Doors (Christian Marclay, 2022).
A door in its doorframe—be it open or closed—exists as neither here nor there, neither inside nor outside, but rather, something in between. Call it a transitional space, or even a liminal space, if that term hasn’t by now been entirely perverted by clumsy popular usage. A door represents a possibility, a transformation, a crossroads, though it may appear so ordinary. After all, “the threshold must be distinguished from the boundary,” as Walter Benjamin observed in The Arcades Project, his monumental, aphoristic, and unfinished treatise on urbanity, history, and the archive. In Benjamin’s formulation, boundaries “function as limits,” while thresholds are zones of transformation.1
Doors are the focus of the Swiss American video artist Christian Marclay’s latest work, fittingly titled Doors (2022) and now on display at the Brooklyn Museum through April 2026. Like his fascinating 2010 work, The Clock—in which clips culled from the last century of moviemaking, every one of them depicting the passing minutes of filmic time, are sequenced to create a 24-hour cinematic timepiece—Doors is stitched together from film clips. The resulting work is just under an hour, presented in a continuous loop, but one that manages to be even more mysterious and unnerving than his magnum opus.
Doors (Christian Marclay, 2022).
Watching Doors, one quickly gains an acute understanding of just how many different ways we interact with doorways in the course of our lives. Onscreen, I watched keys twisting into locks, elevator doors sliding smoothly open, closet doors and front doors slamming shut or swinging open. A thief jiggles a door open with the blade of a knife. Exit signs glow over doorframes. Rita Hayworth emerges through one, as does John Wayne. Genres proliferate: There are bedroom farces, horror flicks, a scene from Louis Malle’s crime thriller Elevator to the Gallows (1958). I spotted Mia Farrow, hair clipped short in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), peering through a keyhole. Dialogue is relatively rare, but when words are spoken, they are in English, French, German, and other languages. Some clips are in black-and-white, and some are in color. There is one distinguishing feature, though, that I noticed on a second visit: All are taken from fictional films, no documentaries or video artworks. Doors is a collage formed from disparate narratives—and yet it does away with plot entirely.
When compared to The Clock, an artwork I first saw at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston over a decade ago and then revisited multiple times during late 2024 and early 2025, when it was on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Doors contains a less noticeable sense of forward momentum. The Clock, because it adheres to the logical progression of linear time, moves along at a steady clip. Not so for Doors, which is more circular and dreamlike in its rhythms. Unlike The Clock, certain clips repeat themselves in Doors. A short scene from a mid-century British film, depicting a man creeping into a study and taking a folder from a desk (the study’s door shutting neatly behind him), occurs at least four times within the span of half an hour. By the third iteration, I began to wonder why, my mind attempting to assign meaning to this odd scene—but like a dream, all meaning, all attempts at reason, collapsed once I left the museum and reentered waking life, as it were. Walking through the curtains that separated the exhibition room from the rest of the museum, I underwent another transformation, leaving behind the artwork and the heightened state of watching. Outside that room, there was only the image of the door inside my head, opening and closing like an eyelid.
Doors (Christian Marclay, 2022). Installation view at the Brooklyn Museum, NY, on view June 13, 2025–April 12, 2026. Photograph by Paula Abreu Pita.
Like The Clock, the treatment of these scenes in Doors works to create an experience of time travel, of compression and expansion. In one particularly memorable juxtaposition, Marclay marries multiple hallway chase scenes, the doors opening and shutting rapidly, deliriously, as the viewer enters through one and exits into another decade, another film, with the creaking of another. With simple cuts, Marclay offers his viewers a miniature history of the chase scene in cinema, spanning the whole of the genre in just a few seconds.
Thresholds are important. An open door allows for us to cross the threshold, to enter a new future and sense of possibility, while a closed door cleaves it off, dividing a house or an apartment building into different private spaces. Doors is installed in a small gallery adjacent to the American art wing on the museum’s fifth floor. I couldn’t find it at first and needed to ask for directions. Finally, stepping out of the light and entering the darkness was an experience akin to stumbling into the wardrobe that delivered C. S. Lewis’s displaced schoolchildren to Narnia. It was not difficult to find a seat, unlike at The Clock’s recent showing at MoMA. Watching Doors, and leaving its room once you’ve had enough, is less disorienting than The Clock. The latter makes you extraordinarily aware of time—you are watching it pass, quite literally, on the screen in front of you—but you also forget that it corresponds to reality. You are caught up in the spell of the film, swept up in its story—though The Clock doesn’t tell a story, not exactly. Not unless time itself can be understood as one: each seemingly banal minute stitching together in order to ultimately create a narrative arc, a seamless whole.
A clock orders our world, imposing rationality, a timeline, on what might otherwise be chaos. A door is not quite so logical: It cleaves, it separates, and it allows for a more confusing form of movement, both forward and backward, rather than a clock’s simple and continuous push toward the future. But what does a door divide? Idioms of the English language offer us a clue. There are the “doors of perception,” you can have “a foot in the door,” you can be “at death’s door.” Clocks are something else entirely. You can’t “turn back the clock,” but time may run away from you. A clock, though it may be a machine, is still intimately connected to the human face: You can “clock” someone’s looks, and someone else can “clean your clock” or “clock your jaw.” The relationship between the body and time is inescapable. And when the clock stops, that’s it—that’s the end. That’s death. Not so for the door opening or shutting. Passing through the doorway, we go from one state to another: from life to death, rationality to irrationality, fiction to nonfiction, dream to waking life, and back again.
Doors (Christian Marclay, 2022).
In a 2022 interview with Artforum, Marclay calls Doors “the most challenging” of all the videos he’s made. Telephones (1995), with its splices between onscreen conversations, was relatively easy; The Clock hewed to the 24 hours of the day. But Doors is more abstract. “There is very little happening in Doors,” he explains. “Unlike The Clock, where you have enough time to get engaged in a fragment of a narrative, here the clips are short and really just about a passage. There are a lot of corridors, a lot of intermediary spaces, which often in cinema are not essential to the narrative. There’s very little dialogue.”
Hallways are typically ill-considered, perhaps the architectural form into which the least amount of architectural planning goes, and yet they are essential to our understanding of a space, the ways in which we move through it and how it shapes our lives. In his initial sketches for The Arcades Project, Benjamin analogized the arcades themselves to: “houses, passages having no outside. Like the dream.”2 By splicing together this series of doorways, leading everywhere and nowhere, Marclay creates his own dreamlike vision of interiority.