William Klein: Artist in Motion
Published in Photofile September Issue #102 Australian Centre for Photography
Photography as ‘light painting’, ‘a slice of reality’, or increasingly, a radical departure from it, are common definitions. A less familiar one might be the idea of photography as ‘arrested motion’. But for the initially limiting associations ‘arrestment’ might bring, images in their infinite taxonomies — as ‘art’, ‘memory’, ‘artefacts’, or ‘truth’ — all offer endless routes and possibilities for storytelling.
Most filmmakers are familiar with the language of photography. Many start their journey into telling narratives with a still camera; documenting and archiving the world they see around them. The words of the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard ‘Photography is truth, and cinema is truth twenty-four times a second’ serve as a potent reminder. Although, however great the relationship between photography and film might be, drawing out the links in the form of written commentary often gets left behind these days. In the world of film criticism (where I come from), editorial logic mostly drives this constraint. Tight word counts and a never-ending cycle of deadlines make a frame-by-frame analysis of film for most outlets usually not only infeasible, but also (depending on who you write for and your audience) indulgent. We should not underestimate the impact that many of the great auteurs of the 20th century had by adopting distinct photographic visual signatures. The intentional aesthetic choices of Tarkovsky, Haneke, Kurosawa and Hitchcock, to name a few, did not so much look to redefine photography, but rather assimilated the pre-existing language of photography by forcibly reinjecting it into cinema.
This elevated the craft from its former position as cheap ‘low entertainment’ for the masses, into both entertainment and art for everyone, and ‘movies’ would later be seen by many as ‘one of the defining artforms of the 20th century’.
Just as cinematographers can adopt a photographic style, so too photographers can adopt a cinematic style. As the lesser considered complement, the vast body of work produced by William Klein does much to remind us of its importance.
Klein was born in the United States after the first World War, and his stylistic voice as a photo-artist and filmmaker reflects a playful and self-aware dynamism that mirrors his world. In a period affected by the wake of world wars and an economic recession, Klein had an iconoclastic street photography aesthetic. Not unlike many other street photographers of his time he sought to draw out the importance of the urban environment after the war.
His background in street photography would later inform his work as a fashion photographer, where his unconventional approaches redefined and reinvented the rules for the industry. He would later make a film about it — Who are you, Polly Maggoo? (1969) — a satire joking about the fashion industry’s vapidness and what he felt to be gross excesses.
Klein’s shift into filmmaking was marked by his move to Europe at the age of twenty-eight. Working as Fellini’s understudy for years laid the groundwork for his work as a director.
Klein’s other films were either satirical, critical or politically inclined in some way. Mr. Freedom (1969) was a commentary on Cold War imperialism and The Model Couple (1977) was about governmental control over individual freedoms.
Digital stills from those films all feature in this edition of Photofile.
As arrested and unarrested motion, photography and film will always share commonalities. And today, their ties still can be viewed as functioning as complementary extensions and abstractions of one another.
As stories, narratives, reality or unreality, whether in the form of 1/125 of a second or a 120-minute feature-length film, the question of impact — something Klein always kept in mind —I would argue, is something that transcends medium altogether.
