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The Clock, or: 89 Minutes of 'Free Time'

Open City Documentary Festival 2025

,Cinema 1
the clock

Curated by Alexander Horwath, this programme is a somewhat surreal – or childlike – attempt at telling a story of the 20th century.

Relating to three different notions of cinematic temporality: the programme talks about leisure or “free” time (a realm of life usually regarded as the province of movie-going); it addresses “the time of film” (a past era that also produced new concepts of history and memory, both of which are now becoming more tenuous by the nanosecond); and it celebrates our imprisonment in “film time” when experiencing a theatrical projection – the distinct duration of a film, its irrevocable passing at a specific pace of X frames-per-second.

Tagged with: Cinema Open City Documentary Festival 2025

Curated and introduced by Alexander Horwath.
All film prints courtesy the Austrian Film Museum.
 

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Film is a clockwork, a metaphor that was given some publicity by the most talked-about non-film of the last decade, Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2011). As opposed to the latter, however, the works in this program have some relation to life: they end. Before doing so, they exude madness, mystery and joy at a rate of 16, or 18, or 24 times per second.

Another way of looking at this film selection is through the eyes of Amos Vogel, born in Vienna in 1921, who passed away in New York in 2012. I hope that the programme can also serve as a tribute to Amos. Among his many achievements in film culture was a new approach towards placing films with each other in an evening’s programme, freed from their traditional grouping according to era, genre, aesthetic, etc. In addition, the Vienna amateur film shown here – Ha.Wei. March 14, 1938 – is a document of the historical moment that turned 17-year-old Amos Vogelbaum into an exile. 

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