Photo finished

Klein holds the shots at the HFA

by Chris Fujiwara

"RAGING BILL: WILLIAM KLEIN'S WORKS ON FILM," At the Harvard Film Archive, February 11 through 27.

Of all the arts, still photography may be the one that has the least in common with cinema. The deceptive similarity between them only separates them further, though it also makes it hard to conceptualize their difference. William Klein's work provides a useful case study. Born in 1928 in New York and repatriated to Paris in the '50s, Klein has had a double life: as a famous still photographer and as an underground filmmaker. The things that make Klein's photographs interesting -- his later fashion work as well as the famous mid-'50s New York street scenes -- vanish from his films. The magnetic gaze of Klein's still camera stretches the moment, lets us live through it at different speeds. But in front of his lingering movie camera, the event goes slack. Immediacy comes into a photograph by what the image leaves out and lets us infer, but Klein's films deny off-screen space. In his movies, everything he wants to say with a shot is there on the screen. And the strong graphic quality of many Klein photographs is -- but for stray brilliant moments -- missing from his films.

The Harvard Film Archive's retrospective "Raging Bill: William Klein's Works on Film," is valuable, nevertheless, for those moments, and also because Klein is revealing even in his shortcomings. An agitprop attack on US imperialism, Mr. Freedom (1969; February 13 at 7 p.m.) works in spurts; its comic energy manifests itself less in Klein's comic-strip mise-en-scène than in the manic raps of Mr. Freedom (John Abbey), an anticommunist superhero standing up for the American Way in France. "If we can't sell it, we burn it; we're not the Salvation Army," he growls to a red-wigged, doll-faced Delphine Seyrig (one of several distinguished actors in this mess). At its best, Mr. Freedom recalls the absurdist subculture studies of '60s exploitation director Herschell Gordon Lewis. But not only is Lewis's She-Devils on Wheels more entertaining than Mr. Freedom, it's also more important as a document of its time.

Muhammad Ali: The Greatest (1974; February 11 at 9 p.m. and February 13 at 3 p.m.) starts in February 1964, when the soon-to-be heavyweight world champion was still known as Cassius Clay and was managed by a group of white Southern businessmen known as the Louisville Syndicate. In a memorably lunar shot, Klein arranges the syndicate members in deep space, lights them starkly from one side, and has each of them in turn introduce himself to the handheld, on-the-move camera. Klein chronicles Ali's liberation from this group, the controversy over his public conversion to Islam, and his May 1965 rematch with Sonny Liston. The second half of the film is devoted to the preparations for Ali's legendary fight with George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire. There's excellent footage of Ali, generally outside the ring, but it's mainly a film around, rather than about, Ali. Too often the film is muffled, distant, and vague; the babble of other voices interferes with our pleasure in Ali's personality without enhancing our understanding of his cultural impact (one exception: Malcolm X's incisive on-screen analysis).

Mode in France (1985; February 12 at 9 p.m.), the most interesting Klein film I've seen, is an expensive practical joke, a series of thematic fashion photo spreads transformed into a film. The party sequence in Mode in France hints at both Godard, with its lateral tracking shots, and Tati, with its swarm of nonlinear detail -- and to recall how those two filmmakers use space and duration is immediately to be aware of the modesty of Klein's ambitions. But Mode in France vindicates itself in the brilliant "Confessions" sequence, in which crouching female models folded into tight white frames recount their horrible childhoods, problems with men, and other occupational hazards while voyeurs of both sexes flow steadily into a peep booth to keep anxious, compulsive vigil before the models' televised images. The construction of pain as spectacle, the anonymity of both seen and seers, and the structural rigidity of the event are dead-on as a representation of the sadism of fashion.

The ideal format for Klein in cinema is probably the TV commercial. He shows some of his commercials in In & Out of Fashion (February 26 at 7 p.m.), his 1994 review of his career, and their terse put-ons are more successful than some of the extended romps in Mode in France. Within the implied context of TV -- its ambient quality, its disposability -- Klein's ambiguity becomes subversive. The progression from Mr. Freedom to commercials suggests that the logical next step in Klein's evolution as a filmmaker is the music video. Maybe he's taken this step, sort of, with his latest film, The Messiah (1999; February 25 at 7 p.m., February 26 at 9:30 p.m., and February 27 at 6 p.m.), an international montage set to Handel's oratorio. Unavailable for advance screening, the film will get its American premiere at Harvard.