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.
By:
Michael Witt (University of Roehampton UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 246mm,
Width: 176mm,
Spine: 30mm
Weight: 1.080kg
ISBN: 9781350494596
ISBN 10: 1350494593
Pages: 512
Publication Date: 05 February 2026
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgements Part 1: Literature, Cinema, Television General Introduction 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 Maquis 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]’) 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 3. Television The 1960s Televised Sport Adventures in Television in Rouyn-Noranda ‘Dreaming on paper’: Moi Je (‘Me, I’) Birth (of the Image) of a Nation Part 2: Theatre, Politics, History General Introduction 4. Theatre Godard’s theatrical projects of the 1960s Antoine Bourseiller and the theatrical adaptation of La Religieuse (Memoirs of a Nun) Pour Lucrèce (Duel of Angels) and A Rehearsal of Pour Lucrèce Theatre in La Chinoise Approaches to King Lear Bérénice revisited The 1990s and 2000s 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’) 1970-71: Other Projects La Jeune Taupe (‘The young mole’) 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 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 List of Completed Works by Godard Annotated List of Godard’s Unmade, Unfinished or Abandoned Projects Bibliography Index
Michael Witt is Professor of Cinema at the University of Roehampton, UK. He is the author of Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (2013) and the co-editor of For Ever Godard (2004), The French Cinema Book (2nd edition; BFI/Bloomsbury, 2018), and Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (2006).
Reviews for Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects
A dazzling array of Godardian might-have-beens from the most meticulous and thoughtful of Godard scholars. * Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Critic, jonathanrosenbaum.net, USA * I am a filmmaker, so for me a cinema book is only as good as the extent to which it gives me some ideas, gives me a bit of hope or shows me a way out of some confusion. Godard's films have the same role for me – they are always encouraging and inspiring since any of them opens something (despite what others say to the contrary), and this great book enables us to discover that the huge corpus of unmade films by JLG can have the same function. As a filmmaker almost always in a deep crisis, Jean-Luc Godard's Unmade and Abandoned Projects helped me a lot and still helps. * Radu Jude, Filmmaker * 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 *
