The Delirious Fictions of William Klein

Perhaps my favorite DVD release of the year, Criterion’s no-frills box set sub-label, Eclipse, has also done an exemplary job of naming its William Klein set, as his three enclosed fictions are indeed powered by a delirium that rivals that of John Coltrane and crew around the time of Ascension. Much more famous for his photography (his oft’ censored mind-altering eye-candy for Diana Vreeland’s Vogue; the ironically titled mind-and-New-York altering collection of wide-angled expressionist still-photo agitation Life is Good and Good For You in New York, which found friends in Chris Marker and his Left Bank cronies at Éditions du Seuil wherefore it could not find a New York publisher it didn’t make puke from psychic vertigo) and unapologetically confrontational documentaries that he never could have made were he still living in the land of freedom (he has been happily expatriated to France since the G.I. Bill got him the fuck out of Dodge), lest he find F.B.I. agents staked-out in his kitchen cupboards every morning whilst getting out the Oat Bran (Muhammad Ali: The Greatest, for which Cat Power has recently named a fairly damp-but-not-between-the-legs-where-it-counts soul record; Eldridge Cleaver). As with the docs, these three features are cantankerous, jaw-droppingly funny affairs that barely aim before they fire, and don’t stop to apologize for any friendly fire casualties. They also employ the wide-angle lense, like Frankenheimer on stereroids, to great editorial a/effect, as when filming fat, Southern financiers in the Cassius Clay doc so that they bulge out at you and drop beads of pig sweat on yr lap. Each of the three fiction films is a kind of over-the-top pop art documentary, very much inspired by the Godard of Deux ou trios choses que je sais d’elle and La Chinoise, delimiting the furthest reaches of the map of two or three things we all need to know about everyday fascism. The latter two pictures, like Godard’s, are pure primary color. Unlike Godard, however, Klein’s films don’t move elliptically around their targets. He is the quarterback and he ain’t passing the ball: they are pure blitz. As you will see via my reviews of the individual films (below Bill's photo):

William Klein. © William Klein. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC.

Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?

“Brilliant,” says one dickhead fashion wag, looking at a poor Negroid goddess dressed up by a jerkoff designer in something resembling a Richard Serra aluminum, “uncomfortable, but what can you do?” Oreintalist brutality at its most blasé – not even Picasso could touch it. Now you know how Josephine Baker must have really felt. (Awful). Klein’s first delirious fiction is the paso doble in which you can most easily see the shadow of the documentary man cast itself over. It comes off like Richard Lester and Godard remaking La dolce vita in Paris with Jean Rouch’s portable bag of tricks d'un été and Dorothy McGowan as Nico (it also feels like an extrapolation upon the Miss 19 sequence in the latter's Masculin féminin, made the same year, a citation facilitated by the fact that McGowan seems to have stolen Chantal Goya's hair from the set of Godard's masterpiece). What is fashion, and who exactly are you Polly Maggoo? famous international model and exemplar thereof? She is, alternatively: a queen for Prince Charming, all Max Factor where once there were “freckles and buck teeth;” eater of chocolate and tripe; “reimagined woman for the nuclear age,” who would like to be a rocket if she had to be an object, a rabbit or a carrot, respectively, if she had to be an animal or a plant; she born of the “rib and electronic brain;” in short, “a keychain of the dream world” and “sidereal queen for today” – a “polly-glot” deprogrammed of her own “polly-tics” for fascists like me, William Klein (who deconstructs and prods a still image of her face, at once point, in full Chris Marker finery), Diana Vreeland (as half frocked-up Pekinese / half bird of prey), and Jean Rochefort’s OK-TV executive to subject to a barrage of imprisoning contexts. Fashion is “fetishism, mutilation, suffering” as one sociologist has it, but also “young, practical, and fun.” Eroticism, in short. This cosmogonic universe is stuck in a traffic jam and every riot, it seems to say, prefiguring the events of May ’68, is a useful pressure valve.

