Putting the Bosch into Handel

Painter, photographer and film-maker William Klein, whose 'Messiah' will be screened in Dublin next week, is one of nature's rebels. Aidan Dunne looks back at his 50-year career

William Klein's 1999 film Messiah has its Irish première on Tuesday in Temple Bar's Meeting House Square, on the anniversary of another premiere, that of Handel's oratorio itself, which Handel conducted in its first performance in Fishamble Street on April 13th, 1742. The showing of the film is a good way of noting the anniversary, but anyone who knows anything of Klein will be aware of what not to expect. That is, one of those dutiful, reverential and usually rather dull videos of a classical performance.

Instead, viewers will see scenes involving ecstatic gamblers in Las Vegas casinos praising their particular god; a Danish woman expressing her devotion to the Lord by having religious pictures tattooed onto her stomach; mob violence in Liberia; newsreels of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; and details of Hieronymus Bosch's nightmarishly surreal visions. As Klein commented to the International Herald Tribune, his religious vision is altogether more Bosch than Handel.

Yet Messiah features plenty of rapt, respectful footage of musicians, though not in a single performance. The oratorio, inextricably linked to Christmas, has become one of the most performed pieces of music in the world, and Klein samples an eclectic spread of those who sing it. There are professional soloists and choirs, but also many amateurs, including the Dallas Police Choir (sirens muted but squad-car lights flashing), a prison choir in Texas and a New York drug addicts' gospel choir. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir declined to take part.

There is a barbed, satirical edge to some of Klein's juxtapositions of words and images but, judged by his usual standards, Messiah is a mild-mannered piece of work. As someone who has made distinctive contributions in the fields of painting, film and photography, he is not as well-known as he might be. In fact, Klein, an archetypal American in Paris, where he has been based for more than 50 years, is a consummate outsider, by nature a rebel. As with Groucho Marx, you feel that on principle he wouldn't belong to any club that would accept him as a member.

He was born in New York in 1928, into a family of Hungarian origin whose clothing business was ruined by the Wall Street Crash. Still in his teens and desperate to get away, Klein enlisted in the army, mainly to take advantage of the GI Bill of Rights, he claims. After training as a radio operator in the cavalry - then mounted on horses, not in tanks - he was dispatched to Germany.

After a relatively quiet year there he was enrolled in the Sorbonne in Paris because he spoke some French. On his second day in the city he met Jeanne Florin, the daughter of a Belgian architect, who became his partner and collaborator. She has said that they gravitated towards each other because they were both running away from their backgrounds and were alone. Keen to study painting, Klein went to the atelier of the academic cubist, André Lhote, but lasted only a day before moving on to the more formidable Fernand Léger.

"Léger," he said later to John Heilpern, "blew my little bourgeois mind."

In fact, he took Léger's revolutionary imperatives to heart and left his atelier within a few weeks.

"As with all father figures, we couldn't wait to reject him," Klein said.

Amazingly, given the tenor of what came later, Klein's initial artistic efforts used an abstract, hard-edged, flat, geometric language, influenced by Max Bill and other severe exemplars. He was conscious of being on the straight and narrow, aware that aspects of himself were not finding their way into this stringent optical framework. So began what he termed his "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" existence. He realised that figuration, expressiveness, all the forbidden things, could be admitted through the click of the camera shutter.

When Vogue's Alexander Liberman spotted his work and invited him to come to New York to shoot fashion pictures and anything else he had in mind, Klein jumped at the chance. His fashion photography is outstanding and innovative, but the main result of his New York sojourn was, famously, Life is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels, a book so unprecedented and so iconoclastically disturbing that no one in the States would touch it. Thanks to film-maker Chris Marker it was published in France, in 1956, to considerable acclaim. It inaugurated the photographic book. That is, it is not a book of photographs; the book itself, as a whole, is the work.

Partly inspired by the tabloid vitality of the New York Daily News, it is essentially Klein's edited photographic "journal" of his months in the city, which he has said many times he approached as an ethnographer documenting an alien culture. Not only did New York come across as a slum, as one potential publisher complained, but there is a rough, aggressive quality to Klein's technique, and to his images, that is still disconcerting, even though his influence has filtered widely into documentary reportage and art photography. He says he was technically indifferent, sometimes - though not often - shooting without even looking through the viewfinder, pushing every aspect of the process beyond its limits, bombarding the viewer as a city bombards its inhabitants with stimuli. He felt that "I was back [in New York] with a secret weapon - a camera. I thought New York had it coming, that it needed a kick in the balls".

Further books, on Rome (while waiting to work as a photographer for film director Federico Fellini), Moscow and Tokyo (at the invitation of a Japanese publisher), followed. In each case Klein's approach is simple and effective. As he described it in writing: "I photograph what I see in front of me, I move in close to see better and I use a wide-angle lens to get as much as possible in the frame."

He really does plunge right into the middle of the crowd and start shooting. He has a knack for capturing a sense of the way people in public spaces are still locked within their personal worlds. Apart from the accidental, composite dramas of street life, in which there are at least 10 different things going on in a single image, he seeks out communal events, demonstrations, parades, funerals, performances. The brutal closeness and distortion of the wide angle pulls us into the heart of the picture. As he says: "I photograph a marriage like a riot."

Jean-Luc Godard's 1972 Brechtian political satire Tout Va Bien dramatises the politicising of an expatriate American maker of advertising commercials. The character is based on Klein, who was not only politicised in the 1960s but, like Godard, is still substantially defined by the spirit of the time. The spirit, that is, of 1968, when the boundaries between art, film, politics, philosophy and even fashion seemed to melt in the brief, intense heat of revolutionary potential.

Klein started making films in 1958 and he has made more than 20 since. After his prolific burst of photographic books he virtually gave up still photography until the 1980s, when renewed interest in his work drew him back to it. His films encompass documentary and satirical fiction. They include Muhammad Ali: The Greatest; a film about Algeria with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver; a study of Little Richard; and a satirical broadside at American foreign policy in Vietnam, Mr Freedom, which followed on from his involvement in the collaborative Loin du Vietnam, featuring segments by Klein, Godard, Marker and other French New Wave directors. He also targeted the fashion industry.

His film work is more varied, amorphous and uneven than his photography, but it too is fiercely engaged, distinctive and influential. Like his photographs, many of his documentaries are feats of close, informal observation.

When it comes to satirical drama though, Klein can't resist battering the viewer over the head to make a point. He works from a positionof isolation, and he's swept away by his own passion and enthusiasm. Perhaps the limitations and discipline of photography suit him best. As he himself describes the process of taking a picture: "Luck directs. Things seem to fall into place by themselves."

Messiah will be screened in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin on April 13th at 8.30 p.m. William Klein discusses his work with Colm Tóibín in The Ark, Eustace Street, Temple Bar on April 13th at 6 p.m. Booking is essential. Contact Sandra Curran at 01-6772255