Cluster-clock

So as discussed on Thursday, I went to LACMA on Thursday night to watch part of The Clock, Christian Marclay's compilation of thousands of moments featuring clocks from the history of cinema, comprising a 24-hour, real-time film. It started at 5 p.m. on Thursday and finished at 5 p.m. yesterday.

I'd talked about going at some ungodly hour, like 3 a.m., just for the surreal qualities of being in a museum, watching a movie, at 3 a.m. Traffic would also be non-existent, and as a third benefit, the screening would probably be pretty sparsely attended.

But my wife said she'd prefer it if I went earlier, explaining that she'd feel less bad about having me baby-wrangle before work if she knew I hadn't just come home an hour earlier. We settled on midnight to 1 as a compromise. I didn't care, really -- I just wanted to go.

As I was driving over, I projected my arrival time to be about quarter to midnight. I remember consciously wondering whether I should wait to go in, so I could do exactly one hour's worth of the movie, from midnight to 1. One hour was all I needed -- after that size sample, where do you draw the line between one and 24? And I thought I'd have the luxury of being anal, of walking through the doors at 12:00:00 and leaving at 1:00:00. But then I decided that if Marclay used New Year's movies as his midnight clock, it might be fun to see the minute or two leading up to that.

Um, yeah, right.

When I got there, I could tell almost immediately that it was a clusterfuck. I expected the streets near the museum to be devoid of cars, making parking easy. I did park on the street, but it was in the only available spot I could see. And looking over at the museum, I saw not one but two large crowds of people waiting -- one along an interior courtyard wall of the museum, and one on the wall that runs along the street. In between there was a gap and a security guard managing the flow. I estimated the number of people to be around 200. I shouldn't be surprised -- KCRW was advertising it pretty much every hour of the day for at least a week leading up to it.

So the entry process seemed pretty straightforward -- someone leaves the theater, someone else gets to go in. But in the five minutes I was waiting there, I didn't move forward once. I discussed the prospects of our admission to the group of twentysomething hipsters standing in front of me, and they guessed it would be a 45-minute wait. I thought they were crazy. My own estimate was more like three hours.

"I guess we should have come at like 4 a.m.," I said.

"Oh, I hear that 4 a.m. is the best part of the movie," said one of the women in that group.

Darn it.

So I was back at my house inside of an hour after I'd left. I didn't see any of The Clock, but I probably had a better day at work yesterday than I would have if I had.

Last night my wife and I discussed our prospects of ever getting to see The Clock -- any part of it. And in fact they seem somewhat grim. I'm sure it will play again in Los Angeles, perhaps multiple times, perhaps annually. But if it draws this kind of interest every time, a dead-of-night screening would really be the only way to do it -- and even then I bet the wait would be at least 15 minutes. Also, normal people like us would be competing with all the actors and other industry folk with irregular schedules, who don't really care what time they're awake and what time they're asleep. Perhaps the line would have been just as long at 3 or 4 a.m.

I figured if there's a phenomenon like this, someone someday will try to capitalize on it through a DVD release, a 12-disc set or something. Ah, but there's a problem with that too. Marclay uses so much copyrighted material in this movie that trying to get clearance on it would be a nightmare, if not actually impossible. Only by showing it for free, as LACMA did, are the copyright violations acceptable. Try to make a profit, any profit, on it, and suddenly you owe a lot of studios a lot of money.

Well, at least now I'm ready -- I know what to expect next time.

I've still got you in my sights, Clock. We'll have our date with destiny.

The spirit of Andy Warhol is alive and well

For the second time this year, I'm going to miss my chance to see the longest film ever made.

I don't know if I'm correct in calling it that, but Christian Marclay's The Clock is playing tonight at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), starting at 5 p.m.

And finishing the next day at 5 p.m.

That's right, it's a real-time, 24-hour movie, which charts the passage of time as captured in cinema over the decades. If I'm understanding it correctly, it's a pastiche of thousands of moments from film in which a clock is captured in the frame, and given how many movies there have been with clocks in them, Marclay has managed to find images that contain every single minute of a day -- all 1440 of them. And no, I don't think he cheats by having a 3:37 p.m. stand in for a 3:37 a.m. That wouldn't be sporting, would it?

What's more, the film is synchronized to local time, meaning that if you drop in from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. of the screening time, you're seeing 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. of the film. That's one feat the TV show 24 could never pull off.

Because very few people are likely to watch the whole movie, and the event by definition depends on people dropping in for an hour here or an hour there, LACMA is not charging for it. The only potential limitations are on the ability to find seats. LACMA screened The Clock for the first time a couple months ago, and it must have gone well, as this is an encore screening.

I would truly love to see this movie. Or some of it, anyway.

It reminds me very much of something Andy Warhol would have done, though perhaps it would be a bit too on-the-nose for Warhol. Still, I think about Warhol's screenings of such films as Empire, the eight-hour-and-five-minute 1964 film which just shows continuous footage of the Empire State Building. He would never allow it to be shown abridged, and if you had a whiff of artistic integrity, you would watch the whole thing.

LACMA is not holding us to that same standard. I was never going to watch the whole thing -- I don't know that I could, even if I had no responsibilities, no job to go to, and a direct intravenous pump of Mountain Dew into my veins -- but I'd sure like to watch some of it. I floated the idea yesterday to my wife in the guise of a joke. You know the strategy -- you bring up something you actually want to do, then laugh afterward, to see if perhaps it will turn into a real conversation about how you actually might want to do it. She didn't bite, and instead started talking about the similarly themed Life in a Day, Kevin Macdonald's documentary culled from footage people took of themselves around the world on July 24, 2010. Which is also in theaters now, but is only 95 minutes long.

I thought this was the end of it, but as I'm sitting here now, writing this, I'm wondering if it might be worth it to take a wild stab at seeing some footage in the middle of the night tonight. If I were to go watch some of this film from, say, 11 to 1, it might not impact either my responsibilities (the baby slept very well last night) or my job (it's Friday tomorrow, so if I'm a bit sluggish, I can probably push through, with the weekend waiting on the other side as my reward).

Because I don't know if LACMA will schedule a third screening. And this is the kind of novelty any film fan should want to experience. Not only does it have the virtue of being a film itself -- a film that, if watched conventionally, would set length records -- but it also celebrates our collective love of film. You'd never know when a moment from your favorite movie might appear.

Then add in the fact that I just love participating in kooky experiments, and the wheels are really turning in my brain now.

So tune in tomorrow -- or more likely, Saturday, since I've already got tomorrow's post planned -- to see if I was able to fit in a couple seconds, minutes or hours of The Clock.

Here's hoping I find the time, as it were.