In February 1964, Muhammad Ali was in a period of transition. The magnificently brash boxer, then known as Cassius Clay, all of 22 years old, swept through the sport like a windstorm, beating Sonny Liston to become the heavyweight champion of the world. This marked the beginning of Ali (he changed his name shortly after the fight) as a true cultural icon. Photographer William Klein captured this transfiguration in the first section of his documentary “Muhammad Ali, The Greatest.”“I was practically the only one from the media in his camp,” Klein told the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum in an 1989 interview. “The white press was scared to death and hypnotized by the bad mother. To them, Cassius was the clown and didn’t have a chance. They were wrong.”Klein’s film is less interested in Ali’s fights than in what surrounds them. At the first match against Liston, in Miami, the camera hovers around the edges of the young boxer’s camp, talking to the hangers-on and associates. Ali is fresh-faced and vibrant but is always shot from a slight distance—Klein adopts the viewpoint of the excited observer. At the same time, the camerawork is always sprightly and chaotic, grabbing images of the rising star as if in a blur of movement. It’s a style Klein perfected in his best photographs, capturing action at crucial moments.In Boston for the second match against Liston (which would be rescheduled and eventually held in Maine), Klein spends a considerable amount of time with young African-American kids in the street mimicking Ali’s moves and with drama students whose exercises resemble the boxer’s back and forth with the press and fans. He throws his camera in the face of Malcolm X, with whom Ali was close at the time. (He broke away later, becoming more tightly associated with the Nation of Islam; four months before the rescheduled rematch against Liston, Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City.)The second part of Klein’s film was shot almost a decade later, in 1974, the year of the match between Ali and George Foreman that became known as “the Rumble in the Jungle,” held in Zaire. What happened between the two sections is extremely important: In 1967, because of his refusal to serve in the Vietnam War, Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title and suspended from boxing for three and a half years. The Zaire match was part of his comeback. At 32 years old he was considered the underdog against the younger and stronger Foreman, who had defeated Joe Frazier for the heavyweight title. Organized by the promoter Don King, the fight was accompanied by a three-day music festival headlined by James Brown, and swarms of press following Ali’s every move. Klein’s camera is right in the center, but the atmosphere has changed: Ali is older, and it shows. His verbal jabs are more scripted, more of a performance. He understood the power the media wielded through images both still and moving, and he understood how to exploit this power. Ali had more great photographers and filmmakers document his work and life than any other major sports figure.Again, Klein is not content to just follow Ali around Zaire (most likely, he also had less access than earlier). As before, he takes his camera out into the crowds, the people in the streets cheering for Ali. There is even an appearance by Zaire’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, eager for the publicity the event would bring his country (while, apparently, keeping prisoners locked up under the stadium, hidden from view). Norman Mailer and other members of the press are seen in the background, waiting in the heat for the bout to begin.The event would end in victory for Ali. His defeat of Foreman is legendary, one of the most stunning comebacks in the history of boxing. “When We Were Kings” (1996) presents a standard talking-head account of the event. Klein’s film, in contrast, barely shows the fight. But in the way it bobs and weaves through its various sections, the way the staccato edits punch right at the screen, its rope-a-dope progression, it captures the spirit of the fighter, his constant movement, the energy and excitement, which sadly are no more.William Klein’s “Muhammad Ali, The Greatest” will screen at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on June 19.
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