Tick-tock: A watched ‘Clock’

September 20, 2011

For 24 hours, starting last Friday at 4 p.m., the Museum of Fine Arts screened Christian Marclay’s “The Clock,’’ a video made up of thousands of clips from the history of cinema and TV, each clip containing an indication - by timepiece or verbal reference - of the real time as the screening takes place. The dazzling work by Marclay, a Massachusetts College of Art grad, won a Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Biennale and is at the MFA through Oct. 10. At the opening, Globe writers, in shifts, joined museum-goers. Here’s what we saw. SEBASTIAN SMEE

SEBASTIAN SMEE FRIDAY, 4-5 p.m. Fraud that I am, I had to leave “The Clock’’ after just one hour. I had booked a train to New York to see the De Kooning show. At least there was no risk of losing track of time and being late.

It was De Kooning, of course, who described content as “a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash.’’ The insight applies perfectly to “The Clock,’’ which is, among other things, a relentless parade of glimpsed content.

The relentlessness is important, and is, I suppose, like life: The clock, ho hum, is always running down. But what makes “The Clock’’ so great is the freedom Marclay carves out for himself - and by extension, for us - within this cruel and ineluctable system. His editing overflows with wit, exuberance, heartbreak, repose, and reprieve.

All these emotions are not simply borrowed, secondhand and desiccated, from the original movies he quotes. They’re created anew by Marclay’s editing, his use of rhymes, tautologies, dissonance - visually, verbally, sonically - and by his delight in playing havoc with the very system he’s enslaved by.

Some of it is obvious: a grandfather clock crashing to the floor. More often, however, it’s gorgeously subtle: A guy selling knockoff watches absent-mindedly uses one of them to beat the time on a bridge railing. A suitor, just before 5 p.m., tells a shop girl, “I’ll be back at 6. I’ve got something to tell you’’ - content not so much glimpsed as deferred.

JAMES H. BURNETT III FRIDAY, 5-7 p.m. I’d love to say that watching “The Clock’’ was a spectacular time (no pun intended). But 20 minutes into my shift, right about the time Ben Matlock in his time-worn (pun intended) seersucker suit tells a client he believes the man’s alibi, I was driven from the screening room to the MFA’s New American Cafe for an emergency dose of double-shot espresso.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t boredom that sent me speed-walking toward the coffee. It was fatigue. Watching “The Clock’’ was like tasting something new and delicious. The film touches multiple emotions the way such a dish touches more than taste buds.