(That documentary title was actually the secondary title, as you'll see from the obit.)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0459017/

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/12/arts/william-klein-dead.html
(this includes many photos taken by Klein)

By Robert D. McFadden Sept. 12, 2022

William Klein, Who Photographed the Energy of City Life, Dies at 96
He built his reputation with dreamlike images of New York, Rome, Moscow and Tokyo and cast a satirical eye on fashion in a decade of work for Vogue.

Exterior. Daylight. Two boys in a doorway. The older, 11 or 12, holds a revolver aimed at your left eye. He is snarling, ready to kill you. The younger, maybe 8, has the face of an angel. It is a grainy black-and-white photograph, staged circa 1954,
titled “Gun 1, New York.”

The visual artist William Klein called it a self-portrait. He was both boys, he said. One grew up angry on the streets of New York and was capable of anything. The other, sensitive and intelligent, settled in Paris as a young man and devoted himself to
one artistic pursuit after another.

Mr. Klein, who caught the wit and energy of great cities and satirized the world of fashion with his strikingly original photographs, and portrayed Muhammad Ali and Eldridge Cleaver as iconic rebels in his documentary films, died on Saturday night in
Paris. He was 96.

His assistant Pierre-Louis Denis confirmed his death.

One of his generation’s most celebrated photographers, represented in museums across Europe and the United States, Mr. Klein began his career as a restless postwar American in Paris who took a studio on the Left Bank, defied traditions and plunged into
his anarchic visions of painting, sculpture, street and fashion photography, feature films and documentaries.

He painted whirling murals and sculptured shapes that moved. His photos looked like accidents. He overexposed negatives, bleached out contrasts and posed subjects to fake illusions of spontaneity. “Klein broke half the rules of photography and ignored
the other half,” Jim Lewis wrote in Slate magazine in 2003.

Mr. Klein’s works have been exhibited for more than a half-century in galleries, cinemas and photography retrospectives, most recently at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan — the first in his native New York since 1994 — in a show
that opened on June 3. (It was scheduled to close on Monday but will now remain open through Thursday, a spokeswoman said.)


...From the late 1960s to the early ’80s, Mr. Klein abandoned photography and made a score of satirical films and documentaries. His first feature film, “Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?” (1966), was a sendup of fashion, with models clad in sheet metal
held together with nuts and bolts, and a lovely airhead in the title role. “I have a pimple today,” she says, straining to sift crucial events in her life.

Mr. Klein’s best-known documentary, “Muhammad Ali, the Greatest,” was a two-part study of the fighter’s evolution from the Cassius Clay who defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship in 1964 to the Muslim convert who was stripped of
his title for refusing to fight in Vietnam and then reclaimed it by defeating George Foreman in the “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire in 1974.

The film, with cameos by the Beatles and a commentary by Malcolm X shortly before his assassination in 1965, captures the excitement of young Black Americans as Ali flaunts arrogant charm, defies the government and becomes a symbol of Black pride.

“So-called battles between good and evil have always obsessed me,” Mr. Klein told The Times in 2003. “Here was Cassius Clay, a clean-cut American. But he became the bad guy because he was Black and had a big mouth. No one took him seriously. When I
did Part I of the film, everybody hated it. Everybody hated him until Zaire.”

William Klein was born in Manhattan on April 19, 1926, a son of European immigrants. (Some sources have listed his birth year as 1928, but Mr. Denis, his assistant, confirmed that it was 1926.) His father’s clothing business failed in the Depression. A
bright Jewish boy in an Irish neighborhood, William read voraciously, hung out at the Museum of Modern Art and graduated from Townsend Harris High School at 14.

He studied sociology at City College of New York, but dropped out a year before graduation and joined the postwar Army. He served in Germany and France and drew cartoons for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Discharged in 1948, he settled in
Paris, enrolled at the Sorbonne and studied painting with Fernand Léger.


...Mr. Klein’s films included “Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther” (1969), a sympathetic portrayal of the author and revolutionary who jumped bail after leading an ambush on Oakland, Calif., police officers and went into exile in Cuba and Algeria; and
“Far From Vietnam” (1967), a collaboration with Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and other film directors protesting American involvement in the Vietnam War...

One comment:

Robert, Nice, Sept. 12
"So sad to hear of this great artist’s death. I loved his work, especially his bites at Paris fashion and how women, back when, should always be glamorous even doing mundane tasks. The article, however, failed to even mention his favorite model Barbara!
I feel fortunate, I guess, to own one of his works. Thank you William. On to your next life."

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