Broadway by
Light
Léger’s student enters the guild with a reel of neon signs and marquees in color, French subtitles by Chris Marker, technical assistance from Alain Resnais, score by Maurice Le Roux.
Qui
êtes-vous Polly Maggoo?
“Quel saccage du jardin
de la beauté!”
An episode of O.K.T.V.’s Qui êtes-vous! (next week the
pope), behind-the-scenes footage, Nabokovian themes.
“Watch
Television”, reads a men’s-room banner at the studio, “Television Is Health”,
another.
Cinderella
and her Prince Igor.
Isidore Ducasse the fashion
maven, who has “re-created Woman” in aluminium, as
the British say.
mr. Freedom
As Sir Jock
Mellor says in Very Like a Whale, “nice bit of
agitprop” or words to that effect. “Freedom fries” in the U.S. House of
Representatives set the seal on this, however, and the satire was not lost.
A Kennedy-hating
Texas sheriff has a superhero ensemble and an alter ego, he deals with looters
and then is assigned to France vis-à-vis his foes Moujik
Man and Red China Man and the latter’s FAF (French Anti-Freedom) group.
Mr. Freedom finds
little sympathy in France, so he destroys Mont St. Michel and Mont Blanc and
threatens to “go all the way,” la classe ouvrière has no use for him,
he dies in the rubble of French civilization.
Vincent Canby found
it “witless” and so on at some length (New York Times), Jonathan
Rosenbaum gives it out in the Chicago Reader as “a singular expression
of 60s irreverence.”
Muhammad Ali
The Greatest
USA 1964 Zaïre 1974
A
great drama, in three parts. “The Louisville syndicate”, the Black Muslims, Mobutu.
The fighters are
Liston twice and Foreman in Kinshasa.
The
good-humored champion breezes along, Klein stays between the ring (where his
still camera is very informative) and the intimate views of Tom Gries’ The Greatest.
As a documentary
filmmaker, he is close in some ways to Frederick Wiseman.
Some complain the
Fancy is ignored or the private man, the fine technique is praised or slighted.
Klein watches
very attentively, from his vantage point. The businessmen who backed Cassius
Clay speak for themselves, however, and so does Malcolm X, and so does Zaire.
The fight game and sociology and political science around “the greatest
scientific boxer of all times!”
Grands soirs & petits
matins.
—Extraits d’un film qui aurait dû exister...
“The
France,” argues a man in the street, “of 1968 is not the Petrograd of 1917,”
which is certainly an argument.
Will the students
fight? What does the working man have to say about the students’ willingness to
fight, or not?
Resnais marches
with the students, like Lowell (“well, this has been a zany evening”) and
Mailer and Macdonald at the Pentagon.
Night
of manifestation, more talk in the
streets. The
unions? Les flics (“pro-vocation!”),
the Sorbonne with a bullhorn.
Meetings, R.P.M. (dir. Stanley Kramer), The Strawberry Statement (dir. Stuart
Hagmann).
Writers
and students. Liaisons, committees. A mother calls. Tricolor, no, red,
black!
Action
committees. Klein’s aplomb and gravitas are admirable to a fault. Quel drame.
De Gaulle, L’Internationale,
Pompidou, even Mitterrand. Dany Cohn-Bendit,
a ringer for Theo Bikel.
“Charlot”, they call De Gaulle, chanting. Fatigues
and cigars, Mao, Lenin. Occupation of the Citroën factory, etc. End of the affair.
William Klein
Contacts
What is a photo
and what a non-photo, seen and demonstrated by the photographer commenting with
the help of a rostrum camera on his contact sheets, back to the very first.
Le Messie
“The brandy of
the damned,” straight guzzled.
“God rot
Tunbridge Wells,” and so on and so forth.
Minkowski, Musiciens du Louvre/Grenoble.
Even to such a
country as this, not France assuredly, but that too, even.