The deadly operation of the watch mechanism, 2021

 

“I know what you're thinking: 'Did he fire six shots or only five?' Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, punk?”

Our presence in time is an infrathin space between two counts. On one side the accumulation of our acts and our experiences, and on the other a calculation of the time that remains. It doesn’t always balance out, and action films portray this friction in the form of the countdown. There is an ultimatum, a bomb, a date, an hour, displaying a hidden, yet omnipresent mechanism in red numbers, highlighting the imbalance between the time that remains, and the acts that the hero still has to carry out. It is never the bomb, the accident or the virus that is to be feared, it is the countdown, the succession of numbers. What action films state, is the law imposed by the act of measuring: “there is no time to lose”.

Two watches circulate between three characters in a Sergio Leone film For a few dollars more. Two identical watches, with identical portraits on the inside covers that, when opened, play the same notes of the same heady music. One of the watches is in the possession of an aging bounty hunter, the other belongs to his enemy, who uses it as a countdown for all of his duels. The watch signals, when the spring of the music box has wound all of the way down, the final moments of life of he who hears it. Up until the final duel, where the aging bounty hunter finds himself facing his enemy, unarmed, with the notes of the music he knows only too well playing, one after the other. And as the final notes are heard, and as the death of the old bounty hunter is only seconds away, we hear music from another watch, in the hand of Blondie, the other bounty hunter. The appearance of the other watch restarts the music, hope changes sides, the tide of the combat shifts, suddenly the first watch becomes useless and a new countdown begins. Through a stroke of luck that is anything but, the characters affront one another on the edge of a vast stone circle, their guns pointing like the hands of a stopped clock, as if to affirm that time is what is at stake, the unmoving duration of the image swept away by the spooling projector and the movement of the music.

By mixing in the watches with the compulsory exercise of the duel, Leone allows us to glimpse the fact that the real enemy could be the implacable law of time and its measurement. He also suggests that this law could be transgressed, redistributing the central questions of the Western, those of the law, of its transgression and the violence that runs through the genre. Leone’s force is his preoccupation with a form of social realism:

“Cinema is myth made into a fable. It is not the dream factory. It is the myth factory. My drive to document myth can not exclude my universe as an author, even if I prefer to show the worst that there is, the bounty hunter.

Perhaps it is negative, but America is a vast terrain for this type of professional. They move around with their information, they are aware of their technical value. To our European eyes, they pervert the law, but for Americans they are useful. They destroy pests.” [1]

His three characters are technicians who observe, count and plan. Respect for, or transgression of, the law only has money as its goal – the bank’s gold or the outlaw’s bounty, sometimes both. “And this is the greatest violence there is, says Leone, acts driven by money.” And yet, when the time comes, events always go off the rails and behind the lure of money something else is looming.[2]  “The colonel is guided by a mixture of desire for vengeance and absolute despair. For the other it is adventure. Money is only ever an accessory.” The outlaw is also constantly faced with images of the past. Something else is being exchanged and transmitted, other forms of transactions. The sensitive dimension enters into conflict with the well oiled mechanism of action. The image on the cover of the watch, the ritournelle that the characters are constantly reenacting throughout the film, are clues that something can be disrupted. By activating the second watch’s mechanism, Blondie interrupts the inevitable outcome of the duel. He retakes the stage, redistributes the roles and then restarts the action.”Now we start”, he says before walking backwards along the stone dial where the duel takes place.

Then he sits down to watch, like a Director interrupting a moment of filming to correct a shot that he wasn’t happy with, like a writer restarting a page. The artist, in his manipulation of memory, image and sounds, rewinds time like a watch-spring, to reenact it once again. In the hollow of a moment and in a brutal historical context, not unlike present times, Leone establishes the possibility of a gap, a delay, the possibility of acting against time. It is the artistic gesture, but as a model for an anarchistic action, a friendly, fraternal, gratuitous gesture, a gift or a game, it is what really counts.

- Any trouble boy?

- No, old man. Thought I was having trouble with my adding. It’s all right now.

.

[1] Noël Simsolo, Conversation avec Sergio Leone, Stock, 1987


[2] This is evidenced by the final dialogue between the two bounty hunters, where the question of money is put off to a later time, a time that one imagines may never come:

- My boy you become rich.
- You mean we become rich, old man.
- No it’s all for you, I think you deserved it.
- What about our partnership?
- … Maybe next time.

A line that one can not help but relate to a telegram that Marcel Duchamp sent to his dying friend Francis Picabia: “Dear Francis, see you soon.”