Telephone

For more than thirty years, Christian Marclay has explored the links between the visual and the audible, creating works in which these two distinct forms of expression enrich and confront one another. Telephone (1995), one of his first films, can belong as much to Found Footage cinema as to structural cinema. Made up of excerpts taken from Hollywood films, drawn from every period, mixing black-and-white and colour film, in all genres and cinematic styles, from the crime film to film noir, from romantic drama to comedy, the film operates through editing a structural logic whose object is the decomposition of a most innocuous action that is nonetheless present in a considerable number of films: namely, making a telephone call.

The film thus breaks down the action of telephoning into the many gestures that make it up: picking up the receiver, dialling the number, the telephone then ringing at either end of the line, followed by the wait, that of the moment when the other party picks up, followed by the inevitable phatic expression “hello” in every tone, in every style. Then come snatches of conversation, silences and, finally, the moment of hanging up, multiplied by the editing, according to the mood of each of the protagonists who follow one another on the screen. The film ends as it begins, that is, in a telephone booth, on the doubtful gaze of a woman who has just hung up and seems to wonder about the significance of the telephone call she has just finished.

The credits of Telephone specify that the materials used come from the Media Art department of the Wexner Center for the Arts of the University of Ohio.

Telephone prefigures The Clock, (2011), Christian Marclay’s landmark film, awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, an extraordinary film lasting 24 hours, made up of nearly 1,500 film excerpts, based on the same principle as Telephone, except that instead of dissecting an action by breaking down its gestures, each sequence contains an indication of the time within each shot. When The Clock is screened in a museum, no matter the city, anywhere in the world, the film is designed to be set and synchronised to the time zone of the place where it is shown, thus creating for the viewer a confusion between the different temporalities that collide before the viewer’s eyes; the time inside the film, the temporality of the film itself, synchronised with the time at which the film is being watched, in a pure moment of temporal jubilation that, in an instant, embraces the whole history of cinema.