So much ado about the revolutionary upheavals of 1968 in New York cinema culture this year, and yet very little looks as prescient as this trilogy of satirical films, cult items all, shot by onetime Vogue photographer William Klein in the decade between LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War and the arrival of the Sex Pistols.

The latest installment in Criterion’s no-fuss Eclipse series of boxed-set obscurities, “The Delirious Fictions of William Klein” more than lives up to its title: these Pop Art escapades erupt with laughing-gas absurdity. Mr. Klein, now 80, made these movies as an American expatriate living in Paris, launching himself as a filmmaker in part, it seems, to reject the artifice and commodification of the fashion industry, whose gatekeepers never quite appreciated his acidic perspective.

Mr. Klein’s 1966 debut feature, the “Who Are You Polly Maggoo?” makes this contrast wildly explicit. During an opening sequence, impossibly slender models are fitted for outrageous aluminum costumes that resemble drain pipes, and one human mannequin gets a severe gash on her arm. The fractured fairy tale follows Polly (Dorothy MacGowan) through her adventures as a supermodel in Paris, obsessively desired by Sami Frey as “Prince Igor.” Shot in richly luminous black-and-white, “Polly” compels as a catalog of Mr. Klein’s compositional verve, whether he’s organizing striped patterns on a wall, or orchestrating a crowded roomful of faces into the confines of a 35mm frame.

Three years later, Mr. Klein burst into color with “Mr. Freedom,” which, of course, would be nothing without its in-your-face palette of red, white and blue. The “Team America” of its day, this live-action cartoon follows the campaign of its eponymous superhero (John Abbey), a square-jawed operative of the shadowy Freedom Inc., to liberate France from the ravages of communist infiltration – not to mention random Black Panthers and subversive Jewish intellectuals. Worshipped by his consort/Gal Friday Marie Madeleine (Delphine Seyrig in a frizzy red wig and cleavage-baring maillot), he lays it on the line like a jingoistic Mike Hammer:

 “Listen, baby! There’s us and there’s them. We are Freedom. The real America! They are Red-ass, black-ass, Jew-ass farts who can’t even spell America … You want to know what America is? I’ll tell ya. What we got, we keep. We fought for it and we’re not giving it to nobody.”

As Mr. Freedom strides toward destiny, variously garbed as a crypto-Texan in a white cowboy hat and an avenging angel in a red football helmet and shoulder pads, he confronts mortal enemies Moujik Man (Philippe Noiret) and the Maoist threat (a version of a Chinese New Year parade dragon), enforcing his message of freedom with gunfire and cowboy rhetoric. In a parallel universe, “Mr. Freedom” could be viewed as an extraordinarily colorful artifact of its times. Mr. Klein’s brilliant set design anticipates Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” even as his bile-black comic tone and military-industrial paranoia feels of a piece with “Dr. Strangelove.” Yet, there are entire chunks of dialogue that could have been transcribed from one of President Bush’s many gung-ho speeches on the necessity and virtue of the Iraq War. And let’s not even get started with “freedom fries.”

Sparked less by current events and more an extension of Mr. Klein’s ongoing critique of mass media, “The Model Couple” (1977) holds it own three decades later as a spoof of reality television and social engineering. Somewhere in the Parisian suburbs, the young lovers Jean-Michel (André Dussollier) and Claudine (Anémone) consign themselves as lab rats, and are introduced to a scientifically designed apartment where their every thought and tremor are analyzed under 24-hour-a-day video surveillance. Under the guidance of the Ministry of the Future, the Model Couple’s domestic life is broadcast to the nation, and their emotional fluctuations measured to determine further designs for living.

Originally published in the New York Sun. Delirious Fictions is out now on Criterion Eclipse.