![]() ![]() Then there are people going out, it’s two or three in the morning – and people commit crimes at that time. “Everything up to midnight was pretty easy,” says Marclay. How about the wee small hours stretch that runs from midnight to daybreak? It’s the most mysterious and almost hidden part of The Clock, the section most people won’t get to see. There was one guy who just kept on bringing me clips of horror movies, people getting decapitated. Some assistants didn’t last very long, because they just didn’t get it. We instructed them on how to ‘rip’ the part. “My assistants had an account at the store, renting all these VHS films. Over the course of the next three years, a team of assistants watched hundreds and hundreds of films, grinding through videocassettes. ‘Everything up to midnight was pretty easy’ … Christian Marclay at Tate Modern. We looked at lot of British films: every time something happens in London, you can bet you’re going to see Big Ben. ![]() First, I asked for films with obvious time themes: thrillers, doomsday dramas, James Bond films where the hero always has a luxury watch. It specialised in hard-to-find films and experimental things. “I recruited researchers with an ad in a video shop in Clerkenwell that has long gone. What creates anxiety is people just waiting and being nervous.” The idea of documenting the banal is very important to me. “It might just be someone in a restaurant checking their watch. “Almost every film has such a moment,” he says. Marclay took his idea to the White Cube gallery – and they got behind it. So it seemed – until he came to London in 2007, his wife Lydia Yee having been appointed curator at the Barbican. What if, in the history of film, I could find every minute of 24 hours? But it would take for ever – it’s an impossible task!” I wanted to mark time and one way to do that was to use clocks. “I was working in New York on a ‘video score’ – a video projection that triggers music from live musicians. But The Clock’s real genesis lay in a project not so different from his Huddersfield composition. So when did Marclay first get the idea for The Clock? Well, in 1995 he created a droll seven-minute work entitled Telephones, a pre-YouTube supercut of people in films making phonecalls. I’m not one of those fascist composers who says, ‘Play this!’” “I can’t read or write music in the traditional way. “I don’t write notes,” says the 63-year-old artist. Its players will work from a “graphic score” – not sheet music, but images of hands in various positions on the keyboard He is in Britain not just because of The Clock: he is composer-in-residence for the Huddersfield contemporary music festival, where he is premiering Investigations, an improvisory piece for 20 pianos. Marclay is a calm, reserved person, looking rather like the architect he once pondered being. “I’m always seeing clocks in films and thinking, ‘Damn, now that would have been great for The Clock!’” “Yes! Me too!” grins Marclay as we meet at Tate Modern. Ever since, I have been unable to see a shot of a clock or a watch in a film without thinking of it. It’s a mesmerising, dreamlike kaleidoscope that is also hilarious. I first saw The Clock in 2011 and my mind was entirely blown. ![]() Still need help? Get in touch with Hatch Support.Time to rob a bank? … The Clock strikes one.
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