So much ado, in New York’s cinema culture this year, about the revolutionary upheavals of 1968, and yet very little looks as prescient or as true as a trilogy of satirical films — cult items all — that were shot by onetime Vogue photographer William Klein in the decade between President Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War and the arrival of punk rock.

The latest installment in Criterion’s no-fuss Eclipse series of DVD 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, a native of New York, 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 fully appreciated his acidic photographic perspective.

Mr. Klein’s 1966 debut feature, “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 the French actor 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 in the confines of a 35 mm frame.

Three years later, Mr. Klein burst into color with “Mr. Freedom,” which, of course, would be nothing without its embellished palette of red, white, and blue. A ’60s-era forebear of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s mercilessly satirical “Team America: World Police,” 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, 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 feel of a piece with “Dr. Strangelove.” Yet, there are entire chunks of dialogue that could have been transcribed from one of President Bush’s spirited speeches on the necessity and virtue of the Iraq war.

Sparked less by the current events of the era and more by an extension of Mr. Klein’s ongoing critique of mass media, “The Model Couple” (1977) holds its own three decades later as a spoof of reality television and social engineering. Somewhere in the Parisian suburbs, 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 is analyzed by 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 are measured to determine further designs for living.

A little bit like Jean-Luc Godard’s anti-utopian “Alphaville,” crossed with Woody Allen’s future farce “Sleeper,” the film’s retro-futuristic tableau features the former’s Eddie Constantine in a hilarious cameo (as “Dr. Goldberg”), but offers no Orgasmatron for its subjects, who nonetheless enjoy sex 3.6 times a week. Ultimately, it’s not enough to steer Jean-Michel and Claudine away from an eventual mutiny, as they lay waste to their model apartment (which resembles a Design Within Reach showroom), and are subsequently taken hostage by a gang of faux terrorists.

If only the snooze-fest that is “Big Brother” and its voyeuristic variations were as lively. But then, “reality” has a hard time keeping up with Mr. Klein’s delirious fictions.