Why Screen a Hollywood Classic Backwards and Forwards at the Same Damn Time?

When young, confident secretary Alice Mayberry, played by Judy Garland, nervously agrees to a date with traveling soldier Joe Allen, played by Robert Walker, they take a noisy bus ride through New York City—but the words "The End" appear on the other side of the screen. Watching Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock (1945) split in half, in dual-screen format—the film’s first half playing forward on one side, the second half in reverse beside the other—is a study in unexpected synchronicity.

In real time, the second half of the film—played backwards—finishes (but really begins), as if their courting was the beginning of the end. There’s the funny tension between a meet-cute on the screen’s left side, and the intimacy in which it culminates on the right; when Joe asks Alice if she’s married, she already is, to him, in the film’s second half. Cinematic flourishes, like the intensity of Garland’s gaze or the transparent overlay of clocks, lots of clocks, over entire scenes, feel enhanced when they get the immediate contrast of another, equally beautiful detail.

One wonders why the film critic and historian David Thomson screened The Clock in this way in 1978 for a class at Dartmouth College, halving its run-time and allowing the narrative to unfold so unusually. His book, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies, culminates with this explanation: “I discovered that the [Dartmouth] archive possessed a 16mm print […] on two reels of equal length. We aligned two 16mm projectors side by side […] What did it accomplish? Well, it introduced a new mode of film—in reverse—so stunning, so lovely, so surreal, that it helped eyes appreciate all the same lyrical, kinetic things in forward motion, things to which we become so accustomed that we grow blasé.”

It is indeed lovely and strange, which is why Obsolete Media Miami is partnering with the Miami Beach Cinematheque to screen filmmaker Bruce Posner’s digital reconstruction of the dual-projected film. Posner will be there in person, while Thomson will Skype in for commentary. The sound plays on Reel 1, projected forward; Reel 2 is silent and, during moments of dialogue, one can forget it’s backwards at all. (Well, until Alice pours coffee into a slowly emptying cup.) Posner produced this version with the Department of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College where, he tells The Creators Project, he landed on a page about The Clock in David Thomson’s book “Have You Seen . . . ?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films, leading to his discovery about the initial dual projection of the film. “You’re watching all these tropes and formulas and visual tricks […] and what you see at this rupture, at this fracture—these things all stand out more,” says Posner. “You can enter and exit the narrative at will.” Barron Sherer, one-half of Obsolete Media Miami, agrees. “Because the film has a self-sufficient meaning, we are free to investigate schematic patterns and visual tropes, and marvel at visual juxtapositions created by Thomson’s presentation.”

Joe and Alice meet and fall in love quickly, and have just a day to make their romance official before Joe returns to war. They speak of the serendipitous nature of their love. “Suppose we hadn’t met,” she says; “We couldn’t not have met,” he replies. When he enumerates the details of their meeting, he expands it to include “the ships in the harbor, the convoy”—he is to be dispatched on a convoy himself. “They all matter.” When time is adjusted in the movie itself, the characters’ awareness of the objectively preposterous nature of their love becomes a self-referential, meta-cognizant. The Clock is ultimately a story about time, and when time is subject to experimentation, the film’s very predictability heightens its magic.

The dual-screen reconstruction of The Clock makes its world premiere on Saturday, September 17, 7PM-9PM at the Miami Beach Cinematheque. More information on the event can be found here. The screening is presented by Obsolete Media Miami, Bruce Posner, David Thomson, and Cinematheque founder Dana Keith. Its digital reconstruction in 2016 was supervised by Peter Ciardelli, Bruce Posner, John Tariot C.S.I., and Mark Williams for the Department of Film and Media Studies, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.

Click here to visit Obsolete Media Miami's website.

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