An hour and a half with the American-Swiss artist Christian Marclay’s “The Clock,” a twenty-four-hour projection of movie clips at the Paula Cooper gallery, doesn’t make me an expert, just an enthusiast. The tumbling montage of scenes—recent and old, familiar and rare, Hollywood and foreign—synchronizes fictional times of day, shown on clocks or mentioned in dialogue, with the downright present. I didn’t get it at first, and marvelled at moviemakers’ surprising obsession with 4:40 P.M. But then it was 4:41—by my watch, and on the screen. The experience is like simultaneously surfing on and deep-diving in an ocean of cinema. It’s wild. Your sense of time is ordinarily the first thing you surrender when watching a film; but, here, film keeps banging it back at you, perfumed by sound editing that may bleed music from one scene into the next. Absorption and detachment play tag, as when you’re under nitrous oxide. Nostalgia cascades. In the late afternoon, immediate and eternal, the climactic tensions of “Strangers on a Train” claw you as a matter of course. ♦
