The blog Include Me Out informs us that the Barbican in London is showing William Klein’s 1958 short “Broadway at Night” as part of its current Pop Art Design exhibition, which runs through early February.

Klein’s mini-masterpiece, which clocks in a tidy 10 minutes, represents the cross-pollination of two admittedly related movements that took manufactured Americana as the starting point for a rethinking of aesthetic categories: Pop Art and La Nouvelle Vague. It’s difficult to imagine a major art movement today embracing corporate insignias in such a guileless manner. From today’s perspective it’s fascinating to see such artistic firepower elevating the likes of Sgt. Bilko, Little Lulu, and Mr. Peanut, all of whom can be glimpsed in “Broadway at Night.”

The movie has scant documentary value—girded by a moody, rambunctious, and percussive bebop score by Maurice Le Roux, it’s a formalist work first and foremost, finding beauty in the off-kilter patterns created by the pulsating light bulbs and other visual elements of the Great White Way. Naturally, this isn’t the Broadway of 2013, which isn’t half as charming.

The French opening scroll says something akin to the following:

Americans invented jazz to console death, the star to console woman.

To console the night, they invented Broadway.

Every evening, in the center of New York, an artificial sun rises.

Its purpose is to announce shows, to advertise products, and the inventors of these advertisements would be astounded to learn of the most fascinating spectacle, the most precious object is the street transformed by their signs.

This day has its inhabitants, its shadows, its mirages, its ceremonies.

It also has its sun…

“Console woman,” huh? Only a bunch of men could have written that, and a glance at the credits confirms—likewise revealing the participation of two future greats of the nouvelle vague movement, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. This movie must have had quite an impact in its day. Orson Welles said, rather grandly, that it was “the first film I’ve seen in which color was absolutely necessary.”

This is a movie that cries out for its individual frames to be converted into stills, so I offer a few of those below.
 

 

 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
And You Are There: Damon & Naomi’s collaboration with Chris Marker
William Klein’s Mister Freedom