“From the point of view of images and sound alone, I think cinema is in better health than ever. People need it, above all in France where the population is getting younger. It’s young people who go to the movies, and they haven’t found their films, their television shows. They’ve found their music, but they haven’t really found the image that goes with it.”
- Jean Luc Godard
[Excerpted from an interview by Pierre Daix; Originally published in Les Lettres Françaises (June 1966)]
‘Masculin-Féminin’ is a 1966 black and white French film, with a running time of 103 minutes, directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
The film, stars French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as Paul, a romantic young idealist and literary lion-wannabe who chases budding pop star, Madeleine (Chantal Goya, a real life Yé-yé girl). Despite markedly different musical tastes and political leanings, the two soon become romantically involved and begin a ménage à quatre with Madeleine's two roommates, Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport) and Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert).
Ostensibly basing his film on two stories by Guy de Maupassant, Godard creates a strikingly honest portrait of youth and sex (in France, the movie was prohibited to persons under 18 — "the very audience it was meant for," Godard had griped — while the Berlin Film Festival named it the Year's best film for young people, 1966). The camera probes the young actors in a series of vérité-style interviews about love, love-making, and politics.
‘Masculin- féminin’ is a notable film within Godard's 60s period of filmmaking, and is considered by critics as representative of 1960s Frances and Paris. The film contains references to various pop culture icons and political figures around that time, such as Charles de Gaulle and André Malraux to James Bond and Bob Dylan, and follows Godard's non-linear filmmaking techniques and narratives.
The main story is, at times interrupted by various sequences and sub-plots, including a scene paraphrased from Le Roi Jones’ Dutchman.
Arguably the most famous quotation from the film is "This film could be called The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola", which is actually an intertitle between chapters.
Masculin-Féminin is perhaps not Jean-Luc Godard's most effective film, nor is it his most stylish, but it is '60s Godard. And while one generally prefers ‘Breathless’, ‘A Woman Is a Woman’, ‘Contempt’, ‘Alphaville’, ‘Two or Three Things I Know About Her’, and ‘Weekend’; Masculin-Féminin remains a compelling Godard essay on disaffected youth.
Godard's insights into the vagueness of youth: their inability to focus on much outside of themselves, their hopelessness and disillusionment, their sense of adventure. Moreover, Masculin-Féminin finds Godard at his most amicable period. Godard's social politics and ideals tend to become a turnoff as he progressed as a filmmaker (particularly in the '70s), so a fairly muted, more subtle Godard makes for a better introduction into the filmography of one of the finest European directors who has had a profound influence on American filmmakers from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino.
The Criterion Collection edition (DVD) of Masculin-Féminin further accentuates the appreciation of Godard, by featuring easier to read subtitles, interviews with Chantal Goya, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and cinematographer Willy Kurant, the original theatrical trailer, and booklet containing further essays and readings on Godard from many scholars.
In the Voice back in 2005, one comes across a startling article by J Hoberman. "Not since DW Griffith was knocking out a weekly two-reeler at the Biograph studio on 14th Street had there been anything to equal the 15-feature run that Jean-Luc Godard began with Breathless (1960) and ended, still accelerating, in the cataclysm of Weekend(1967)," J Hoberman observes. He further writes, "Directed by anyone else, Masculine Feminine - one of three movies that Godard made in his peak year, 1966 - would be a masterpiece. For the young JLG it's business as usual." Much of the summer of 2008 was spent by Film Scholars at large looking back at 1968, forty years on, and of course, the 60s in general. Accordingly, Film Forums ran series of Godard's 60s, and Masculin-feminine.
"Taking Masculin féminin as primarily a chronicle of the sixties, however, obscures the film's achievement, both as a work of art and as a personal testament," Adrian Martin advises us in a 2005 piece for Criterion. Martin further notes; "Aesthetically, Masculin féminin can easily seem like one of Godard's more casual efforts: a collection of fragments, notes, improvisations. Looked at closely, it coheres into a tight pattern that is surprisingly classical and balanced.... As in Vivre sa vie (1962 [tomorrow's feature!]), but more rigorously, Godard tries out all the available techniques (long takes versus extensive editing, static camera versus moving camera) as he experiments with different ways of rendering the verbal exchanges between his characters - demonstrating that truth can never be simply filmed in a singular, transparent way, while trying, all the same, to reach and express that truth through a mosaic or collage structure." In short, as film scholar Ed Gonzalez once put it, "Godard's satire of the children of Marx and Coca-Cola still resonates today."
