Time suspended

What’s their view

San Francisco, earthquake, April 18th, 1906, 5.14 (1) © Luc Debraine

Oradour-sur-Glane, Nazi massacre, June 10th, 1944, 4-5pm (2) © Luc Debraine

Dresden, Allied bombing, February 13th, 1945, during the night (3) © Luc Debraine

Hiroshima, atomic bomb, August 6th, 8.15 (4) © Luc Debraine

New York, attack on the World Trade Center, September 11th, 2001, 9.04 (5) © Luc Debraine

History has shown how clocks and watches can become infused with the memory of an event. Institutions, museums or simply individuals keep these silent witnesses like talismans.

Luc Debraine*

Per non dimenticare, to never forget. Three words engraved on a glass plaque on the front of Bologna railway station. They explain why the hands on the clock above are still. Forever set at 10.25, the exact moment of a fascist attack in which 85 people lost their lives on August 2nd, 1980. It was a Saturday morning and countless families were setting off on holiday. The bomb ripped through the station waiting room. The youngest victim was three years old, the oldest 86.

To commemorate the tragedy, the city’s authorities commissioned a sculpture to stand opposite the station. But as though this memorial were not enough, or perhaps did not sufficiently evoke the immensity of the event, they decided that one of the original clocks, stopped by the blast of the bomb, would remain in place.

This is a simple yet powerful symbol, curiously charged with emotion when one considers its mechanical origins, an inanimate assembly of gears, dial and hands. Suddenly, frozen at the crucial hour, the inanimate object is given a soul. As though the suspended movement was now driving another force, an inner almost metaphysical force with the power to fire the memory just as surely as Proust’s madeleine.

Sentinels of a critical hour

There are other clocks and watches whose hands were stopped by some brutal event, whether a war, storm, tidal wave, terrorist attack or accident. The timepieces melted by the atomic explosions in Hiroshima at 8.15 on August 6th, 1945, and in Nagasaki at 11.02 on August 9th, 1945. The pocket watches carried by passengers on the Titanic, frozen in the Atlantic on the night of April 14th to 15th, 1912. The clocks shattered by the terrorist attacks in New York and on the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001. The titanium watch of a man who miraculously survived the explosions on the London Underground, on July 7th, 2005 at 8.47 in the morning. These are rare objects, scattered around the world, some still at their original site such as the Bologna station clock, others in museums, memorial centres or in someone’s home.

Literally timekeepers, they stand guard like sentinels over a critical hour. They are infused with memory, so much so that the word takes on an almost electronic sense, that of a device whose purpose is to supply energy. Suffice to see the fascination these clocks and watches hold over visitors to the museums or institutions that house them. Schoolchildren gather round the watches displayed at the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima, unable to tear themselves away. They are the first objects one sees on crossing the museum’s threshold, an essential message immediately spoken.

Pregnant with metaphorical implications, heavy with the meaning it so obviously carries for whomever sets eyes on it, the broken clock is an imposing sight, like a stele or a talisman, lest we forget. It is natural that we should wish to preserve them, as did the employees of the bus depot next to the AZF plant in Toulouse. Their building was razed to the ground by the explosion on September 21st, 2001. It was their wish to keep one of the depot’s clocks, struck dumb at 10.17.

No matter that the minute hand moved while the heavy clock was being transported. All that counts is that it should bear witness to the terrible accident that killed 30 people and injured 2,500 others, including many employees from the bus company itself. Never forget.

Silent yet eloquent witnesses

Never forget, but also understand. A team at the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center was able to learn from the countless clocks that stopped inside homes in New Orleans, when the levees that were supposed to protect the city broke in the wake of Katrina, in late August 2005. For a long time investigators didn’t know where and when the levees had given way. To resolve the mystery, they gathered all the stopped clocks, watches and alarm clocks from flooded homes. Mostly electric, their movement had frozen instantly on contact with the water. Similarly, the pendulums of upright clocks had ceased their to-and-fro movement when submerged.

Scientists noted the times given by some sixty of these silent witnesses to the disaster. The clocks at Saint Bernard’s church were frozen at 6.30 whereas clocks in the neighbouring Ninth Ward had continued to count the minutes for a further hour. Around 17th Street in downtown New Orleans they had stopped at 10.15. By tracing back the thread of time, the investigators were able to retrace the flood waters’ frenzied path, and determine precisely when and where the levees first broke. These broken clocks were the silent yet eloquent witnesses in a unique forensic analysis.

Suspend time and elicit memories

We are touched by these silent witnesses for other reasons, in particular the analogy between their fragile mechanisms and our own physical mechanisms, equally vulnerable and equally subject to the passing of time. This is something Charlie Chaplin clearly understood in The Pawnshop (1916) in which he examines a customer’s broken alarm clock. He listens to it with a stethoscope, takes its pulse and performs surgery, removing parts that jump around on the counter. The customer is driven increasingly irate, almost fatally so, by Chaplin’s antics. The clock and its unfortunate owner are one and the same, suffering at the hands of this improvised medico-horological intervention.

For some time now I have photographed these frozen hands of time. My hope is to create a fresco of these silent witnesses to the disasters that have shaken history. Because a strange thing happens when a broken watch leaves its imprint on the sensitive surface of the film. Two theoretically dissimilar mechanisms, one to measure time, the other to write with light, converge to strike the same metaphorical chord. Both have the capacity to suspend time and to elicit memories. These two cases, one full of seized-up gears, the other with lenses, mirrors or sensors, have the astonishing faculty to fix a continuum at a given point in time. A point we like to believe is absolute, but which in reality is fragile. ■

*Luc Debraine is a journalist at the Swiss daily "Le Temps". A selection of photos and texts from his project Les Heures Interrompues are being shown at the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva (Conches building) as part of the Scénario Catastrophe exhibition until January 6th, 2008. Telephone 022 346 01 25 or www.ville-ge.ch/meg. The full version of this text appears in the exhibition catalogue, Scénario Catastrophe (published by Infolio).

(1) San Francisco, earthquake, April 18th, 1906, 5.14
As the great earthquake shook the city, a pub clock fell to the floor and stopped. It was hung back on the wall as a permanent reminder of the disaster.

(2) Oradour-sur-Glane, Nazi massacre, June 10th, 1944, 4-5pm
The stopped watches of civilian victims after SS troops, in reprisal, set fire to the French village, having first massacred its inhabitants.

(3) Dresden, Allied bombing, February 13th, 1945, during the night
Part of the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon collection in the palace of th0e Elector of Saxony, this 1740 coach clock was split in two by the bombs dropped on the city.

(4) Hiroshima, atomic bomb, August 6th, 8.15
Among objects displayed at the Japanese city’s Peace Memorial Museum are watches that stopped at the fateful moment.

(5) New York, attack on the World Trade Center, September 11th, 2001, 9.04
An office clock, stopped at the time of the first attack on the twin towers in South Manhattan.

(6) New Orleans, hurricane and flooding, August 29th and 30th, 2005
By noting the time on clocks that had stopped as seawater surged into people’s homes, scientists from Louisiana State University were able to reconstruct the flood water’s devastating trail, and more precisely identify where the levees had broken.

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