"The Clock" is a clock. That much is obvious: through film clips, Marclay has created a chronograph which tells the time of day as accurately as the best Swiss watch. But it also tells the times. The artistic and presentational aspects of Marclay's work are themselves an expression of our times: that we live in the time of the assemblage, where history is constantly brought into the present and the present is rapidly made history. It also tells the time of a society fixated on time-stamping everything from packets to parcels. "The Clock" tells the time, but it also tells the times.

Fittingly, my reaction to "The Clock" is in the form of a chronograph. While Marlcay was a filmmaker acting like a writer, combining film clips to create sentences, I shall play the part of the chronographer. Consider this piece to be a written chronograph, a reflection on time in “The Clock” and the times it represents.

Like any good watch, this chronograph embraces the inherent illusion of time, and its implicit distortion ability. It can be read at any level of granularity. If you need a quick summary of "The Clock," just glance at the themes articulated in the middle of our written chronograph: time, film, plot, and story. Should this be insufficient for your purposes, the subtler passages of argument are split into twelve portions. Finally, every passage is split into many minutes, each of which constitutes a complete entity, whether a sentence, or video. Together, these 720 minutes, split into twelve arguments and four themes, form the whole arc of this argumentative chronograph. However, the chronograph itself is my thesis: “The Clock” is a monument to our times. Use it to tell the times.

To read the times, just hit the down arrow key. But beware—there's no turning back time. Though you might find a way to skip it.

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