Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects

A dazzling array of Godardian might-have-beens from the most meticulous and thoughtful of Godard scholars. * Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Critic, jonathanrosenbaum.net, USA *
A book does not begin or end, at most it pretends to”, said Mallarmé. This is the dizzying impression that Michael Witt gives us by revealing the vast panorama of “dark matter” surrounding Godard’s diverse completed works – an obscure network made up of all his planned, aborted, failed or unrealisable projects that were never entirely abandoned but lingered on and were carried forward or carved up in a continuous work-in-progress. What a job! ... The historian’s incredible investigative work (he combs through every possible interview, summarises collage scripts and their successive versions, and reconstructs the back-and-forth of the filmmaker’s creative process) not only brings to light the myriad echoes of the “non-corpus” in the completed works but also throws the doors to the Godardian factory wide open. -- Pierre Eugène * Cahiers du cinéma *
The book is a meticulous investigation of the Swiss–French director’s “non-corpus”, as well as an experiment in a different kind of cinema history. -- Emilie Bickerton * New Left Review *
I am a filmmaker, so for me a cinema book is only as good as the extent to which it gives me some ideas, gives me a bit of hope or shows me a way out of some confusion. Godard's films have the same role for me – they are always encouraging and inspiring since any of them opens something (despite what others say to the contrary), and this great book enables us to discover that the huge corpus of unmade films by JLG can have the same function. As a filmmaker almost always in a deep crisis, Jean-Luc Godard's Unmade and Abandoned Projects helped me a lot and still helps. * Radu Jude, Filmmaker *
Michael Witt has set a high bar for what it means to analyse a film director’s body of work, and to locate its hetroclite traces in order to do so. He has accomplished the Herculean task of covering ALL of Godard’s work of this kind, giving it order, showing us its logic, understanding the zigzag ways of Godard’s 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 Witt’s 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 *