Is Christian Marclay a One-Hit Wonder?

The worst thing one could say about Christian Marclay’s latest supercut, Doors, is that it’s a film for art lovers.

Doors is a looped 50 minutes of famous actors in movies just opening and closing doors. It is now at the Brooklyn Museum after stops in Boston and Europe, and it is a less highfalutin, more self-obsessed monument to its own conceptual glory than was The Clock (2011), Marclay’s biggest hit. Over the last 14 years, The Clock, a 24-hour, MoMA-headlining video-clock, has enjoyed a rare Barbenheimer blockbuster status in the art world. It’s a real-time video, edited from thousands of films pulled from what appears to be shitty DVD rips, wherein the viewer’s time of day is synchronized to match up with the clocks and watches that appear onscreen. The films are as diverse as When Harry Met Sally (1989), a black-and-white Laurel and Hardy short that’s been colorized, and some Godard-esque movie where the girl really wants to fuck Fidel Castro. So when it is 1:23 pm, you are watching Robert Shaw’s terrorist in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three(1974) announce to the NYPD that his subway hijacking has begun at exactly 1:23pm.

Neat, right? This gimmick ensures that circuslike crowds will always amass whenever The Clock arrives in a city near you.

But the arty point is obvious: in real life and especially in films, time is a fantastical construct that nevertheless rules our lives. Ya don’t say!

This pseudo-profound revelation did not prevent Zadie Smith from hailing the conquering clock in the New York Review of Books as “neither bad nor good, but sublime, maybe the greatest film you have ever seen.” Let’s ignore that Marclay’s The Clock is not even the greatest film named The Clock you will ever see. (That honor goes to Vincente Minnelli and his 1945 Judy Garland-led melodrama). What was until recently less apparent while face-to-face with The Clock’s sublime blah-ness, but which is all too plain in Doors, is how slavishly in thrall Marclay’s works are to the principles now touted by A.I., the way it decontextualizes, corrals, and amalgamates moments into a machinelike order. Up until recently in the short history of cinema, an image cut together with another image could potentially create new meaning in a shiver-inducing manner. But in the TikTok/GPT era, a cut bringing together unmoored images hits the viewer with the force of a shrug and a meh. With The Clock, Marclay predicted this mediascape all too beautifully; with Doors, he belabors the obvious.

Perhaps I react like some ’60’s New York art people aggravated by Andy Warhol and his machine-embracing, speed-fueled love letters to grocery store items, dead starlets, and sleeping John Giorno. But those were still love letters; Warhol shot and silkscreened with a soul. Even a mass-marketed face, in Warhol’s hands, was more than just a face; it pointed to the existence of a feeling, dying other. Who cares about any one actor, whether Peter Sellers or Brigitte Bardot, in Marclay’s hands? Where’s the tenderness in Doors? On its Hinge?!

I searched for the feeling in a recurring scene showing Audrey Hepburn from what I think is Stanley Donen’s Funny Face. (Neither Marclay nor the Brooklyn Museum would provide me with a list of films in the piece, most of which seem to be from the US and France. Apparently, being curious about movies in a movie about movies isn’t the point.) Here, Hepburn exits through a door that signified chaos, is chased down a hallway by Madison Avenue advertising women, hides in a corner next to another tantalizing door, breathes, and takes a moment to collect her bearings as she is about to enter yet another portal—of doom, of joy. Who knows. Who cares. The film moves on, cuts to the next door.

The point of not needing to recognize or discuss the films is, according to correspondence I had with representatives of the Brooklyn Museum, “to preserve the conceptual focus of the work, by avoiding drawing attention to specific titles and turning it into a checklist of references.” I don’t buy that. There’s a pretty damn limited, even political idea being silently forwarded here. It’s the same idea The Clock seemed to portend if not outright indulge: Marclay encourages an ahistorical remixing of cinema, one that is stuffier than your average YouTube compilation. Take the time to watch, at some point in your life, the complete films of Ernst Lubitsch, the master of doors. I guarantee you will experience a funnier, more interesting, melancholic, and devastating rumination on doors—their weirdness, the lovers they isolate, the grief they foretell, the options they tantalize.

As a lover of not just movies but also narrative, history, and context, this fanatical devotion to a logline of a concept is what is so uncompelling about Doors. The seeming whole of cinema can be disassembled and scrambled into discrete elements to create—via the heroic intervention of Final Cut Pro and a team of unheralded laborers in the Marclay Workshop—something shiny, grooved to land as a white cube wow. That’s fine. I love playing and remixes. But what is the result, in Marclay’s case? A billboard idea of Narrative that inadvertently doubles as the best artistic allegory I’ve encountered of the Feed: a decontextualized super-scroll of events with no end, wherein certain friends pop up doing what you expect those particular friends to do (i.e., all those repeating, endless door slams by Audrey Hepburn, Mia Farrow, and Sidney Poitier, and the like) while other homicidal events (most notably, femme-fixated horror, viz. the screaming women in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me [1992], The Night Porter [1974], and American Psycho [1998]) flit on by, ignored as we wait for the next image to distract us. This feed only ends once you get sick of it.