William Klein: Delirious montages

William Klein has only made a handful of films, but he carved out an amazingly fresh and vigorously strange and funny cinematic style, especially in his trio of fiction films. I’ve been showing scenes from Klein’s films on the program since mail-order copies became available from France, and so I was utterly delighted when Eclipse/the Criterion Collection released all three in the box-set The Delirious Fictions of William Klein. I’ve noticed that two of the most visually arresting scenes from two of the films were up on Youtube already, but in abbreviated versions, and so I thought it would be best to see the scenes in their full mondo-montage context.

First the sequence in Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966) in which our heroine (Dorothy McGowan) becomes part of an odd spoof of beauty-product pitches, and then flies away with her Prince Charming (Sami Frey) in a wonderful bit of photo-animation. The latter part of the sequence is striking, as it prefigures Terry Gilliam’s work at the end of the decade but was influenced by the work of Harry Smith (thanks to Stephen Kroninger for the citation).



Then the wonderful skewering of American patriotism from Klein’s Mr. Freedom (1969). John Abbey (where did he go?) does a dynamite job delivering Klein’s mock recitation of American values, followed by a bright and bouncy montage (with the occasional dark, menacing overtone) elaborating the joys of the U.S. of A.

The Mayor Who Wouldn't Leave

From the national to the local: let me just state for the record that our billionaire mayor here in NYC has decided he deserves a third term. He has done nothing to appreciably make the city better in any way, but he plays a good role as daddy-placator, he has made sure he's never avoided a camera, and is, above all, phenomenally wealthy (so everyone is cowed into thinking he must know what's talking about). His voice is a monotone drone that just disappears into itself (I continually think of the speakers who make PowerPoint presentations you fall asleep at when you're briefed about your benefits at a new job). He is a drippy little rich man, but he's got his game goin', and so he decided to take a tip from the Fascist bastard who preceded him. He feels the city owes him more time in charge. What to do? He is going to have the City Council overturn the ruling that Mayors can only serve two terms because — while that ruling was good enough for every Mayor before Guiliani — it isn't proper that a billionaire be asked to vacate his job.

Every time I even consider "Mayor Mike" and his b.s. reign over the city, I think of Charles Foster Kane's "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper." Mike thought it would be fun to run a major American city, and it has been — for him.

Credit where credit is due: The above image of King Michael of Bloomberg came from the Queens Crap blog, which you should all visit, provided you're a Queens-ite, or like the place.