Nothing is ever resolved in this suspense-packed movie, and that is the point

Boston Globe

10-07-2025

This is 'Doors,' the aptly-named new filmic mash-up by Christian Marclay, making its North American premiere at the ICA (it debuted in London in 2023). One door closes, another opens — over and over in the 55-minute amalgam of in-between moments, across a gamut of film history that lodges you, the viewer, firmly and forever in liminal space.
The film manufacturers a perpetual compulsion
to anticipate something that never comes. It's unnatural, uncomfortable, and exactly the point: 'Doors' leaves the mind unconsciously searching, scrambling to assemble narrative from fragments unlinked by anything other than its key device: a door and a jump-cut, the central artifice of film for its entire existence. In a heartbeat, viewers can leap moments, or years, mere steps, or miles. Marclay's defiance of expectation, hardwired by generations of film-viewing, is where its power lies: a flatline of edge-of-your seat anticipatory drama, without beginning or end.
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A still from Christian Marclay's "Doors," 2022.
Christian Marclay/White Cube
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Marclay, equal parts movie nerd and high-concept formalist (his early creative forays were as a DJ in New York in the 1980s, specializing in radical remixes of music history), has been down this road before. He's best-known for 'The Clock,' his 2010 magnum opus that plundered decades of film history for clips of every minute of a 24-hour day and knit them together in precise 60-second snippets so that the piece
actually told the time
.
It was a bona fide sensation, the rare combination of deep conceptual rigor and broad popular appeal. In 2010, people
'Doors' operates on the same premise. It extracts hundreds of moments from generations of cinema, linked together by the intuitive logic of entry and exit. It's tempting to consider it 'The Clock' lite, but that isn't giving the conceptual challenge Marclay sets for himself the credit it deserves. 'Doors' is virtuosic in its own right, razor-sharp in its rhythm and timing; with such pronounced seams — black and white to color; 1930s to 1990s — it nonetheless appears seamless. Fluidity of motion is matched by sound, the sonic environment of each clip melting into the other, smoothing the flow. 'Doors' could easily be jarring; its core device is abruptness and transition. Instead, it reaches altitude quickly and stays there; the only turbulence is by design.
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An installation view of Christian Marclay's "Doors," at the ICA.
Mel Taing
Where 'The Clock' was relentlessly linear — minute by minute, not a millisecond out of place — 'Doors' has no such guiding logic. Its rhythm is irregular, but propulsive. In crafting his tease of narrative, Marclay sometimes deploys the same clip twice or more as it suits his narrative tease (I watched Sidney Poitier burst out of his classroom and into a clutch of eavesdropping students in 'To Sir, With Love' at least three times, re-linked to other comings and goings).
And narrative — non-existent, impossible — is the central deception of the whole affair: Marclay strings together clips with comparable emotional tenor — furtive, jubilant, terrified — that tempts a mind hungry for story to craft one where none could possibly be.
Different viewers will take different things from 'Doors.' Encyclopedic film buffs can take it almost as a trivia challenge: Identify actors and movies by name, score points for all your right answers. Don't get me wrong: Whatever else it is, 'Doors' is great fun. I'm no film buff
(though I know John Travolta in 'Urban Cowboy' when I see it, and I did), which makes 'Doors' about something more for me: a sustained emotional state.
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A still from "Doors."
Christian Marclay/White Cube
'The Clock' was heady — we go to the movies to be transported from real time, a respite; here was a movie, fantastical and star-studded, that pinned you down, and made real time inescapable. 'Doors' is more visceral, a transporting, immersive experiment in forced hyperacuity.
The whole is more — far more — than the sum of its parts. Sidney Poitier bursting into that hallway is dynamic, nostalgic, and stirring. But it's just one element of a more potent brew. Marclay is a master of dramatic tension; he expertly tightens the screws and slackens them off. But there is never respite, or pause. All is motion, transition, an edge-of-your-seat, what-happens-next on permanent lock. It's not normal, or natural. It's also exhilarating. The dramatic core of 'Doors' isn't doors, or film, at all. It's you.
CHRISTIAN MARCLAY'S DOORS
Through Sept. 1. Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive. 617-478-3100,
Murray Whyte can be reached at