the tradition of Andy Warhol's Empire and John Cage's ORGAN2/ASLSP. As is the case with those earlier works, The Clock has the paradoxical property of being both renowned and unknown. It's a familiar stranger, to borrow the title of a classic book about time (which glosses a concept originally articulated by St. Augustine). The simplicity of the concept makes it easy to reference in passing, much as Empire can be described as a fixed view of the Empire State Building screened over eight continuous hours. But has anyone actually seen the whole thing? Marclay viewed every scene many times while editing it. But has anyone watched it continuously? The Museum of Modern Art has gamely offered the opportunity by presenting several all-night screenings. An intrepid MoMA staffer actually sat through one of them. He fell asleep. Christian Marclay. The Clock. 2010. Video (black and white and color, sound). 24 hrs. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift from the Collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. © 2024 Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery and White Cube. Installation view, White Cube Mason's Yard, London, October 15 – November 13, 2010. Photo: Todd-White Photography. That the work eludes full viewing is not a failing. Instead it should be seen as an indication that the work is more than mere concept. Or, to be more precise, Marclay's execution reveals that the concept contains unforeseeable complexity underlying its simplicity. The Clock need not be viewed in entirety for the complexity to be revealed. Seeing all of it might even be beside the point. Meaning emerges from minute to minute. The most striking quality of The Clock, at least initially, is that time is experienced vicariously. Sitting in the dark, viewers become voyeurs, watching every tick and tock. This perspective comes quite naturally, since film is a vehicle for voyeurism. What is unusual is the attentiveness to what would ordinarily be background information. With time as the protagonist, the viewer seeks to understand its character as keenly as people watching High Noon seek to understand the character played by Gary Cooper. Observed in this way, time loses the abstraction of a purely physical phenomenon, everywhere the same. We recognize time to be contextual and interpersonal. It's the stuff of relationships. Although The Clock is not polemical, it calls attention to the consequences of mechanization, advancing themes evoked in some of Marclay's source material (most obviously Modern Times). Marclay's work reveals an alternative to standardization: In contrast to the precision timepieces that populate it, The Clock keeps time in aggregate while syncopating time from moment to moment. Christian Marclay. Still from The Clock. 2010. Video (black and white and color, sound). 24 hrs. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift from the Collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. © 2024 Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery and White Cube. Christian Marclay. Still from The Clock. 2010. Video (black and white and color, sound). 24 hrs. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift from the Collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. © 2024 Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery and White Cube The syncopation of time arises in part from stylistic differences over the lifespan of cinema: Different periods have different pacing. The scenes that comprise The Clock are not set in chronological order, progressing from the oldest films to the newest. On the contrary, movies of different eras are juxtaposed. The cyclical time of clocks and watches is constructed by fragmenting the linear time of cinematic history and reorganizing the fragments according to a logic alien to their origin. Almost miraculously, a circle emerges from countless tangents. Marclay's deconstruction and reconstruction of time does not reduce to a coherent theory of the fourth dimension. On the contrary, The Clock celebrates the perplexity we feel when we strive for definitions. And yet, the work is perfectly lucid. Like time, that familiar stranger, The Clock seems strange only upon reflection. Many of the strategies Marclay used to make The Clock can be seen in his earlier works. The most obvious forerunner is Video Quartet, a 2002 work in which four screens show four videos simultaneously, each constructed from myriad film clips, all synced in a way that interlaces their soundtracks into a musical composition. More than just a feat of virtuoso editing, Video Quartet liberates the films from their intended function. Their appropriation is ontological. They're orchestrated like musical instruments. In an equivalent way, The Clock appropriates cinematic material to make a timepiece. The rupture opens up what it means to be a clock. But there's a reciprocal effect on the movies themselves. By setting the scenes to local time, the movies are defictionalized. The fourth wall is broken. The films enter everyday life. Or viewed from the opposite vantage, time no longer seems real. The clock becomes nothing more nor less than a narrative device.
