THE FILMS OF WILLIAM KLEIN
At a time when the National Endowment for the Arts is under siege–and not only from yahoos like Jesse Helms, but also from certain anarchists, leftists, and intellectuals–the general paucity of information and understanding about national funding of the arts in other countries only helps to underline how isolationist this country has become in cultural matters. As a rule, our overseas news coverage and our access to foreign films both seem to operate according to the same chillingly reductive circular reasoning: if people don’t already know about something or understand it, they aren’t likely to be interested.
All this is a preamble to considering the work of William Klein, an American who has lived in France since the late 1940s. Most of his films would not exist without the support of European grant-giving agencies (including European TV), and none of them would be available to us without the NEA–which enabled the Walker Art Center to mount a nationally touring retrospective, an abbreviated version of which is currently showing at the Film Center. I don’t want to argue in this case that Klein’s films are as important as those of contemporary masters of French cinema such as Marker, Godard, or Rivette, but they’re fascinating, singular, and at times even exciting works that tell us all sorts of things about both France and the U.S. as seen from abroad that we’d never find in commercial releases. The nearly total neglect that they’ve received prior to this retrospective tells us a great deal about how much our film culture is delimited by restrictive categories–how much gets factored out of consideration merely because it eludes those categories.
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Generally regarded by the French as an American and by the Americans as a Frenchman, Klein occupies a kind of no-man’s-land in the world of film, which has rigorously excluded him from attention. In spite of his personal, professional, and political links with certain members of the French New Wave (Marker, Resnais, Varda) you won’t find his name even mentioned in most studies of the New Wave, or of French cinema in general. Similarly, although his first documentaries are contemporaneous with the rise of cinema verite, he is almost never mentioned in connection with that movement either. French film critics tend to ignore his work, and it has received so little exposure elsewhere that he has remained in a critical limbo throughout his 30-year career.
Regardless of whether his films are documentaries or fiction, Klein generally combines documentary techniques with an expressionistic vision to produce a disturbing and decidedly nonhumanistic view of our world as the media see it–predatory, overbearing, and glistening with glitz and hype. Yet paradoxically, his contributions to the otherwise dated Far From Vietnam, concentrating on Norman Morrison and on two war-related marches in New York (one supporting the war, one protesting it), carry a human charge and moral challenge that are decidedly missing in the self-conscious posturings of the episodes by Godard and Resnais.
I can’t say that I enjoyed this film as much as the others I’ve seen–the shapes of too many of the episodes seem fuzzily defined–but as a look at the cultural sensibility of France in the 80s, I must confess that though different, the film is no less valuable. We often tend to forget that we see only a thin crust of films from other countries, and, as I’ve suggested above, what we do see is usually far from characteristic. I doubt that Mode in France is a “characteristic” French film, but I strongly suspect that it is characteristically French in ways that recent movies by Malle, Varda, Claude Miller, and Claude Sautet are not. If you’d like to know what it’s like to be in France right now, this is a movie that could tell you a lot.
