Michael Witt

Michael Witt is Professor of Cinema.

He is the author of Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), which won the 2014 Limina Award for Best International Film Studies Book.

He is also the co-editor of For Ever Godard (Black Dog Publishing, 2004), The French Cinema Book (BFI Publishing, 2004; 2nd edition BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2006), which was the official catalogue of Godard's major exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in 2006: Voyage(s) en utopie, JLG, 1946-2006, à la recherche d'un théorème perdu.

In addition to his publications on Godard, Michael has written widely on French cinema history, film technology and documentary. His work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese. He also has a longstanding interest in curation, and has curated large-scale film seasons for cultural institutions such as Tate Modern and BFI Southbank.

In 2024, Michael published a book in French based on a three-hour interview he conducted with Jean-Luc Godard in his studio in Rolle, Switzerland, in April 2005: Michael Witt, Notre musique, c'est celle de tout le monde: Entretien avec Jean-Luc Godard (Bordeaux: 202 Éditions, 2024). In this book, Godard discusses in depth his 2004 Sarajevo-set film, Notre musique (Our Music), and those who played a key role in it (Elias Sanbar, Juan Goytisolo, Mahmoud Darwish). He also addresses a wide range of other topics, including the French New Wave, his 1976 film Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, co-dir Anne-Marie Miéville), his montage practice, digital technology, suicide, and the large-scale exhibition project he was working on at the time, Collage(s) de France (which later became Voyage(s) en utopie).

Michael's other recent publications include:

'Unfinished Business: Godard, Cinema and Theatre in the 1960s', in James Fenwick, Kieran Foster and David Eldridge (eds.), Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 73-89.

'Unearthing a Forgotten Television Work by Jean-Luc Godard', Senses of Cinema, No.95, July 2020. This article is available in French translation in Trafic, No.117, Spring 2021, pp. 78-92; and in German translation in Vinzenz Hediger and Rembert Hüser (eds.), Film denken nach der Geschichte des Kinos (Paderborn: Brill Fink, 2023), pp. 139-159.

BA Hons (University of Bath), PhD (University of Bath)

Michael's principal research interests lie in the fields of French cinema, cinema history, avant-garde and experimental cinema, film theory and philosophy, found footage filmmaking, audiovisual history and criticism, documentary, essay films and video essays, and the work of Jean-Luc Godard. 

He welcomes enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in pursuing research in any of these fields.

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
• British Film Institute
• British Universities Film & Video Council
• Association Française de Recherche sur l'Histoire du Cinéma (AFRHC)
• British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS)
• Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA)

Journal Editorial Boards:

• French Screen Studies (Editorial Board)
• La Furia Umana (Comité d’honneur)
• Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media (Advisory Board)
• Comparative Cinema (Advisory Board)