The Clock of the Long Now
2015 · United States
Directed by Jimmy Goldblum, Adam Weber
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, mythic
A portrait of computer scientist Danny Hillis and his team of inventors, futurists, and engineers — including Stewart Brand and Alexander Rose — as they build The 10,000 Year Clock, a monumental timepiece carved into a mountain in West Texas to tick once a year for ten millennia and embody the power of long-term thinking.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's obsessed with disruption and velocity, so watching Goldblum and Weber treat deep time as a *feature*, not a bug, is genuinely perverse—but the film earns it by refusing to sanctify the project; it's oddly skeptical of its own subject, which is the only move that could've worked.
A formally composed meditation that inherits the essay-film tradition of Marker and Solaris while maintaining the observational rigor of contemporary long-form documentary—the pacing mirrors the clock's tick, and that's not accident, it's curatorial discipline.
The decision to shoot the mountain, the machine, and the architects with the same unhurried gaze—treating them as co-equals rather than hero-worshipping the inventors—is what prevents this from becoming a TED talk, and it's what makes the scale actually *land*.
Reviews
A New, Gorgeous Look at the 10,000 Year Clock With 'The Clock of the Long Now'
Watch this short documentary about the clock built to last 10,000 years.
Festivals
- DOC NYC 2015
- Mountainfilm 2016