"A Report to Our Funders"
An email exchange between Yuck 'n Yum's Alexandra Ross and Alex Tobin in the wake of their 24-hour sponsored viewing of Christian Marclay's The Clock in the CCA, Glasgow as part of the British Art Show.
AR After recovering from self-induced delirium I am now almost fully acclimatised to daylight and interacting with others. Since we embarked upon our 24-hour sponsored watching of Christian Marclay's The Clock in order to raise funds for Yuck 'n Yum's 2011 programme of events, it seems appropriate, if not essential to give a report to our funders. So what do you think they want to know?
AT It takes a long time to recover, doesn't it! When I went to bed last night, my brain was still locked in endurance-mode, and was very reluctant to let me shut my eyes.
I think if I were paying someone to watch The Clock, I'd most probably ask: "What films were in it?"
In fact, I hope someone is wondering this, because today I took some time to try and write down as many films as I could still remember. In no particular order: Silence of the Lambs, Beetlejuice, The Fly, The Pit and the Pendulum, Ed Wood, A Nightmare on Elm St, The Evil Dead, Spellbound, Rope, Rear Window, Pan's Labyrinth, Back to the Future, Back to the Future II, Back to the Future III, Goldeneye, Moonraker, The Man with the Golden Gun, Amelie, The Pink Panther, The Ladykillers, Knowing, 1408, Zoolander, The Big Lebowski, Groundhog Day, Big Daddy, Gregory's Girl, Live and Let Die, Saw, Saw IV, Mary Poppins, The Green Mile, Hook, One Hour Photo, Kinsey, Schindler's List, Casino Royale, Die Hard III, Pulp fiction, The Time Machine, The Producers, Planes trains and automobiles, When Harry met Sally, A Single Man, Pride and Prejudice, Kes, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Scarface, The Untouchables, Hellboy, Interview with the Vampire, From Hell, Mr and Mrs Smith, The Others, National Treasure, Batman, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Lost in Translation, Run Lola Run, The Terminal, 3.10 to Yuma, The Machinist, The Number 23, The Mask, Office space, Nosferatu, Citizen Kane, Little Miss Sunshine, Knocked up, War of the Worlds, Vanilla Sky, Rain Man, The Wizard of Oz, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Titanic, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The World is not Enough, Watchmen, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Micmacs, The X Files, Beatrix, Jumper, Hallam Foe, Chaplin, Marie Antoinette, Mission Impossible, Bruce Almighty, Jingle all the Way.
Of course, these are only some that I both recognised and later remembered having recognised. The majority of the films were outside my acknowledgeably limited film-watching experience, and I will forever associate those unknown clips with Marclay's "The Clock" instead of with their original sources.
One of the staff members at the CCA asked me what I thought the best hour was, and I couldn't really remember in particular (I said perhaps around 3.30am). Did you have a favourite segment?
AR Well, the passage of time was not only relevant to the content of the work itself, but also to the situation of us as viewer. My immediate thoughts on these are varied, subjective and somewhat lacking in logic. Apologies. The hardest hours: 1-2pm and 7-9am. Hours when I thought I would give up: 12noon until 1am! The first 13 hours were certainly the hardest for me. Things that kept me going: when the cinema space was nearly empty between 4-7am. With hindsight, I think this was because in some skewed way I felt that I had won. Perhaps a last man standing competition. Most emotional moment: when the CCA staff asked for a round of applause for our having completed the 24 hours. Another question sponsors have been asking me since my return to Dundee is, 'would you do it again?' This question could be viewed in another way - was this viable method to fund-raise for Yuck 'n Yum project programming, and are there other possibilities to use this as an alternative to existing and diminishing funding for the arts? Bearing in mind, that despite The Clock being thoroughly engaging, there were torturous elements to this as an endurance exercise.
AT I think it can only be done once. It was an extraordinary experience that seems to have altered the plumbing in my brain: it has absolutely changed the way I think about film, and, in a wider context, about narrative and fiction. When you witness a character being told to wait outside a courtroom for three hours, and then you revisit that scene three very real hours later, you feel yourself shrinking down to the size of these wee characters that exist for our entertainment within the bounds of movies. Or perhaps the characters are growing into real people and their situation is taking on a quality of actual life. The normal editing process works as a buffer between viewers and the discomfiting situations characters are subjected to in the course of a standard action movie. The man locked in a cellar with a ticking bomb, for example: The Clock's real-time narrative revisited him over several hours, whereas in the original context, I can't imagine us witnessing more than a few minutes of his suffering.
Tortuous is the word!
AR I entirely agree. The potentiality of a never fulfilling narrative pulled me through the 24 hours at a surprisingly vigorous pace. That is of course said with nod to the limitations of hindsight - I now feel caught someway between a Marclay groupie and film buff. I think I prefer the former. Maybe I will give him a call now!