A new work by Christian Marclay is always a treat, if what you enjoy is an exemplarily-crafted audio-visual montage. He's best known for The Clock, a 24 hour compilation of clips from other films in which timepieces appear, with each clip scheduled to play at the time depicted. It's possibly the most absorbing thing I've ever watched, even if thus far I've only managed to sit through 4½ hours of it. Doors is not The Clock but it does have similarities, most notably that you're about to watch a heck of a lot of bits of classic Hollywood and world cinema.
The idea this time is that each short clip starts and ends with the opening and/or closing of a door. Christian and his team spent a decade spotting door-to-door scenes in cinematic footage, then splicing them together to create a seamless presentation. It helps that directors often use doors to cut to the next scene in a film so the end result here is a flowing narrative - it's just that the actor walking out on the other side is never the actor who walked in.
It could be a detective entering a corridor and exiting through a second door followed by a leading lady arriving home and crossing the hallway to the kitchen followed by a teacher storming from his classroom to the staff room. Occasionally someone enters and exits by the same door, occasionally the sequence reaches a third door before cutting away, occasionally there's just a close-up of a bolt, a latch or a keyhole. But what's amazing is how many clips Christian's found of action bookended by doors a few seconds apart, generally without dialogue. You are not here for the plot, more to admire the golden age of cinematography.
If you like old films you'll enjoy the flashes of recognition when something familiar crops up. I spotted three seconds of Gremlins, five seconds from one of the Pink Panthers and ten seconds of Funny Girl but a celluloid aficionado would spot a lot more. Also be aware that some of the clips crop up more than once, some several times, so it's hard to know precisely when the loop's got round again to the point where you walked in. I finally reached the point of thinking "no, I have seen all this before" after about an hour, so see if you can stick it out for that long.
Doors is being shown downstairs at the White Cube, Masons Yard, until the end of September. If you've never been before it's a strange modern cuboid in the middle of a well-hidden courtyard round the back of Jermyn Street, and free to visit. It only has three galleries, one showing the film, one currently empty and the third (upstairs) featuring a tiny number of door-related sculptures. These too are by Christian, it turns out, and mostly consist of tiny slices of identical doors stuck together. They will not detain you long, that's an open and shut case, but his Doors is well worth seeing.
