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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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The Clock by Christian Marclay. Currently at The Power Plant, Toronto. Art review by VB
still from Ingmar Bergman's 'Wild Strawberries'
(note: this image is reference only, not the actual work described here)
You’ve probably heard about this unapologetically-blockbuster art-installation. As mentioned many times before, it’s a 24 hour video loop of depictions of clocks in cinema, consisting of thousands of short clips from all kinds of old movies which depict on screen the “real-time” at the moment of viewing. Most of the clips are only a few seconds long, and from what I saw rather few clips got past 10 seconds, but I haven’t seen the whole thing. My personal experience was about two hours, from 1:13 to 3:38 in the afternoon. Yes, those times exactly. I could tell.
I couldn’t help but be impressed by the scope and ambition of this project. But aside from being impressed, I can also have little quibbles.
Essentially it’s mostly pretty fast moving scenes with random juxtapositions, but the randomness is teased by a psychological pull towards an implied narrative, which is created by the illusion of the forward motion of time. This false narrative creates an odd tension, which is both interesting and frustrating. My mind is pulled into filling in the blanks and constructing an artificial plot from these fragments, but then I’m denied the release that a conventional story resolution provides. Then I’m annoyed for a couple of seconds, and then something else unrelated happens, and for some odd reason I find myself really curious to see what happens next, and the mind loop continues. Then I find it hard to leave the theatre, even though I’m annoyed. I still want to see what happens next, even though I know it will just be something random.
The editing is pretty slick, especially the sound design, which often features an interesting audio overlap between transitions of the different clips. The sources for the film stock are pretty diverse: old black and white movies, generic movies, a few famous Hollywood blockbusters, lots of obscure foreign films, and some television (mostly Italian soap operas). For a film nerd like myself it was actually pretty hard to keep up with the name that tune references, but at least The X-Files, James Bond and classic Film-Noirs have a reasonable profile in the mix. When I first walked in, I heard the famous Orson Welles cuckoo clock speech from ‘The Third Man’. No matter who you are, you will recognize at least something.
The actually selection and cutting of clips is the real star of the show, and gets a less than perfect rating from me. The basic selection philosophy is pretty good, it’s a loose balance of drama and comedy with some generic banal stuff in the middle to balance it out, and with the genres loosely clumped, so that you would often see a couple of Japanese film clips or French film clips or cop show clips flow together into small groups of twos and threes. One thing is for certain: lots of chimes and gongs at the top of every hour.
The dramatic sections are where the audience pulse really revs up: when you get a bunch of different tense film noir “race against time under the threat of death” clips running together against each other for a few minutes, the total effect is really exhilarating. But obviously, it is impossible to sustain this pitch for too long, so with either a bang or a sigh it deflates and slides off and wanders into something else, which is not as interesting, and then slowly builds again. The comedic sections are generally pretty goofy. Christian Marclay is a big fan of fake reaction shots cobbled from different clips. I’m not so much myself, it’s okay I guess, but for me it gets tired after a while. One thing I found more frustrating is that a really intriguing clip would roll for a few seconds, but then cut to a comparatively long pointless segment of a family eating dinner in an Italian soap opera that would seem to go on forever. I often wanted to just grab that channel controller right out of his damn hands, which I guess makes us like siblings.
An entirely unintentional juxtaposition is that I watched 'The Clock' right after watching the Omer Fast looped film 'Five Thousand Feet is the Best'. Both of these projects explore the alternate use of narrative, but the difference is that the Omer Fast work is emotionally more profound. Watching them together made 'The Clock' seem glib and superficial by comparison, which isn’t really a fair evaluation of the work in itself.
Aside from my minor quibbles, this show is really worth a look, for whatever time you can spare. You might want to note that screening hours are 10-5 Tues-Sun (later on Thurs), and that the space was pretty booked up by the time I left on a cold rainy weekday, so if you go on a weekend for sure there will be a line-up. There is only one more scheduled special 24-hour screening on November 24. I myself would love to see 'The Clock' at 4 in the morning, but I’m just kidding myself if I think I’m going to actually be awake at that ungodly hour.
At The Power Plant until Nov 25.
Five Thousand Feet is the Best by Omer Fast. Currently at The Power Plant, Toronto. Art review by VB.
Predator Drone specs via Wikipedia
(note: this image is reference only, not the actual work described here)
This is a 35 minute video loop with the nice production values of a decent feature film. In theory, it might have been presented just as a short film with a beginning and end, but in practice the narrative doesn’t work quite that way here. The narrative structure itself is a series of not-quite nested loops, with the same story introduced several times, and which develop in different ways each time.
The establishing story is about the post-traumatic stress disorder of a former remote computer operator of geographically removed Predator Drones. In a bunker near Las Vegas Nevada, they clock in for a shift of distantly observing, and at rare moments distantly and intensely interacting with the landscape of rural Afghanistan. Their job seems kind of like a video game, but: “It’s a video game where you’re stuck on the same level for ten straight hours every day”. After work, they often like to unwind by playing “real” video games.
There are no images of actual Predator Drones here. There is no footage from real Drone operations here. Instead there is remote-feeling aerial footage designed to simulate the sense of a military Drone distantly observing Las Vegas and other parts of America. Some of the internal digression stories are prosaic and diverting. But one story, of an average family trying to make a getaway under the “eye in the sky” of “the occupying power”, is pretty damn intense. It’s the real focus of the entire narrative. The other segments are distancing devices, designed to intentionally distract attention to and from the entire effect.
Years ago my associate Dr.J used to have a paperback copy of the 1977 edition of ‘Jane's Pocket Book of Remotely Piloted Vehicles: Robot Aircraft Today’, which he jokingly called: “Jane’s Book of Things which Can Fly Fast and Kill You”. I guess we were naive in those innocent times. Those mechanical critters looked pretty ominous, and Bruce Sterling used the bulbous Canadair Sentinel as an assassination device in one of his cyberpunk novels (‘Islands in The Net’) but back in those days these things were uncommon and relatively harmless, even if they ‘looked’ creepy. The Predator Drone was originally designed as an observational instrument. Adding the capabilities of lethal Hellfire missiles was a later evolutionary adaptation.
(Note: Sally McKay has been studying the work of Omer Fast lately. I knew a little about the piece before I went in, but the primary impression I had was that Sally liked it.)
At The Power Plant until Nov 25.