Christian Marclay's The Clock, an art film that goes on for 24 hours and features one minute each of found and famous film footage of a timepiece showing that exact minute of the day, will be one of the closing exhibits at SFMOMA. It opens this weekend to the public, and on Thursday for members only, with the first all-day-all-night screening going from 11 a.m. Thursday to 5:45 p.m. on Friday.
Overnight screenings will continue every Saturday to Sunday in May, with regular museum hours starting at 11 a.m., and the fourth-floor screening room equipped with IKEA loveseats to seat 80 staying open from 11 a.m. Saturday morning straight through until closing time on Sunday evening at 5:45 p.m. The final screening will coincide with the museum's closing weekend, ending at 5:45 p.m. on Sunday, June 2. See the continuous screening schedule here.
What's cool about it is that it's synchronized to local time, so it acts like a video clock of its own, and only six copies of the film are in existence (LACMA owns one, and this one is on loan from the artist). And Marclay had to find footage to represent every minute of every hour of a day, so obviously some of the moments are going to be quiet and contemplative, while others like the footage of 3:00 p.m. taken from the remake of 3:10 to Yuma starring Christian Bale will be nail-biters. You can expect it draw crowds though, and others who have seen the film suggest trying to go in the middle of the night, and seeing how 3:00 a.m. and 4:15 a.m. are portrayed. They suggest checking Twitter for up to the minute wait times during regular museum hours.
Also, there are "brief moments of nudity," so there's that to look forward to.
Marclay was born in San Rafael but raised in Switzerland, and SFMOMA describes The Clock (which won a big prize at the Venice Biennale in 2011) as "a dazzling, genre-defying distillation of movie history, a radical reflection on cinematic duration, and a reminder that time waits for no one."
[SFMOMA]