Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abando
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Description
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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Towards a negative history of cinema
Godard on unmade, unfinished and abandoned films
The Godardian non-corpus
Aims and organisation of this book
Chapter 1: Literature
Godard's earliest unmade literary adaptations
Odile
Other unmade or abandoned adaptations of the late 1950s
The early 1960s
From Éva to L'Écrivain ('The writer')
Popular genre literature
Classics
From Guy de Maupassant and the Marquis de Sade to Masculin féminin
Unmade adaptations of the 1970s and 1980s
Animal films
The 1990s and beyond
Ramuz again: Les Signes parmi nous (fable) ('The signs among us (fable)')
Conclusion
Chapter 2: Cinema
Remakes
Un simple film
Film criticism and the desire for a new type of film journal
Jean-Pierre Beauviala, the Paluche, and the dream of a new 35mm camera
Collaborations with Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios
Voyons ce dont on parle ('Let's see what we're talking about')
Films on cinema history
Collages de France, Collèges de France, J-L Godard légende 2006, Never Godard…
Self-reflective projects
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Theatre
Godard's theatrical projects of the 1960s
Antoine Bourseiller and the theatrical adaptation of La Religieuse (Memoirs of a Nun)
Pour Lucrèce and Une répétition de Pour Lucrèce ('A rehearsal of Pour Lucrèce')
Theatre in La Chinoise
Approaches to King Lear
Bérénice revisited
The 1990s and 2000s
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Television
The 1960s
Televised sport
Adventures in television in Rouyn-Noranda
'Dreaming on paper': Moi Je
Birth (of the image) of a nation
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Politics
From France la douce ('Sweet France') to Masculin féminin and La Chinoise
The Vietnam War
The USA, Cuba and Cub(us)a
One American Movie
Communications and Un film français ('A French film')
Down with cinema!
Jusqu'à la victoire ('Until victory')
1970–1: Other projects
La Jeune Taupe ('The young mole')
Conclusion
Chapter 6: History
Adaptations of books by professional historians
The Ninth Symphony
Imagining France under Russian occupation
World War II: The White Rose and the killing of Anton Webern
A film about the Holocaust in the early 1960s
Jean-François Steiner and Treblinka
Le Tunnel
Pas un dîner de gala ('Not a gala dinner')
Le Silence de la terre ('The silence of the earth')
Projects with Marcel Ophuls
A further proposed collaboration with Bernard-Henri Lévy
The Kindly Ones and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Conclusion
Godard's Unmade and Abandoned Projects
Godard's Principal Completed Works
Notes
Filmography
Select Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 18 Sep 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 448 |
| ISBN | 9781350494602 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 30 bw illus |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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