Jean-Luc Godard's Unmade and Abandoned Projects

Add to my list

by Michael Witt

Type: Studies
Subject: Director > Jean-Luc Godard
Keywords: Jean-Luc Godard, unmade films
Publishing date: 2025 (December 11, 2025) (Upcoming)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 456 pages
6 ¾ x 9 ¾ inches (17 x 24.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-350-49459-6

User Ratings

(0 vote)

Average rating:

0	rating	= We can do without
0	rating	= Good book
0	rating	= Excellent book
0	rating	= Unique / a reference

Your rating: -

Book Presentation:
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.

About the Author:
Michael Witt is Professor of Cinema at the University of Roehampton, London, UK. He has published widely on French film history in journals such as Screen, Trafic and New Left Review and co-curated seasons of French experimental cinema, documentary, and the work of Jean-Luc Godard for institutions such as Tate Modern and BFI Southbank. He is the co-editor of For Ever Godard (2004), The French Cinema Book (2004; 2018) and Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (2006), and the author of Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (2013).

Press 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 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

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic

See the complete filmography of Jean-Luc Godard on the website: IMDB ...

> From the same author: