JAMESON DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

FRIDAY 14TH FEBRUARY
JAMESON DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2014
DELIRIOUS FICTIONS
THE FILMS OF WILLIAM KLEIN
William Klein’s career has spanned over 60 years.
After studying painting with Léger in post-war Paris,
he was spotted by American Vogue and returned
to his birthplace, New York, where he established
himself as an influential fashion photographer and
street documentarian. He remains one of the giants
of 20th-century photography.
Klein attributes the opportunity to begin making
films to his association with people like Chris Marker
and Alain Resnais. Since the 1960s he has made
many feature films, documentaries and commercials.
Imaginative, influential, anarchic and controversial, his
subjects cover areas as diverse as Algerian folklore,
Eldridge Cleaver, Muhammad Ali, Little Richard,
Hollywood, The French Open and the French fashion
world. Through his use of critique and satire he
creates an audacious mode that infuses his fictional
films with an expressionistic and unorthodox style
of parody and social burlesque.
James Armstrong
Lecturer in Visual Culture, NCAD
Photos courtesy William Klein
With the support of the French Embassy in Ireland
There will be a public interview with William Klein on
Thurs 20 February after the screening of Who Are You,
Polly Maggoo?, hosted by James Armstrong.
MESSIAH
THE MODEL COUPLE
Fri 14 Feb / IFI 1 / 3.30pm / 135 minutes
Writer-director: William Klein 1999 US
Klein visually interprets Handel’s Messiah – with its tale of Christ’s
birth, crucifixion, and ascension – as performed by numerous
international choruses including the Dallas Police Choir, the
Sugarland Prison Choir, a drug rehab choir in Harlem and the
Lavender Light Gay and Lesbian Interracial Choir.
Klein’s impressionistic visualization takes the viewer (and listener)
all over the world and includes women boxers at the Taj Mahal,
Las Vegas; a Paris Christmas party for the homeless; a Danish
woman in a Bastille tattoo parlour; a graphic lynching in Liberia;
a Spanish production of the crucifixion play and the Ministers of
Muscle preaching the gospel across America.
This is a deeply poetic and disturbing portrait of the
dysfunctional family of man, told through a moving montage
of the sacred and the profane.
Mon 17 Feb / IFI 1 / 6.30pm / 101 minutes
Writer-director: William Klein 1977 US
Cast: André Dussolier, Anémone, Zouc
The third of William Klein’s ‘delirious fictions’ (the others being
Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? and Mr Freedom) prefigures the
reality show. In all three films the television set is a motif through
which the characters watch themselves and are watched and
manipulated by others. The growing presence of celebrity
culture, media surveillance and televisual hyperreality seems to
dominate Klein’s fictional worlds.
In The Model Couple, the French Ministry of the Future chooses
two of the most average men and women to inhabit a prototype
living space for the ideal ‘City of the Future’. Two psychosociologists
subject the couple to various behavioural and
emotional tests that are broadcast to the television audience. As
the audience loses interest, the experiment descends into farce.
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