Masculin Féminin

Masculin Féminin:

locations and quotations

Despite the claim in the credits that Masculin Féminin presents '15 precise facts', these do not correspond to the successive sequences of the film. Rather, it can be broken down into about 19 distinct sequences, separated or interrupted by intertitles and inserts (mainly street views).

This post is chiefly about the locations of the film, but at the end there are some quotations identified.

cafés

There are five café sequences, as well several inserts of cafés interiors and exteriors.

In the opening sequence Paul meets Madeleine at the Zoo café, place Edouard Renard, 12e, near the Porte Dorée. The name and the animal-themed décor relate to the nearby Zoo de Vincennes.

The film returns to this café an hour later, when Paul, Elisabeth and Madeleine have lunch there.

3 minutes

64 minutes

Paul meets Robert at the Bar Henri, 73 boulevard Sérurier, 19e, just south of the Porte du Pré Saint-Gervais. He proposes to Madeleine in the Tabac de la Porte Chaumont, 149 boulevard Sérurier, 19e.

11 minutes

33 minutes

Paul, Madeleine and Elisabeth have a drink at the bar near the entrance of La Locomotive, a discothèque at 80 boulevard de Clichy, 18e. This scene is preceded by a view of them dancing inside the club:

34 minutes

The other views of cafés are inserts. Two show Madeleine and Elisabeth in a café that is I think at 27 rue Fontaine:

The rest are observational inserts unrelated to the characters. I can't locate them exactly, but the last four all look like they're on the place de la République:

boulevard de Grenelle

Madeleine, Elisabeth and Catherine live in an apartment at 25 boulevard de Grenelle, overlooking the overhead métro. Views from the apartment onto and across the boulevard, as well as street level views, combine to make this the film's most distinctive location:

le métro aérien

In the last of the views above Paul is heading off-screen right towards the Bir-Hakeim métro station at the top of the boulevard de Grenelle. The next shot shows Paul there at night, emerging from a café and crossing towards the station. He is then on the métro with Robert, passing in front of Madeleine's apartment:

In this sequence we see Chantal Darget, Med Hondo and another actor in a scene taken from LeRoi Jones's play Dutchman (called in French Le Métro fantôme):

Hondo and Darget where playing these roles on stage at the time, at the Théâtre de Poche-Montparnasse, in a production directed by Darget's husband Antoine Bourseiller. Bourseiller appears later in the second Café Zoo scene, going over a play (Vauthier's Les Prodiges) with Brigitte Bardot. Yves Afonso, who plays the man who commits suicide near the entrance to the Locomotive discothèque, was also in Bourseiller's production of Le Métro fantôme.

Neuilly

The office of Godard's production company Anouchka Films was at 4 rue Edouard Nortier, in Neuilly-sur-Seine (the same premises as the film's main producer, Argos Films). Two scenes are filmed here. The first shows an American army car (a Ford Fairlane 500) park on the street. An American officer and the singer Françoise Hardy get out and go into the building. Robert paints 'Peace In Vietnam' on the side of the car as Paul distracts the driver:

24 minutes

The second shows a man take a can of petrol from a car and say goodbye to his wife before going to set himself on fire in front of the American Hospital in Neuilly:

92 minutes

The 2CV is parked in front of number 1 rue Edouard Nortier, opposite the company premises. The American Hospital is three blocks from here, on the boulevard Victor Hugo. I haven't found the wall in front of which Paul and Catherine are standing to know if it is actually between the rue Edouard Nortier and the boulevard Victor Hugo.

The apartment under construction that Paul buys with his inheritance and from which he falls to his death (as reported to the police by Catherine in the last sequence of the film) was in Neuilly.

the recording studio

The sequence following the second scene in Neuilly shows Paul and Catherine arriving at the studio where Madeleine is making a record. The implication is that the two locations are near each other, but the studio is in fact in Paris, about 2.5 kilometres away. These are the Decca premises at 30 rue Beaujon, 8e:

the magazine offices

According to Alain Bergala (Godard au travail p.299) the premises used were those of Daniel Filipacchi's company, which at the time was at 8 rue Marbeuf, 8e. Among Filipacchi's magazines were Mademoiselle âge tendre, Salut les copains and Pariscope, copies of which are seen in the film:

I haven't noticed any copies of Cahiers du cinéma in the film, though it was also, by this point, owned by Filipacchi. Other, non-Filipacchi-owned magazines are shown, including Formidable, Ciné-monde and Nous les garçons et les filles, the Communist Party's attempt to emulate Salut les copains:

the laundromat

This large modern laundromat is a major location still to be identified. It is not seen from the exterior and the interior bears no identifying marks:

Joshua Baldwin (many thanks Joshua) has alerted me to the interview with Philippe Labro reproduced in the booklet accompanying the Criterion edition of the film, where Labro says that the laundromat was next door to a café on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, not very far from the location of the cinema (see below).

the cinema

This is the Splendid Gaité at rue Larochelle, 14e, between the Théâtre de la Gaité-Montparnasse and the cimetière de Montparnasse. Various interior and exterior parts are shown, but not the façade:

The cinema has now gone. Here is its façade in Jacques Demy's L'Evénement le plus important... (1973):

quotations

The text of Paul's voiceover in the cinema sequence is adapted from Georges Perec's novel Les Choses (1965):

Near the end of the film, Paul's monologue about his work as a pollster is also adapted from Perec's novel:

The text Robert and Catherine read in the kitchen comes from an article published as 'Un ouvrier parle' in Les Temps modernes in 1965:

Some of the intertitles are quotations:

Paul Eluard, 'Comprenne qui voudra', in Le Rendez-vous allemand (1944)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'Le Cinéma et la Nouvelle Psychologie', in Sens et Non-Sens (1945)

Jan Kott, Shakespeare, notre contemporain (1965)

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (trans. F. Hugo)

The phrase above is from Jean Giraudoux's last play Pour Lucrèce, which the year before Godard had been planning to film. I don't know the source of the phrase below: