There is one hour, just one, that disappears every year. It does not vanish like smoke, nor evaporate like dew with the first rays of sun: it simply moves forward, as if it did not want to live out its turn. In the early hours of Sunday 30 March, two o'clock will become three. No one will see it die.
The clock change is an administrative act, yes. A mechanical adjustment intended to save energy, although for years there has been debate about whether it really does. But beyond its practical function, it is a deeply literary and cinematic phenomenon. Because time is not only what clocks mark out: it is the invisible substance of our lives. And when it jumps, when it stretches or shrinks, culture turns it into story.
Asleep or dancing, we will all have crossed that threshold barely noticing it. But something lingers: a strange sense of being out of kilter, of having been shifted slightly out of our everyday orbit, a gap we would have to fill with art.
The clock as a fiction machine
In cinema, time is a constant obsession. In Groundhog Day (1993), Bill Murray wakes up again and again on the same day, trapped in a loop he can only break by understanding his own heart. In Interstellar (2014), one hour on a planet is equivalent to seven years on Earth. In The Clock, the monumental work by the artist Christian Marclay, thousands of film scenes build an audiovisual clock synchronised with real time. Watching that work is a reminder that cinema has always been a way of taming time.
Literature is not far behind. Marcel Proust sought to recover lost time through memory, while Virginia Woolf distorted and expanded it in novels such as Orlando or The Waves, where the stream of consciousness replaces the ticking of the clock. In The Invention of Morel, by Bioy Casares, time is trapped in an infinite replay, as if nostalgia could be frozen.
In painting, too, time has been obsession, mystery and raw material. Salvador Dalí, with his melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory, turned the regular tick-tock into a soft image, deformed by dreams. There is no Swiss precision here, but dreamlike time, malleable, elastic. Edward Hopper, by contrast, fixed the suspended instant on his canvases: that late-hour light, those solitary figures beside a window, as if time had stopped just before saying something important. And Monet, in his series of cathedrals or water lilies, painted not things, but the passing of light over things, that form of slow time that only art can hold on to.
A ghost hour
The hour lost when the clocks go forward to summer time has something ghostly about it. What would have happened in that hour we will never live? A reunion? A kiss? An accident that did not happen? It is fertile ground for the imagination, like those moments when we think we have forgotten something important but do not know what.
In Japan there is the concept of “ma”, empty space, the pause that gives meaning to rhythm. This lost hour could be just that: a gap that reveals something about the whole. In cultures that celebrate the spring equinox, such as the Persian Nowruz or the ancient European pagan rituals, the balance between light and darkness was a reason for renewal, for new beginnings. And perhaps that is why, when time jumps, we feel that something inside us is also changing season.
Emotional time
In a world that spins faster every day, stopping to think about that vanishing hour can be an act of resistance. Sociology reminds us that there is an objective time (that of the clock) and a subjective time (the one we feel). “Everything is relative”, Einstein asserted. An hour with someone we love can feel like a second. An hour in a waiting room can be an eternity. Is it not strange that the clock change happens just as winter gives way to spring? As if even the calendar needed a jolt.