• DOI:10.1353/FRM.2013.0020
• Corpus ID: 191480641

The Clock: Gesture and Cinematic Replaying

@article{Fowler2013TheCG,
  title={The Clock: Gesture and Cinematic Replaying},
  author={Catherine Fowler},
  journal={Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media},
  year={2013},
  volume={54},
  pages={226 - 242}
}

• Catherine Fowler
• Published 1 October 2013
• Art
• Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media

IntroductionIn the many reviews of Christian Marclay's The Clock (2011), the work's uniqueness tends to be emphasized over and above any debt it may owe to preceding work.1 In this essay I attempt to create a lineage for The Clock by comparing it with films and videos by Joseph Cornell, Ken Jacobs, Martin Arnold, and Douglas Gordon, artists whose practice has centered upon replaying other people's movies.2 By calling Cornell, Jacobs, Arnold, Douglas, and Marclay "replayers," my aim is to conceive of a subset of found footage film and video making for which the emphasis is upon re-experiencing the feature films during the screening event.3 By approaching The Clock from this perspective, my objective is to argue that the film's overriding conceit-its apparent synchronicity of reel time and real time-belongs among practices of replaying, in which viewers are encouraged to dwell in moments that, through these artist's interventions, linger, contract, dilate, and are suspended.Through replaying, artists reflect upon cinema's past and its (and our) relation to temporality and duration. However, what is replayed is as important as how replaying is achieved. In tandem with the mental labor that it takes to reconceive of the purpose of the found films, we find reshapings of the original material that also require extensive manual labor. Similarly, a concern with making us really see bodies in motion on screen accompanies the somewhat philosophical effects described above that occur when we experience this work. As such, replaying and re-experiencing become political and ethical acts. While artists operate flatbed editors, optical printers, projectors, and computers that require them to hold, push, press, switch, turn, swivel, and twist, by hand; viewers are encouraged to hone in on bodies performing sustained and repeated movements, both naturally and at the behest of the hands of these creators. The visual hinge that joins the moment that we experience and the movement that we perceive is gesture, while the theoretical hinge that fastens Marclay to Cornell, Jacobs, and Arnold is the media philosopher Vilem Flusser and his intensive consideration of gesture.4 Ultimately, I will show in this essay how, through an attention to the making of gesture in the cinema, replaying can be seen as what Flusser terms a "gesture of making"-thinking with one's hands.5The Clock: "Discriminations of Theatrical Gesture"In a review of The Clock, Iain Sinclair describes the film as providing "discriminations of theatrical gesture. How to sleep. How to get up. How to cross a street."6 Sinclair's syntax is instructive, as it expresses the punctuating effect of the diegetic clocks. Accordingly, in the scenes that occur between 10 and 11 o'clock at night, we may be witness to gestures that remind us how to sleep, but those gestures will be divided up into discrete moments from different films that break down the larger action into smaller parts.The technique of combining clips to break actions down into their discrete parts was actually introduced in Marclay's first video, Telephones (US/UK, 1995) and honed in his second, Video Quartet (US/UK, 2002). In Telephones, the act of phoning is broken down into eight discrete gestures: dialing; ringing; characters interrupting what they are doing to pick up the receiver; the receiver being lifted to the ear and the first "hello" being spoken; the beginning of a conversation; longer, cliched fragments of conversations; mute listening; goodbyes and hanging up. Being only seven minutes long, Telephones can be seen as a short experiment for what would become The Clock in which we see an amplification of techniques that were tried and tested in Marclay's earlier work, namely, the extraction of theatrical gestures and the discontinuity that is created by reminders of the time.7 This combination creates tensions for the viewer, who is forced to negotiate two speeds: the fluid movement of gestures and the abrupt, regulated movement of the clocks and other references to time. …