By Michael Atkinson
Like a missing-link hominid stepping out of the jungle, famous photographer William Klein emerges on 21st century DVD as the great bullgoose Art Film-era satirist we never knew we had. Hallowed for his still images and his documentaries, the Paris-based Klein also made three furiously hostile lampoons that were nominally released, ignored and then forgotten. Until now, you could only find "Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?" (1966), "Mr. Freedom" (1969) and "The Model Couple" (1977) in scruffy bootlegs from pro-am vendors like Pimpadelic Wonderland . and given the movies' paucity of reputation, you would've had little reason to do so. A busy '60s shutterbug for the French Vogue, Klein more or less fell in with the Left Bank New Wavers (Resnais, Demy, Marker, Varda) and the Panic Movement (Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor both show up in "Polly Maggoo"). But his perspective was New Yawk pugilistic, his humor was mercilessly...
Like a missing-link hominid stepping out of the jungle, famous photographer William Klein emerges on 21st century DVD as the great bullgoose Art Film-era satirist we never knew we had. Hallowed for his still images and his documentaries, the Paris-based Klein also made three furiously hostile lampoons that were nominally released, ignored and then forgotten. Until now, you could only find "Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?" (1966), "Mr. Freedom" (1969) and "The Model Couple" (1977) in scruffy bootlegs from pro-am vendors like Pimpadelic Wonderland . and given the movies' paucity of reputation, you would've had little reason to do so. A busy '60s shutterbug for the French Vogue, Klein more or less fell in with the Left Bank New Wavers (Resnais, Demy, Marker, Varda) and the Panic Movement (Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor both show up in "Polly Maggoo"). But his perspective was New Yawk pugilistic, his humor was mercilessly...
- 5/27/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
William Klein was already a noted painter and modernist designer when he shifted to photography in the mid-'50s, annoying the establishment with an off-kilter style halfway between documentary and abstract art. By the end of the decade, he'd moved on to fashion photography, and found the commercial art world unusually receptive to his use of natural locations and pop surrealism. Inspired by the absurdity of his career to that point, Klein made a movie: 1966's Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, a freewheeling beauty-industry satire steeped in French New Wave technique and graced with an uncanny eye. The budget-priced three-disc Eclipse box set The Delirious Fictions Of William Klein matches Polly Maggoo with Klein's mind-bending 1969 action-comedy Mr. Freedom, about a costumed American superhero spreading neo-fascism in Europe, and 1977's fantastical The Model Couple, about a pair of newlyweds who live in a futuristic apartment monitored by state sociologists (and...
- 5/7/2008
- by Noel Murray
- avclub.com
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