We no longer think of adolescence as a transitional period, a time of crisis and change, but rather as a state of being in itself with its own custom and privileges. The critical period of development is now the transition from adolescence to adulthood; it is a time of life without a name, when the future finally becomes the present, and questions like those of profession and sexual style are seriously posed for the first time. In Masculine-Feminin, Godard compiles a natural history of this period.
Masculin-Féminin is both unmoved and felt – duality repeated in the double aspect of Godard’s reactions itself, which is a mixture of touched concerned and fascinated recoil.
In an interview of Godard’s, given to Pierre Daix and originally published in Les Lettres Françaises (June 1966); the master craftsman spills quite a few beans on his film Masculin-Féminin.
The following are a few excerpts from the interview post his Berlinale Award:
Q: Would you say Masculine Feminine is film about youth?
A: “No, it’s more a film on the idea of youth. A philosophical idea, but not a practical one – a way of reacting to things. It’s not adissertation on youth or even an analysis. Let’s say that it speaks of
youth, but it’s a piece of music, a “concerto youth.” I have taken young
signs, signs that have not yet been deformed. My signs haven’t already
been used a thousand times. I can talk about them now, afterward,
because when I made this film, I didn’t have the least idea of what I
wanted.”
Q: What’s most striking to was that this is a film not about youth, the way that films on the same subject by Carné or De Sica are; it’s a film with youth. A: “True. At the same time I chose young people because I no longer haveany idea where I am from the point of view of cinema. I am in search of
cinema. It seems to me that I have lost it. Talking with young people
was an easier way to find myself than talking with adults. I have the
impression that, if a person is young, he must give of himself, and he
does so willingly, without ulterior motives, and if he gives himself away,
he’s not unhappy. For me these were people who had not been
conditioned. Conditioned by their life, certainly, but not morally
conditioned. Even when they react badly, or when they don’t want to
come right out and say something, there’s a certain spontaneity, a certain innocence. I wanted to use cinema to speak of youth, or else I
wanted to use youth to speak of cinema.”
Q: You disturb the traditional relationship between the director and his actors. A: “I’m sure of one thing, that this is what cinema means to me, and thatthis is what it has never been; it went off track immediately. When
Lumiere first invented cinema, the last thing he had in mind was a
spectacle. One day a guy said to him, “Come show your gimmick in my
neighborhood and we’ll make people pay.” But Lumière was an artist,
not a showman. I know very well that cinema is a sort of industry, one
that’s got to make a profit and that’s part show business. But in my work there’s
always a part that’s not a show at all and yet it comes through quite nicely, like an
informal lecture, or a course at the Sorbonne, or a concert. The theater is pure show;
it’s magnificent. Cinema – a film by Jacques Demy or [Max Ophuls’] Lola Montes – can
be pure spectacle. Other films are both, and still others that have
absolutely nothing to do with this. They can be bad – that’s another
question entirely – but they’re searching for something.”
Godard’s movie is full of dualities, of ambivalence and opposition. But the terms of antitheses are as shifting as the loyalties of its characters, who are themselves described as the product of an extraordinary dialectic; “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” [Again, duality within duality: the attitude toward Coca-Cola – America – is represented in two slogans, “Paixpaix au Vietnam” and “You’re in the Pepsi generation.”]
The form of the film shifts back and forth between inclusive, open improvisation and considered, articulate design, to produce a rich and dense texture rare in films.
One of the main things Masculin-Féminin is about is the relation between public and private (again an antitheses). Young, urban, not rich, its characters have no choice but to live out their inner lives in public. To the awareness of being watched, Madeleine and Paul respond in exactly opposite ways.
One way is to become a performer, an exhibitionist. That is Madeleine’s response. The other way is to become paranoid, e.g. Paul interprets the situation of never being alone as threatening.
