Christian Marclay, Doors

Now showing at the Brooklyn Museum (through April 2026) and the ICA in Boston (until Spet 1, 2025) is Christian Marclay’s Doors. Like his masterpiece The Clock, Doors is a film montage, this time of people in movies opening and closing doors.

In Doors (2022), Marclay stitches together hundreds of short film clips featuring the opening and closing of doors. More than a decade in the making, the moving image collage draws from nearly all genres of narrative cinema ranging from French New Wave to Hollywood blockbusters. Carefully edited by Marclay, the visual narrative follows actors entering new spaces, with each door marking an editing point and transitioning between films and soundscapes. The work suggests a labyrinthine journey where protagonists get lost and found again. Marclay describes the video as sculptural – a “mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in.”

The film is 54 minutes long but runs in a continuous loop. These videos feature some footage from the film; this one shows five minutes and this one four minutes:

Here’s Marclay on the process of making the video:

It’s quite difficult to find scenes in cinema showing an actor entering a space and then going into another space. I needed two doors: The actor enters one space and then leaves through another door — so it’s one room to the next room to the next room to the next room, and every time a different actor in a different film. It’s a strange choreography to edit. The door has to be opened in a similar way and at the same speed to make it believable. If someone is running and then you see them peek slowly through the door on the other side, it doesn’t look realistic. I also had to match the motion of pulling or pushing the door. To make things even more complicated, that door is hinged on one side and that has to match, the hinge and the door handle. If done well, the viewer gets sucked in and fooled by these editing tricks. So you see an actor in color in the ’80s entering a black-and-white film from the ’50s, and you know it’s not the same actor, but your mind wants to believe that it is. The trick is to create a flow, an illusion of continuity.

Doors brings to mind Christopher Nolan’s Inception (“a mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in”) and the doorway effect (“The doorway effect or location updating effect is a replicable psychological phenomenon characterized by short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another.”)

P.S. The Clock is showing at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, starting at the end of November and running through Jan 18, 2026.

Tags: art · Christian Marclay · movies · remix · video

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