Abstract
Drawing on archival research, Michael Witt provides an in-depth, evidence-based study of the unmade, unfinished and abandoned projects of the French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard from the late 1940s to the early 2020s. Witt characterises his approach to Godard’s ‘non-corpus’ as ‘negative’ cinema history, which he relates to studies of unfinished art, to Godard’s discourse on unproduced and uncompleted films, and to the emerging subfield within Film Studies that has been termed variously ‘shadow cinema’, ‘phantom cinema’ and ‘unproduction studies’. The surviving traces of Godard’s over 380 unmade and abandoned projects, which include books, plays, exhibitions, a film journal and a camera alongside film, video and television works, vary considerably in format and scale. Witt organises his discussion of the vast Godardian non-corpus under six thematic headings: literature, cinema, theatre, television, politics and history. Witt provides a detailed examination of Godard’s most significant unrealized projects relating to each of these core themes. Drawing on the tradition of genetic criticism, Witt’s approach serves to foreground Godard’s work as a producer, his creative process, the full range of his activities and interests, the largely invisible labour associated with the non-corpus, and the close interrelationship of his non-corpus and completed output. Witt concludes that Godard’s oeuvre is ultimately best thought of in terms of a perpetual process of metamorphosis and transformation, that his finished works were often the culmination of waves of antecedent projects, and that his unmade and abandoned ventures are no less important than his completed ones.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Place of Publication | London |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 18 Nov 2024 |