William Klein's films

Friendly Witnesses

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/movies/friendly_witnesses/Content?oid=1190003

William Klein's films cover 20th-century pop-cultural upheaval. The
Baader Meinhof Complex busts heads and assassinates pols. Choose your weapon.

By Kelly Vance
September 9, 2009

William Klein's name may not be instantly recognizable, but his
images are. The New York City native, a painter turned photographer,
first set up shop in Paris as an ex-GI after WWII but soon perfected
the transatlantic shuffle. When the 1960s exploded, Klein was already
famous in New York as a photographer of fashion and documentary, and
his Parisian address turned out to be an ideal vantage point from
which to witness the era's culture wars.

Klein's photography was never as well known as that of Robert Frank,
but it shares with Frank (The Americans) a taste for eye-popping
candor, a vividly social context, and an affinity for the outsider
that tickled European preconceptions while providing stateside
hipsters with a thrill of recognition. His instinct for uncovering
America's obsessions ­ race, celebrity, money and the lack of it ­
dovetailed nicely with France's love-hate for the America it thought
it knew. Klein's move from still photography to filmmaking was as
natural, but also as studied, as a Cassius Clay right cross.

Good luck trying to draw a thematic circle around Klein's subjects.
One minute his camera is tiptoeing through a gaggle of outlandishly
dressed models posed in a French barn, the next it's floating through
Hollywood in a convertible loaded with Little Richard impersonators.
For its twelve-title retrospective of Klein's work, Top Bill: The
Films of William Klein, curated by Steve Seid and featuring prints
from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Pacific Film Archive
samples the full range.

The pick of Klein's narrative fictions is probably The Model Couple
(1976), a none-too-subtle satire of social engineering and marketing
research in which two newlyweds (André Dussolier and Anemone)
volunteer to spend six months in a government-sponsored "happiness
capsule" where a team of sinister technicians studies their every
move. Liberally sprinkled with shards of Jean-Luc Godard and Robert
Downey Sr. (especially Putney Swope), the concept dwindles in the
last quarter but fares better than Klein's 1969 farce Mr. Freedom,
another not-quite-hilarious critique of overbearing Americanism,
starring John Abbey as a red-white-and-blue anticommunist crusader in
Paris. The latter plays September 19, The Model Couple on October 10.

Klein had a highly developed eye for the fashion demimonde, but with
a dollop of grime in one corner. His first feature film, Who Are You,
Polly Maggoo? (1966), channels Richard Lester and Richard Avedon in
the story of an American runway model (Dorothy MacGowan) trying to
convince herself, in vain, that the haute-couture life is glamorous.
Klein's black-and-white images certainly are. It screens September 12.

Klein's earliest films were documentaries, and it's in that sphere,
free-associating with pitch-perfect editing and his gorgeous,
intimate camera work (Klein shot all of his own films), that he hits
his stride. If he had made no other films than Muhammad Ali, the
Greatest (1974), Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther (1970), and 1980's
The Little Richard Story, Klein would rank as one of the most
perceptive pop-cultural documentarians of his day.

The hook in The Little Richard Story is that Klein had no access to
his subject ­ the rock 'n' rolling "Georgia Peach" failed to show up
for Little Richard Day in his hometown of Macon, even though they had
decorated a public park for him. Undeterred, Klein and his crew
trolled the streets for local color and discovered what everybody
likes about the South: sidewalk blues singers, shotgun shacks, etc.
He cut that together with a Little Richard impersonation contest plus
raucous concert footage of Richard Penniman himself, and presto!
Party time. It plays September 24.

The Ali film is something of a legend. Alongside Leon Gast's When We
Were Kings, it captures the essence of Ali's appeal, from his 1964
title fight (as brash, trash-talking Cassius Clay) against scowling
Sonny Liston, all the way to the "Rumble in the Jungle" in 1974
versus George Foreman, Ali's magnificent comeback amid hordes of
African kids chanting "Ali, boma ye!" (Kill him, Ali!). Four years
before, Klein scored a coup by going to Algiers to interview American
fugitive revolutionary Eldridge "Soul on Ice" Cleaver as he strolled
through the medina ­ Klein then placed that Q&A into a montage of the
Black Panthers' greatest hits. Ali the boxer, Cleaver the agitator,
and Little Richard the screaming queen ­ three faces of Black America
that scared the hell out of the establishment in the 1960s and 1970s.
Klein captured that heat for all time. Muhammad Ali opens the PFA
retro on September 11; the Cleaver doc shows September 18. Go to
BAMPFA.berkeley.edu for details.

In the summer of 1972, I was traveling in a dilapidated Volkswagen
van with four other scruffy, long-haired companions, on our way from
Amsterdam to Cologne. A few kilometers into West Germany after the
border crossing near Aachen, we were stopped by a squad of German
polizei with automatic weapons, who pulled us over to stand for a
frisk while they searched the van. The man in charge was an American
in civilian clothes who looked exactly like Gomer Pyle. When asked
why we were being stopped, he mumbled something noncommittal and
then, after his men had found nothing interesting, let us continue
our trip. It was only after we had met up with our friends in Cologne
that we realized what the fuss was about. "Don't you read the news?"
our incredulous German buddies asked. "They were looking for the
Baader Meinhof gang."

Indeed, many Americans then and now will have a hard time placing
Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and their comrades in
a meaningful context. Which is why, despite its dramatic failings,
filmmaker Uli Edel's The Baader Meinhof Complex arrives in Bay Area
art houses as a useful tool, a history lesson in a box, on a moment
in time when actual revolution seemed not only possible but in some
cases likely, in parts of Western Europe and the United States.

Frustrated politicos of the bread-not-bombs school might be tempted
to read the film ­ adapted by Edel and Bernd Eichinger from Stefan
Aust's book ­ as an instructional parable. We see how journalist
Meinhof (nice job by actor Martina Gedeck), a married mother, moved
from the sidelines to the forefront of violent resistance against
what she saw as US-led Western imperialism, alongside hotheaded
Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and blond lefty-Valkyrie Ensslin (Johanna
Wokalek), who robbed banks, planted bombs, shot capitalists, and
inspired "second- and third-generation" adherents to do the same,
circa 1970-1980. Edel's account runs us through the events so briskly
that we end up wondering what it all meant.

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