Archival Cinephilia in The Clock

This is how the accelerated tempo of technology appears in light of the primal history of the present. Awakening.

—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Art critic Rosalind Krauss called The Clock a “tour de force,”¹ and novelist Zadie Smith wrote enthusiastically about it in the New York Review of Books.² It is clearly an event, both a novelty event for the general public and an intellectual event; and yet film scholars don’t seem so sure. Thom Andersen sums up the grumbling cynicism that I’ve heard from several cinephiles when he asks, “Is the clock dumb enough?”³ The problem for Andersen is primarily curatorial, as Marclay’s corpus of films is severely limited historically and geographically, fairly predictable, and not always accurate in terms of the actual synchronization of movie time and clock time. Marclay borrows heavily from film history, but the question of his own contribution to that history remains unresolved, perhaps because it is not precisely a film.

The Clock may be a video collage, but it is very much a cinematic experience, drawing the viewer into a hermetically sealed world of cinematic time and space. The continuity principles of editing, sound, and performance create a fluid, endless text that is at once seductive and engrossing. Marclay arguably invokes both forms of cinephilia as Thomas Elsaesser has described them: the older version of immersion in the spectacle and the more recent version of the collector and interactive user of digital cinema.⁴ The Clock also invokes several principles of collage-based film practice that have been a cornerstone of the avant-garde since the late 1950s. Marclay’s techniques of appropriation and recombination are, however, neither challenging nor critical. The Clock begs the question, “Where is the détournement?” Instead of interrupting narrative flow, Marclay has successfully reconstructed a kind of narrative that seduces and entertains. Marclay has appropriated not only the film clips but something close to the mechanism of desire that interpellates the viewer into the flow of narrative film.

If The Clock challenges engrained notions of political modernism that are very much still at play in experimental film practice and criticism, it also opens up some key questions about cinematic representation in the digital age. Despite the viewing pleasure and critical rewards of identifying hundreds of movies and actors, The Clock is nevertheless an experimental work made by an artist and exhibited in museums and galleries. It might be best described as an essay on cinephilia, if that isn’t too much of a backdoor way of talking about secondhand or borrowed pleasures. This is not to say that the work offers a coherent argument regarding cinephilia, or that Marclay intended it as an intervention into the ongoing scholarly debate regarding cinephilia. In fact, The Clock is not exemplary of the essay film as it has been defined either by Timothy Corrigan or Laura Roscaroli, who both stress the subjective aspects of a form that engages with the world through various creative modes of cinematic address.⁵ The Clock offers no first-person reflexivity whatsoever, and arguably inverts all principles of cinematic subjectivity through the use of exclusively borrowed footage and its lack of voiceover—although there is definitely an authorial inscription registered in the montage and in the sound-image relations. However, if we consider The Clock in terms of its production of knowledge, it may nonetheless be aligned with the video essay as a genre of film studies practice.⁶ Moreover, I want to argue here that whether one understands the piece as a good object or a bad object, it foregrounds a crucial tension in film aesthetics between genre cinema and the avant-garde and art cinemas. Rather than press the issue of the essay film, I will explore this treatise on cinephilia by way of key concepts in Walter Benjamin’s thought. As a cult phenomenon, The Clock evokes the aura of the pre-cinematic artwork, and yet its strategies of sampling clearly embrace the reproducibility of the cinematic image that Benjamin endorsed for its potential engagement with progressive social politics. Going beyond the artwork essay...