“Sound is very malleable and very easy to transform,” explained Christian Marclay to a press gathering for the US premiere of his video Doors, at the ICA Boston. “The image, you can’t do much.”
Marclay works in many media but is, at heart, a sound artist. Doors is the follow-up, of sorts, to his widely celebrated video The Clock, which premiered in 2010 and was itself a follow-up (of sorts) to his 1995 video Telephones. All three of these pieces are constructed from found material in film or television, edited together to “create the effect of continuity [through] suspension of disbelief,” as Marclay put it at the ICA. Edits in these works are not hidden, they are obvious – indeed, the subject matter of all three pieces seems chosen at least in part by commonly existing edits in commercial movie making: the cut to or away from a door, to or away from a clock or watch, to or away from a telephone. These existing edits in his sources serve as an entryway for the artist (a door); a moment that slips between the time of the original work and its contemporary transformation (the clock); a means for dialogue with the found material (a telephone).
But even if the visual edits in Doors (and The Clock, and Telephones) are obvious, the sound edits are not. We are all familiar with foley sound effects used to emphasize the opening and closing of doors in film – there are creaky doors, there are heavy doors, there is the slamming of doors, the breaking down of doors, and the attempted but never-completely-silent slipping through doors. And then there are locks: the click of locks, the sliding of bolts, the turning of keys. All these sounds are typically emphasized in film more than we usually experience in life, but in Marclay’s video Doors they loom even larger than they usually do in film. Locks, in particular, boom across Marclay’s soundtrack with preternatural force. Footsteps – another familiar trope from foley effects in film – burst onto the soundstage of the video, as characters rush from door to door in a seemingly never-ending maze of passageways.
Heightened foley is not the only unusual element to Marclay’s soundtrack for Doors. The varied clips carry with them equally varied music, scored by as many hands to elicit as many moods. But something happens to this music in Marclay’s edits between scenes – the soundtrack sometimes slips, entering before its accompanying clip or lingering past it. And sometimes it seems, although I can’t be completely sure I didn’t hallucinate this, that music from one clip repeats as the soundtrack to an entirely different one.
Hallucination is more than possible while viewing Doors. The sequence of doors opening and closing is disorienting – these hallways never lead where one would expect. People morph between leaving a room and entering another. Color changes to black and white and back to color again. Periods, costumes, even language change as quickly as one might turn a door handle – noisily – and push, or pull.
Contributing to the continual disorientation of Doors are repetitions of scenes which do not in turn lead where they had previously. The piece as a whole is one long loop – how long precisely, Marclay elects not to specify – but within it there are many feints at loops. We recognize a scene and assume it signals a repeat of the work, only for it to branch instead into another new and again seemingly endless set of corridors.
This maze is, unsurprisingly, anxiety provoking. So are many of the clips Marclay has chosen to employ from horror films or crime dramas. A glimpse of Mia Farrow at a closet door in Rosemary’s Baby may evoke terror in anyone who has seen the complete film. But no recognition of original context is necessary to feel the “energy,” as Marclay describes it, each scene brings to his piece. And a good deal of that energy is fueled by fear.
On the other hand, much of Doors is funny – after all, bedroom farce is another genre that calls for multiple doors on a set. Fear and farce might seem an odd combination, but Marclay’s edits slide between them time and again. After a while - and this was almost certainly a hallucination, because there is no demarcated start to the sequence – the edits felt to me like they were speeding up. Transitions between moods - between comedy and terror, between fear and farce - began to flip faster and faster, like stills in a kinetoscope. Could this movement eventually become so smooth that I would no longer see the obvious edits between scenes, just as I could not clearly delineate cuts in the soundtrack?
“I’m not a film buff,” Marclay said at the opening, which drew a laugh. But it is a serious goal for Marclay that his videos work in a gallery rather than a cinema. Galleries and museums are notoriously awkward for watching film and video, a setting for them that we often experience only as a compromise. The Clock vaults over this limitation by synching its images to the real time experienced by viewers as they encounter them. There is no need in The Clock to “lose oneself” as one might wish in a theater, where time disappears between the dimming of the house lights and their reillumination. Time in The Clock is real time, not cinema time. And yet it is precisely also cinema time, minute by minute, emphasized constantly by the images on screen. This fusion of inside and outside is a triumph of The Clock, a video that works perfectly in the self-conscious space of a gallery or museum.
Doors is again tailored to the peculiarities of watching film or video in a gallery rather than a theater. There is no beginning, middle or end to the endless corridors. There can be no “this is where we came in,” if the repeated scene leads to one you haven’t yet seen. This also means there is no reason to leave Doors, apart from your own eventual desire to break its spell – a spell which Marclay’s video has again succeeded in conjuring despite screening at a gallery.
And yet the spell of Doors is unlike that of The Clock. One might say The Clock feels like a summary comment on twentieth-century film and television, while Doors is resolutely of our current and thus-far miserable new era. Not that the source material is so different; if anything, Doors hews closer to clips from classic film and does not, as in The Clock, delve into television and animation. There is a lack of kitsch in Doors. But that may also bring it closer to this frightening period we are experiencing. The anxiety of endless corridors leading only to more corridors is contrary to the sense of progress through the twenty-four hours of The Clock. There is no time at all in Doors. There is no space that doesn’t fold back on itself. There is no exit, literally.
Do I even need to point out that Doors was completed during the COVID pandemic? See it, if you can, and stay as long as you can bear. It is as much about being locked in the present as The Clock, but without the relief of simultaneous escape through narrative. Which is pretty much how I am feeling, minute by minute, here in 2025.
Listening to: YHWH Nailgun, 45 Pounds
Cooking: a whistling tea kettle no one is shutting off
I grok your response, but I did not experience the anxiety you did. For me The Clock reveals not just the way that films manipulates time but also the way that we have structured our lives around the clock (Noon, 3pm, 5pm, Midnight, 2am… predictable things happen at those points). Doors was more purely about cinema (although also about gender: women being more likely to answer doors, men being more likely to beg for entry). As such it did not evoke anxiety for me because it did not align with life outside the same way.
This YHWH Nailgun album is fantastic!