Jean-Luc Godards Unmade and Abandoned Projects

(Hardback)

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This book offers the first study of the French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's vast body of over 380 unmade, unfinished and abandoned projects over the course of his career from the late 1940s to the 2020s. While Godard is widely recognised as one of the most important and influential filmmakers of the post-war period, extremely little has been written about his largely invisible and unknown corpus of unrealised works. This includes many unmade films, videos and television programmes alongside a wide range of unfinished non-audiovisual ventures such as plays, books, exhibitions, a CD, a camera, a film journal, and even an architectural maquette. Drawing on extensive research on the surviving traces of these projects in archives and private collections, Michael Witt's comprehensive survey establishes the extent and constitution of the Godardian corpus of unrealised and abandoned works for the first time and examines them in detail in six key perspectives: literature, cinema, theatre, television, politics and history. The volume includes in-depth case studies of numerous major unfinished initiatives by Godard and his collaborators in locations around the globe (France, the Middle East, the USA, Quebec, the People's Republic of Mozambique), charts the extensive connections between his abandoned projects and his completed works, casts in relief his creative process, and offers a fresh way of thinking about and approaching his practice and oeuvre as a whole. A full annotated list of his unrealised and abandoned projects is included as an appendix.

Reviews

A dazzling array of Godardian might-have-beens from the most meticulous and thoughtful of Godard scholars. * Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Critic, jonathanrosenbaum.net, USA *
Michael Witt has set a high bar for what it means to analyse a film directors body of work, and to locate its hetroclite traces in order to do so. He has accomplished the Herculean task of covering ALL of Godards work of this kind, giving it order, showing us its logic, understanding the zigzag ways of Godards thinking through ideas, sometimes, for decades. This is a book to come back to, and to treasure as an absolutely reliable resource. * Janet Bergstrom, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, UCLA, USA *
An astounding scholarly achievement. The depth and rigour of Witts primary research is breathtaking. Once again, Witt completely reconfigures the Godardian corpus, while making a significant contribution to media archaeology and to the study of orphaned, lost or forgotten cultural objects. * Michael Temple, Emeritus Professor, Birkbeck College, London, UK *

Author Bio

Michael Witt is Professor of Cinema at the University of Roehampton, UK. He is the author of Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (2013) and the co-editor of For Ever Godard (2004), The French Cinema Book (2nd edition; BFI/Bloomsbury, 2018), and Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (2006).