Chris Marclay enchants @hollandfestival with his found footage collages

Holland Festival

Multidisciplinary jack-of-all-trades Chris Marclay has broken through with his film project The Clock: every second of the day represented with found footage. It took him five years to make the 24-hour work. That says something about the way he makes his art. The incredible precision with which he edits makes his work so convincing that the viewer almost falls into a trance.

The Holland Festival presented three of his works at EYE, the new film museum, in which he collaborated with MAZE, a descendant of the Maarten Altena Ensemble.

The first work was The Bell and the Glass, in which the Liberty Bell ( the bell rung in honour of US independence) and Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass play the leading roles. The most striking similarities between the two objects are their location Philadelphia and their famous cracks. On a split screen, Marclay shows collages of the clock and Duchamp's work, as well as interview excerpts with Duchamp. The intonations of these are made into sheet music, occasionally also seen on screen, and this in turn forms the starting point for MAZE's improvisations. In the hands of lesser gods, this can become a hollow, pretentious exercise, but here both music and image have such airiness and beauty that the audience was happy to be enchanted. Someone climbs a staircase in the lower half of the screen, on the upper half someone arrives at the top. The score of Duchamp's interview. Chocolate replicas of the Liberty clock. Sometimes the images comment on each other, sometimes they elaborate on the theme of The Large Glass, whose official title is The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is. The result is the best thing you can do with found footage.

The second part, Shuffle, was a lot more abstract and conceptual. So much so that it caused a few people to flee the hall afterwards. The musicians of MAZE were given a number of cards containing visual hints for their playing. Not everyone, it seemed, got the same hint, and all were invisible to the audience. That it became musically interesting is a credit, but easy is not this genre.

The finale, Screen Play/Everyday was again a bit more accessible, as the audience at least had the same visual information as the musicians in front. This time a collage of everyday and not so everyday events. The collage, surmounted by abstract animations of moving lines and dots remotely referring to musical notations, were the starting point for MAZE's improvisations. Sometimes the relationship was very clear: images of people and objects spinning around with an animation of red circles with a pulsing bass clarinet. Most of the time, the relationship was more loose.

Marclay gave three variations of his work. At the run-in, The Bell ran in a loop, first without a live ensemble, and after the 'official' start with. Then sound but no picture in Shuffle and finally both evened out. He explicitly intended both found footage works as scores for improv music, and it is clear that the combination of image and sound is ironclad. But where the images without music still held up, it was slightly less so for the reverse.