Christian Marclay's The Clock. List of films?

March 1, 2013 2:35 AM

For my next viewing project, I was thinking of watching everything which appears in Christian Marclay's The Clock in order. Very slowly, obviously. Does anyone have a definitive list?

The wikipedia page for the film links to this crowdsourcing project to try and put together a list:

http://theclockmarclay.wikia.com/wiki/Crowdsourcing-The-Clock

But I wondered if an actual list had ever been disseminated to journalists or art galleries which the Google searches I've tried haven't found because of review appearing at the top.

posted by feelinglistless to Media & Arts (3 answers total)

Best answer: I could see why you'd want an official list since that wiki effort is pretty far from done, but unfortunately his studio never released one. I'm not sure if this was for legal reasons, his own preference or because the editing process continued after its first unveiling (although I imagine it was settled on by the time he won the Golden Lion) but in any event there was never a proper list released to the public. I know because I looked too!

It might be important to remember that Video Quartet, a 2002 work that runs fourteen minutes, apparently contains clips from over 700 films. The Clock was made by a team of people combing through films for over two years, and I would imagine it must have well over 2000 sources, but I wouldn't be surprised if I was low by half.

I don't want to discourage you, but I think you might find this both extremely difficult (in that you're probably going to have to compile the list yourself) and only slightly more rewarding than watching 2000+ films (!) picked at random. But if you're determined, I say go for it: great art is inspirational, and The Clock is, as you know, great.
posted by Chichibio at 6:19 AM on March 1, 2013 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks Chichibio. As you guessed its about the action about allowing someone or something else choose which films I watch. I'm also currently working through all the films ever nominated in The Oscars, Baftas and Golden Globes, all the award winners at Cannes plus Sight & Sound and Empire Magazine's year choices chronologically moving backwards year by year for the same reason. Thankfully, there's a fair bit of crossover. But I wanted to add a random element via The Clock.
posted by feelinglistless at 11:40 PM on March 1, 2013

Hi -- I'm actually the guy who created the "Crowdsourcing the Clock" wiki. I did it because I, too, wanted to find a definitive list of every movie that appeared in The Clock and couldn't find one, so I figured the best way to create a list was to crowdsource it.

As Chichibio says, Marclay doesn't seem to have disseminated a list. I hope he at least has one somewhere.
posted by Tin Man at 3:45 PM on March 2, 2013 [1 favorite]