Doors slam, close with a hush or with the quietest click. Filled with foley-artist creaks and squeals and dramatic snatches of moody soundtrack music, Christian Marclay’s 2022 work Doors is getting its first UK screening at White Cube Mason’s Yard in London. Comedy capers, film noir, snatches of old B-movies, bedroom farce, New Wave and costume dramas are all grist to Marclay’s editorial mill. Tough guys with guns stalk corridors and invade hotel rooms. Someone passes through the door of a swanky apartment and then they’re suddenly somebody else, down in the basement or locked in the slammer. Whenever someone passes through a door, we are cut and spliced into another clip from a different movie. The elevator isn’t to be trusted, and no closed door is safe. Doors is like one of those horror movies where you can never leave the building. I don’t recall seeing a window anywhere. Down in White Cube’s basement, we are lost in a labyrinthine, film-set world of mock-up interiors, and might never see daylight again.
As it’s projected as a continuous loop on a single screen, it doesn’t matter at which point you start watching Doors, or when you stop. Nor does Marclay give a running time to his montage of quickfire edits. Viewers might take note of a scene as a signpost – to know that they’ve seen the whole thing – but the artist lays traps for us along the way. Certain scenes repeat as we watch the work unfurl. Here comes that man again, stepping into an office to grab a package from a desk. “I forgot my money!” he yells to the guy behind the desk, before quickly stepping back out. Now that horrible, tattooed hand is pawing at the door again, and I think I recognise this garish wallpaper from earlier.
Meanwhile, the action keeps at it, in Marclay’s relentless way, with all the hectic running and slamming, the pratfalls and slapstick, the continual walk-ons and fall outs, the switcheroos and clever jumps. This leaves us with a temporal and spatial sense of entrapment and disorientation. As one door opens, another slams in our face. It is a bit like being trapped in one of Mike Nelson’s rat-maze installations.
Pursued and pursuer switch genders and genres as they go through doors. Storylines – what we can guess of them – are redirected or derailed at every turn. One minute fedoras, the next a top hat, a fur stole or a bouffant. Periods and costumes come and go, while black-and-white bursts into colour. Suddenly everyone is speaking French, or coming in through the door marked EXIT. There are nervous fumblings for keys and deft closeup work with lock picks, as well as a whole lot of keyhole peeping and spyhole sneaking, listening at the door or hiding behind the jamb. With its constant branchings and bifurcations, and all the stagey entrances and exits – the immemorial bits of theatrical and filmic business – Doors turns the cliches of its material into something new.
Upstairs, Marclay is showing a number of sculptures made from doors. An old house door, replete with knocker, letterbox and house number, has had various panels chopped off it, and hangs like an inverted medieval crucifix from the wall. Others have been carefully re-carpentered into compressed towers and stacks of mortice-and-tenon joints. Passage through them is impossible. Another door looks like it has been gnawed and whittled into the most skeletal frame. There is a nice reciprocity with Marclay’s film, in that both manipulate found material by way of cutting, compressing and editing, but they lack the uncontrollable, volatile snatches of human action in the film downstairs.
A nightmarish entertainment, Marclay’s new film has none of the overarching precision and temporal structure of his 2010 work The Clock: whenever we see a clock or a watch in that 24-hour montage of film clips, it always tells the right time. Nor does Doors have the joyous exuberance of the artist’s Video Quartet from 2002. But its cumulative, claustrophobic mood feels fitting for a work completed in the shadows of Brexit and lockdown. Thoroughly absorbing, there’s plenty of star-spotting to be done along the way: Bette Davis, Sidney Poitier, Jack Lemmon, Charles Laughton, Peter Sellers, and good lord there’s Stanley Holloway, among the trenchcoated prowlers and chirpy messenger boys, the posse of ditzy office girls rampaging down the hall, the hunters and the hunted, the desperate and the buffoonish. You stay not just to see what’s next, but to watch it all again.
• Christian Marclay’s Doors is at the White Cube Mason’s Yard in London until 30 September
