“The Clock” and “Alter Bahnhof”
Film, while dynamic in nature, typically struggles with an overall feeling of passivity on the part of the viewer. Often the level of authority leveraged by the director and writer is immense, and if effective, frequently produces an immersive and focused narrative. The question of what would be lost or gained from relinquishing some of that control and passivity is addressed in two works which both turn to film, a traditionally linear and sequential format, as a base medium for a discourse on time. Christian Marclay’s, “The Clock,” is an audio/visual piece that references every minute of its 24 hours set to coincide with the time of its display; while “Alter Bahnhof”, a 26 minute video walk by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller created for dOCUMENTA(13), brings the past and memories of it, into the present. Their unique approaches reveal interesting considerations regarding the role of audience activity while continuing to value immersion, elements typically at odds.
Marclay’s “The Clock” is composed of innumerable clips from a plethora of released films and television shows, chosen and edited such that the piece serves as a literal clock with a reference to the current time at every minute. Most frequently the reference is an image of a clock, digital or analogue, personal bedside alarm or Big Ben (a recurring image in the piece). Other times, the reference comes as part of the dialogue, often in response to a seen or unseen, heard or unheard, query. The clips span the history of film: silent movies, film noir classics, pop culture hits of the 1980s, and contemporary blockbusters all share screen time. Some are black and white, others grainy television captures, and several are frames filled with high-fidelity, big budget technicolor. The lengths, the directors’ cuts and styles, the locations, and the actors vary — at times, the latter tellingly so, as he or she is revisited in clips from throughout a career displayed in non-chronological order.
Yet Marclay has carefully selected the clips not just for the appropriate reference to time, but for each one’s codified language of mood. At times the transition is simple and smooth, relying on a shared action between clips to extend the moment, such as a sequence showing characters eating an early meal during the minutes between 9:00 and 10:00 am. There is often an action that extends across clips, like the opening of a door or the answering of a phone. But Marclay began his career in audio, as a record spinner and sampler, and much of his previous work is sound collages, utilizing vinyl records and turntables. In “The Clock,” one of the most effective and subtle transition techniques is his blending, mixing, and dubbing of audio over the visuals. For Marclay, “in a music video, the image follows the rhythm of the sound and you get a lot of that fast jump-cutting. I’m sick of it. It was created to hold your attention, but it doesn’t anymore” (Zalewski 12). Instead his audio mixing brings cohesion to the piece which the visual [and occasionally auditory] references to time and clocks can only hint. In order to trick the mind, to create a sense of immersion, he uses the continuity and logic of the audio to provide a sensory depth free from starts and stops and jarring incongruities.
The piece’s film format proffers not only an immersive experience, but also a completely passive one. Instead, by forcing the audience to experience their own time at precisely the same moment and crafting it to incorporate an entire day, the audience is not only made acutely aware of chronology, but is also actively involved in the entire experience. Marclay describes it as disturbing: “You’re constantly reminded that you’ve wasted an hour of your time, and you’re constantly reminded about this thing that you’re trying to figure out: time. So I think it is an anxiety” (Johnson 1). The anxiety of taking responsibility for one’s own exchange of time is dramatically heightened compared to that from a traditional length program. Afterall, staying for the complete experience would require 24 full hours — a seemingly impossible indulgence, contrasted to being certain that one will be ‘released’ in an hour or two at most. Interestingly, the constant prompt to reflect on the temporal does not hinder the spectators from experiencing ‘imaginary time’ — that sense of time passing more slowly or quickly than it actually is which comes about as a product of immersion.
Even the process of utilizing clips to create the piece places a significant responsibility on the viewer; for each audience member recognizes at least some of the clips and actors. Marclay states, “these things I sample, or clip, are things that we share – music, films, sounds. It triggers a layer of participation from the audience as they recognise the material and remember it. Every person’s remembering will be different. That engagement is important, I think” (Davies 2). As the audience views a sample in the context of the previous and succeeding clips, they are also experiencing it in relation to their concurrent presence and the context they bring to it through personal memory. Simultaneously, they are reliving the parallel universe of the referenced clip as they recall it, and even their experiences of that original exposure. The latter occurs with this piece in particular because of that constant reminder of synchronized time, a prompt which encourages consideration of one’s own role during previous times of viewing.
