Christian Marclay: The Clock

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Christian Marclay, "The Clock," 2010

film, courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada.

The Clock took Marclay and a team of assistants over three years to create. After its premiere in 2010, it was hailed as “a beguiling dream of eternal cinema” by the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, and “…maybe the greatest film you’ve ever seen” by author Zadie Smith. Organized by the National Gallery of Canada, we are grateful to be working with them to bring this widely acclaimed artwork to North Vancouver.

Christian Marclay's The Clock runs for 24 hours, and functions as a real timepiece. It is constructed from thousands of film clips drawn from the past 70 years of cinema and television, each of which includes a timepiece or an image of a clock. The fragments were then intricately stitched together into a kinetic, fragmentary day in sync with actual time. When Richard Gere looks at his clock radio in American Gigolo, for example, 12:05pm in the film will be that precise time in the gallery.  

The Clock strikes that rare balance of a work that is engagingly popular and critically challenging, and with each presentation, including at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2011), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015), and the Tate Modern in London (2018), its reputation has rightly grown. Now, for the first and perhaps only time, this iconic artwork can be experienced here in British Columbia. It’s not to be missed, a chance to see to an extraordinary homage to cinema that fundamentally reconsiders the way we view time. 

On select dates this summer, The Polygon will stay open overnight for 24-hour screenings, providing the an opportunity to see the work in its entirety. These are scheduled for Fridays, July 5, July 26, August 16, September 6, and September 13.

Friday, September 6 24-hour showing of The Clock (until Saturday, September 7 at 5pm) Sara Cwynar: In Discussion at 7pm