William Klein's explosive New York street photography made him one of the most heralded artists of the sixties. An American expatriate in Paris, Klein has also been making challenging cinema in France for more than forty years, yet with the exception of his acclaimed documentary Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, his film work is barely known in the United States. The Sacramento French Film Festival is proud to bring you two of his greatest films.

After nearly a decade as American Vogue's most subversive fashion photographer, William Klein made his debut feature film in 1966 with Qui êtes-vous Polly Maggoo and served up a caustic satire of worlds he knew intimately: high fashion and the media.

Dorothy McGowan plays the titular Polly Magoo, the latest supermodel of the Twiggy era, who is the subject of a TV documentary by a French journalist (Jean Rochefort) and is pursued by an obssessed prince (Sami Frey). Cult actress Grayson Hall (Dark Shadows) costars as an American publisher, a character, according to William Kklein himself, closely based on Diana Vreeland (the controversial and legendary Editor-in-chief of Vogue from 1963 to 1971).

Klein's first fiction film is a daring deflation of cultural pretensions and institutions, dressed up in brilliant black and white.

 

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