About
A blog about the best things in life. Football, music, clothes, film, real ale.
Nero fiddles while Gordon Burns.
Others
Casual Connoisseur
One-upmanship
Magnetic North
Llywarch
Young Wilson
Swine Magazine
Our Culture
SONS Records
Soft Water
Two Hundred Percent
Mine
Following
“The film production was an incredible ordeal, and famously involved moving a 320-ton steamship over a hill without the use of special effects. Herzog believed that no one had ever performed a similar feat in history, and likely never will again, calling himself “Conquistador of the Useless”.”
Phil Daniels and Pete Townshend during the filming of Quadrophenia.
Masculin, féminin - Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1966
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).
More than any other film of Godard’s greatest period Masculin, féminin is a time capsule of France and Paris in the 1960s, with references to everyone from Charles de Gaulle and André Malraux to James Bond and Bob Dylan, and — true to the Godard style — filled with jokes, puns and non-sequiturs, the story repeatedly interrupted by seemingly extraneous incidents: a woman blows away her husband; a scene paraphrased from LeRoi Jones’ Dutchman; Brigitte Bardot rehearsing the lines of a play in a bistro; a Swedish sex-cum-art-film-within-a-film, with Léaud stalking off just when things get hot on-screen — going outside to climb the external stairs that lead to the projectionist, where he delivers a lecture on aspect ratio; a pinball arcade where an armed thug gives Léaud a choice between life and death, and surprises the audience with a third alternative; spray-painting anti-war slogans on walls, and more.
The most famous quote from the film is actually an intertitle between chapters: “This film could be called The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola.”
(The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola)
