Beyond a brief stint with a Timex Indiglo in Grade 8, I have never worn a watch in my life. This makes me more tied to time: one eye forever trained on sidewalk parking meters, the dashboard of a streetcar, the TTC transfer machine, the barrage of clocks along the Gardiner Expressway and in Dundas Square. As I write, the right-hand corner of my computer is staring me down: 11:03 a.m. Five hours to write this piece; time for another coffee.

Last month, Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” had its Canadian premiere at the National Gallery in Ottawa. The 24-hour video installation compiles over ten thousand film clips across eras, genres and countries into a fully functioning clock with a reference for every minute of the day. The piece is regarded not only as a masterpiece (Marclay won the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 2011 Venice Biennale), but a grueling feat as well, requiring three years and a team of five to complete.  There are five copies of the piece, or rather computer program, circulating between the world’s top museums currently. Last April, Ottawa secured the Canadian premiere of “The Clock” when the National Gallery purchased a copy with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

This coming September, Toronto will get its own turn with the cinematic timepiece when the Power Plant screens the work on a 24-hour loop for two days. I would have waited for “The Clock” to come to me, except I won’t be here. Just over two weeks ago, I landed a job in a mountain town halfway across the country and found myself in a sudden race to find a subletter and pack up my life before boarding a plane this Sunday. Before the last-minute packing frenzy began, I arranged a day trip to Ottawa and a visit with the clock.

On Monday night, I left the city with a friend, driving four hours northeast until we reached a cottage a few hours outside of Ottawa. We planned a 9am start for the next morning, hit the road an hour after that –when the National Gallery’s doors open and “The Clock” starts ticking–and pegged a new arrival time: no later than 12:30pm. A few wrong turns and an accidental detour into Hull later, we arrived at the gallery doors at 1pm. But sooo hungry –a quick bite, then? Sure, but then down to business. Quarter past two rolls around and finally we’re seated on one of the 12 white IKEA couches (one of the stipulations of the 24-page screener’s manual for “The Clock”).

On the drive to Ottawa, I wondered how exactly the installation might look.  I pictured each minute of the day equaling one unedited minute of film. Marclay is more masterful than this, building a story out of recurring images and a tone out of peaks and troughs in tension. In the faster, scattershot segments, a half-dozen clips can click by in a minute of threatening phone calls and worried faces. The pace then slackens to a more languid crawl of drawn-out clips, a woman snoozing in the late-afternoon sun, a man tinkering with a timepiece.

All the disconnected clips keep one character constant, though sometimes you have to hunt for it. A bald-faced clock might sit centre stage in one shot. In the next, the clock hovers behind a person’s head; after that, there is only the sound of a church bell ringing in the hours. Sometimes there is no tangible clock or time reference at all, but the scene is steeped in passing time, for instance a woman ironing a child’s shirt and stopping to smell it tenderly. There are other less subtle timekeepers besides clocks: a rotating fan, vinyl passing under a needle, a woman cutting into a birthday cake.  “The burning cigarette is the twentieth-century symbol of time,” said Marclay in a recent New Yorker profile. There are many, many shots of cigarettes smoldering in ashtrays.

Conventional Hollywood thrillers that often use nothing but time to drive a plot (known as the ticking time bomb structure) are at home here, films like the Taking Pelham 123, Nick of Time and too many Nicholas Cage appearances to count. The utterly forgettable rom-com Happy Accidents delivered the most poignant line of my two hours and forty-five minutes with ‘The Clock.” Marisa Tomei is on a lunch date with her time-traveling boyfriend Vincent D’Onfario as they discuss why good times fly and bad times drag. ““Time is an emotional thing,” Tomei concludes dreamily, before noticing her watch and rushing off to work.

On screen, people are perennially racing to appointments, oversleeping alarms and pacing back and forth, worrying about whatever is ticking closer. Watching the clock in a darkened theatre makes the rat race feel distant even as you’re reminded, frame-by-frame, that real life is indeed slipping by. At 5pm, the lights go up just as an onscreen librarian hisses, “The library is now closed”  and an real-life attendant ushers us out. A dreamy surreal feeling lasts right up to the gallery doors where outside Ottawans are rushing home and traffic is dense. I remember: we need to find the car and get back on the road to Toronto quick. There are library books to return, this article to write, a meeting I really should cancel. Time is an emotional thing, but at least the feeling is universal.

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Laura Trethewey is working and studying in the Literary Arts Department at the Banff Centre.  

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