As part of the “William Klein: Films, etc.” retrospective, this first screening invites you to discover two films from Klein’s early years as a filmmaker, paired with a previously unseen INA archive.
The exhibition traces Camille Vivier’s entire artistic career through a thematic journey bringing together around ten series and nearly one hundred works: gelatin silver and digital prints, Polaroids, as well as works designed especially for the exhibition, some of which play with scale and display methods. Broadway By Light | Screened in a new 35-millimeter print 10 minutes, 1958 Directed by William Klein, produced by Argos films Just after William Klein had published New-York, Alain Resnais, through Chris Marker, advised him to turn his attention to film. Klein then rented a 16 mm camera and obtained some Kodachrome. At night, he walked the brightly lit sidewalks of 42nd Street and Broadway. Anatole Dauman, finalizing the production, would add Marker’s and Resnais’s names to the credits for CNC purposes. “I felt that the signs and their animated cycles were already cinema. I filmed them and edited them together, and I looked for music with Maurice Le Roux. And it became Broadway by Light, an abstract film. My first film.” A first film, and perhaps also the first pop film, this cinematic ready-made signaled from the outset Klein’s attraction to recycling popular visual culture, to posters, to advertising. “Every evening, in the center of New York, an artificial day dawns. (…) This day has its inhabitants, its shadows, its mirages, its ceremonies. It also has its sun…” Chris Marker (Argos Films) Excerpt from Magazine des Arts 5 minutes, 1959 This excerpt from Magazine des Arts gives the floor to William Klein, as he returns from a trip to Moscow. Then thirty-three years old, he had already published his books New-York and Rome, and his first film Broadway by Light had just been released. 1959 was a year of relative thaw between the USA and the Soviet Union, against a backdrop of muted ideological propaganda on both sides. It was the year of the “Kitchen Debate” between Nixon and Khrushchev, of Soviet tours by “Jazz Ambassadors” such as Duke Ellington, and of the American exhibition in Moscow. Visual artists were not left out, and William Klein also took advantage of this opening to take part in cultural exchanges. His next book, Moscou, published in 1964, most likely found its momentum during this trip. William Klein Aux grands magasins 45 minutes, 1964 Directed by William Klein, series Les femmes aussi Eliane Victor, a pioneer of documentary television and creator of the series Les femmes aussi in 1964, renewed from within the view of women’s condition presented by the very “Gaullist” ORTF. By offering William Klein this unusual report, with the committed left-wing star Simone Signoret as mediator, she went even further in boldness. Klein was no less daring, taking this commission and turning it into a very free, personal film in the aisles of the department store “le Printemps.” A maverick report for its time, it shows Simone Signoret freely engaging customers in conversation, addressing subjects related to femininity, social class, money, and couples. Formally, politically, and sociologically innovative for television, the film already contains William Klein’s future commitments. Yet he appears free of irony, and his camera is striking in its attentive and respectful distance, much like Simone Signoret herself. “I no longer do any of the things other women do… I haven’t bought saucepans in years. And yet, when faced with problems, we are not so different. We all talk about them in practically the same way” (Simone Signoret)
Price: From 0 to 14 euros.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Still from the film “Aux grands magasins”