Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock

The Clock (Christian Marclay, 2010) is a twenty-four-hour collage movie comprising thousands of film clips that collectively span a range of cinema history and genres. The excerpted scenes show timepieces that are precisely synchronized with the moment during which the audience sees them, thereby conflating cinematic and actual time. Beyond The Clock’s clever gimmick is a significant theoretical contemplation of the contingency of measured time, the power of film narrative, and the conventions and complexities of spectatorship. Using varied analytical frameworks, including the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, this article explores the ways in which The Clock both celebrates and subverts cinematic practice.