Mr. Freedom

Mr. Freedom (the man and the movie) is such pure lunacy that it may actually work the best of all three delirious fictions as an island unto itself because, as critic Jared Rapfogel puts it in the new Cineaste, “to say that it is simplistic, crude, inert, and smug is not so much criticism as simple description.” What we are delivered, instead of a movie, then, is street theater in an improvised Captain America getup, like a Manny Farber termite eating its way through the culture with roadrunner aplomb and Acme-brand dynamite strapped around its paunch, subsuming everything from blaxploitation to Stendhal (celebrated hilariously by the obviously-judges-a-book-by-its-cover pimped-out ride of a titular riot cop as a friend of freedom who warned us in advance of “the reds and the blacks”). “Freedom” not only has a Donald Rumsfeld Freedom-‘r’-US hate-on for actual freedom, he is all about barbarism, ready to destroy the whole world and rebuild it in his image, egged on by his straight-to-video Mabuse (Donald Pleasance as Dr. Freedom or maybe president Bush/Budweiser dressed up as Max Headroom for Halloween) and in full command of an army of retarded cannibal rapists from way-the-fuck beyond Thunderdome. The American embassy is essentially a Costco that comes with its own drugged-out red, white, and blue cheerleaders and one hell of a lot o’ cut-rate merch. And Sami Frey plays Christ in the metro, though it is Mr. Freedom, feeling sorry for himself ‘cause everybody fucking hates him, who must bleed from his stigmata and pout in bed w/ his lady infiltrator. So, eerily prophetic, even if Red China Man is now a trading partner of Freedom Enterprise. A movie that leaves the head spinning and, once again, celebrates somewhat unquestioningly the third act riots, shot documentary style to force some verisimilitude, as the only conceivable course of action for mankind forced, Afghani-style, to endure this freedom of which one can only take so much.

The Model Couple

Originally intended as a full-scale debunking of the ridiculous “city of the future” that de Gaulle wanted to create out of thin air, Klein lost financing (big surprise, that), so he took what $$$ he could get from his target (the French government) and zeroed in on one element of his original treatment, guerilla-style: a typical Parisian couple taken under the auspices of The Ministry of the Future and supplanted in a bare apartment (of the future) in order to undergo a battery of carefully surveill’d experimental tests (Polly Maggoo style) by a trio of Psychosociologists in full Nazi regalia, an Ilsa She Wolf surrogate heading the team, the swastika replaced w/ a happy-go-lucky rainbow logo. Our happy couple, Jean-Michel (played by André Dussollier, subsequently excellent in so many Resnais films) and Claudine (played by Anémone, who is very much like a cross between Shelly Duvall and my sister’s childhood Hamster, Teddy) are given a television, a super-kitchen (double pyrolitic oven w/ three-ply panoramic window, illuminated indicators, temperature control, and automatic timer; a dishwasher with six automatic cycles that will save them “319 hours a year”), and three boxes of generic brand culture: one reading Balzac, one Zola, and one for “Les Grands Peintres.” We watch our happy couple, under these sorry conditions, quickly go from 76% to only 44% average, Jean-Michel even starting to cum prematurely every 3.7 times they have sex. The keepers grow alarmed and annoyed, the news media pontificate. Finally, after the final blow, whereby a cruel interloper in the form of Eddie Constantine (still looking and sounding like somebody stepped on a bullfrog), over dinner with the government Minister in charge (who says humanity has to decide between happiness or progress), makes Jean-Michel hand him his glass of wine (which the Eddie then dumps out) and repeatedly stand for no reason, bragging that this is how Auschwitz happened, our couple is only too happy to be saved by - after first playing anarchist house w/ - a group of kid terrorists with toy weapons, a couple sparklers, and demands to address the television audience. Sadly, the boy’s-own-adventure mercenaries and the news media leave our model couple alone in the parking lot without a ride, doubtlessly having bigger fish to fry, and for once suggesting that William Klein has contempt for both sides equally. As the closing musical number serenades: “Model couple. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” This movie, needless to say, kicks serious ass and doesn't take names. We would expect nothing else. Cheers to Eclipse. May it continue to gleefully corrupt!