Cardiff and Miller’s “Alter Bahnhof”, which translates to old train station, is site specific, meant to be viewed on a mobile device with headphones while exploring the station in Kassel, Germany. The viewers walk through the building, often given oral directions as they progress, and are instructed to hold the device in front of them, fitting and matching the scene on the screen with that of the real world space. The recorded video walk is mysterious, dark at times, with references to Jewish concentration camp internees and the carnage of war. There are actors throughout, allowing the viewer to catch glimpses of action and overhear fragments of dialogue, but Cardiff’s narration is a constant companion. The piece feels both surreal, and yet present, immersive. The artists’ site describes the piece thus: “an alternate world opens up where reality and fiction meld in a disturbing and uncanny way that has been referred to as physical cinema.”
Exploration of time is again a central element. Memories and the past are brought to the forefront with images and audio, but in a more directed and passive manner than in Marclay’s piece. The people are not recognized actors, the visuals are not clips with social or personal history specific to the viewer. For this reason, the elements of preceding events and remembered narrative are presented by the piece itself, and unlike in “The Clock,” are not the onus of the audience. Aspects of the present are what the viewer actively brings to this piece — the work is brought into the here and now by the overlaying of the dual realities and the actions of the viewers as they walk, move, and glance about. This is even more evident as the observers reorient the running piece in the physical space as it is held in their outstretched hands. The perceptual overlay of images from the past, the pre-recorded, and the observer’s current view allows the viewer to slip through time. “You could say our work is about time travel, in a way. The walks especially,” said Cardiff (Wray 3). This ability to bring the past into the now, this altering of time, is an immersive experience, a powerful realization of an augmented/mixed reality.
As with Marclay’s piece, the immersion and energy of the work are not solely the products of the visuals or the interaction, but rely heavily on the audio elements. In fact, many of Cardiff’s previous solo works, while also directed ‘walks’, are audio only. With this piece, as with her non-visual walks, it is the binaural recording that instantly and permanently erases distance between viewer and art. “when I first discovered the walking binaural technique I was attracted to the closeness of the sound and the audio bridge between the visual, physical world and my body” (Egoyan 6). The audio serves not as a transition, but as disintegration between the past and present, and as a portal between fantasy and reality. The narrator, just over the viewer’s shoulder, ushers the audience into the other world, while the illusion of binaural recordings produce ambient sounds which perfectly match authentic spatial loci and blur the boundaries of where the past was and the present is.
Both Cardiff & Miller’s and Marclay’s pieces run parallel to the observer’s world, letting the viewers slip from one side to the other, or ride the middle, unaware; and both immerse the audience moment by moment through suggestive but incomplete narrative, precise considerations of audio, and layers of perceptual experience. These two pieces represent the power of interaction and audience participation as elements of new, blended media artworks while still fostering compelling immersion and inspiring a complex dialogue — in these examples, one regarding man’s relation to time, mortality, and humanity.
Works Cited
“Alter Bahnhof Video Walk.” Janet Cardiff George Bures Miller, www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/bahnhof.html.
Cardiff, Janet. “Janet Cardiff” by Atom Egoyan. BOMB Magazine, no. 79, 2002. p. 6. bombmagazine.org/article/2463/janet-cardiff.
Cardiff, Janet and George Bures Miller. “Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller and the Power of Sound” by John Wray. New York Times, 26 July 2012. p. 3. www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/magazine/janet-cardiff-george-bures-miller-and-the-power-of-sound.html.
Marclay, Christian. “Christian Marclay: Art’s Man of the Moment” by Lucy Davies. The Telegraph, 1 October 2012, p. 2. www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9571926/Christian-Marclay-arts-man-of-the-moment.html.
Marclay, Christian. “For Christian Marclay, ‘The Clock’ Continues to Tick” by Reed Johnson. Los Angeles Times, 18 May 2011, p. 1. articles.latimes.com/2011/may/18/entertainment/la-et-clock-20110518.
Marclay, Christian. “The Hours: How Christian Marclay Created the Ultimate Digital Mosaic” by Daniel Zalewski. The New Yorker, 12 March 2012, p. 12. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/12/the-hours-daniel-zalewski.
Marclay, Christian. The Clock. 2010. Video installation. MFA, Massachusetts.
Cardiff, Janet, and George Bures Miller. Alter Bahnhof. 2012. Video download. Web.