Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects

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.