The Clock, redux

I caught up with Christian Marclay’s The Clock again this weekend, this time at one of its new permanent homes, Boston’s MFA. The couches were comfy and the exhibition space was off the beaten track; the audience was small but committed and the viewing experience a good one.
The second time around, the novelty of the work is dissipated; the thrill of discovery is gone, but that holds true for any work of art. What I experienced this time were deeper thoughts, mostly about time. “We live our lives by the clock,” goes the song from The Pajama Game, and that is Theme No. 1 of this montage. The clock creates deadlines: so many of the actors have to be somewhere, or meet someone, or deliver the ransom by a certain hour. If we all didn’t have synchronized watches, would there be this pressure? One answer comes in the clip from Easy Rider, when Peter Fonda takes off his watch, throws it into the desert, and guns his motorcycle.
Theme No. 2 involves the passage of time. We sit in the theater, literally watching the time go by. As the next clip shows 10:53 instead of 10:52, we realize that another minute of our lives has passed. We could, of course, have the same sensation by staying home and watching one of our own clocks inexorably count off the minutes, but watching these fictional clocks must be more productive, mustn’t it? Some minutes in Marclay’s movie seem to go much faster, or slower, than others, but every time we check our own watch we see he is right on cue. Which goes faster, the minute spent reading the paper at breakfast, or the minute spent waiting for the bomb to explode? (Which weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?)
Theme No. 3 also involves a passage of time, but this one is measured in years, if not decades. Looking at clips of Harold Lloyd or Laurel and Hardy is like being in a museum, looking at history. But seeing clips of a young Robert Redford or Robert DeNiro, people we’ve always identified with as being “our” stars, makes us realize how much older they have become and, ipso facto, how much we, too, have aged. Where went the era of our youthful moviegoing (ou sont les neiges d’antan)?
I don’t know if it is properly a theme, but the final thought that kept returning as I watched was, how wonderful movies are! In ten- or even five-second clips, we are transported into an alternate world, a distant location, an alien situation. Remember how much each whole movie took us out of our own particular place in the universe for 90 minutes or two hours. What a gift!
Beyond the substance, there is so much style in The Clock, and one can appreciate it solely on its own terms, even if one had never had the personal cinematic encounter with Woody Allen or Sophia Loren or Jimmy Stewart that creates such echoes. Adjoining clips relate to each other in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Dialogue from one is allowed to drift into the next, and background music weaves the threads together. Moments of tension on the screen build up through fast-paced cutting, while moments of languor roll more casually into one another.
And always, when you want to leave, there is the temptation to stay, to see what comes next, to see if Marclay really will use High Noon.