Similarly, we experience the violence in the movie as the characters do. It is in sight fleetingly (the first shooting, the self stabbing) or is just out of sight (the Metro shooting, the self-immolation). In fact, the most eruptive episodes are the very ones, which exist only peripherally for us, out at the edge of awareness. They do not exist more substantially for Paul and Madeleine and their friends, who are only momentarily or partially diverted. This continual suppression of violence by ignoring it, this “coolness”, amplifies its force until it seems to be potentially anywhere – we grow is paranoid as Paul. Again, Godard’s cinematic style is wordlessly eloquent.
One of Masculin-Féminin’s best-designed scenes in this regard is the one in which Paul and the girls go to the movies. All its elements cohere to offer us one of Godard’s most suggestive pictures of his characters. The scene is a masterpiece of thematic structuring: everything in it is absolutely relevant yet it is so subtly, and as if casually, wrought that we only realize later that how central a scene it is.
During this period of Godard’s career it becomes clear that he is a poet of the common place. He shows us what our heart and eyes touch on each day, but so viewed and with such speed that we are moved by it as if for the first time. First in the fables of “Alphaville”, “Pierre le fou”, then in the more direct essays of “Masculin-Féminin”, “Made in U.S.A” and “2 ou 3 choses”, we are presented with a rich collection of the objects sentiments and events of everyday life. This is a cold, icy poetry, balancing the fiery reason – the two poles of Godard’s Cinema.
The Movement of the 60’s did make one large advance over previous Leftist politics, in two relatively new areas of thought and action, which Godard was well equipped to deal with: sexual politics and the media. These are the themes of Masculin-Féminin.
Masculin-Féminin is a realist mirror image of the romantic “Pierre le fou”. Paul, like Ferdinand, is obsessed with a woman, but Paul has no thought of escape. The film is another story of betrayal, but now the dialectical nature of the argument between the feminine, active principle and the masculine, passive and contemplative principle is sharper. As always, the active for wins; the man is betrayed and destroyed. But before the logic works itself out in the plot, Godard has had a chance to capture a number of precise truths about the way men and women interact.
The long, tentative, shy conversations between Paul, Madeleine and Robert and Catherine (the first is nine and half minutes long, the second is eight minutes long) give us a Cinema-Verite analysis of sexual relationships, which are painfully forced.
The basic mode of dialogue in the film is the interview. Many questions are asked, but few are answered. The media culture continually acts to separate the characters from each other, and after a while we sense that Paul, who has had a job with a public opinion firm, has become just as much an outside as his mentor – Godard.
Yet, the objectivity of Masculin-Féminin is one of its greatest achievements. It captures the taste and smell of Paris in the winter of 1965, with such rich detail that it is one of the masterpieces of truth-cinema (Godard had said that since Marker and Rouch had done Paris in the Spring and Summer – in Chronique d`un ete and Le Joli Mai - he wanted to do it in the Winter.)
And it explicates with great sympathy and intelligence the dilemma of being young in the 60’s. The relationships that the film describes may be characteristically empty (and fatal), but Masculin-Féminin is still an optimistic film.
It is cooler and less anguished than its predecessors, and Paul is asking questions: the political landscape can be glimpsed on the horizon. Perhaps if and when, Paul/Godard can transcend the obsession with romantic love, there would be good work to be done and a community of workers to do it with.
There is a sense that the old movies and the life they described are dying and will be replaced by the new films of a new reality.
Masculin-Féminin is not that film either; Godard is perhaps still a stranger among the generation of Marx and Coca-Cola; but he is now definitely involved in the struggle for a new life and a new cinema.
N.B – This article has been condensed from the following references:
1. James Monaco, “The New Wave – Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette”; Oxford Univeristy Press (1976)
2. A critical anthology edited by: Toby Mussman: “Jean Luc Godard” – sub article: Scott Burton: The Film we secretly wanted to live: A study of Masculin-Féminin
3. Online Journals and Essays: www.mubi.com ; Masculin-Féminin finds Godard at his most amicable period by Fred Hong Joo Jung
Excerpts from an interview by Pierre Daix; Originally published in Les Lettres Françaises (June 1966)
