[Commlist] New book: Jean-Luc Godard's Unmade and Abandoned Projects

Michael Witt is pleased to announce that Bloomsbury have just published 
a much more affordable paperback edition of the recent book, /Jean-Luc 
Godard's Unmade and Abandoned Projects. /This paperback is now available 
in the UK, US and Canada and is due out in Australia on 29 October.

For those in the US, to coincide with the film season inspired by the 
book that Michael Witt has curated at L'Alliance in New York, which 
continues until 15 October, Bloomsbury are offering a 30% discount and 
free delivery. Just enter the promo code GODARD30 at checkout: 
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/jeanluc-godards-unmade-and-abandoned-projects-9781350644014/ 
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/jeanluc-godards-unmade-and-abandoned-projects-9781350644014/>
(Please note that this discount offer only works on Bloomsbury's US site.)

For details of the remaining screenings in the L'Alliance series, please 
see: https://lallianceny.org/event/jean-luc-godard-unmade-and-abandoned/ 
<https://lallianceny.org/event/jean-luc-godard-unmade-and-abandoned/>

Here are a few reviews and endorsements of the book so far:

'The appearance of Michael Witt's book /Jean-Luc Godard's Unmade and 
Abandoned Projects/ was undoubtedly the publishing event of the year in 
the field of cinema.' — Tsveta Dobreva and Cyril Neyrat, /Fidback: Revue 
de cinéma/, 2026

‘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

'It is difficult not to sound excessively complimentary about this book, 
nor to avoid gushing superlatives, but it is a truly remarkable 
achievement that manages to be erudite, exhaustive, crammed full with 
detail that reveals much about Godard and his working methods, but which 
is also rich in its explanation of the context for the conception and 
(non-)execution of Godard’s projects. ... While /Jean-Luc Godard’s 
Unmade and Abandoned Projects/ may appear to be a book for Godard 
completists, a study that may only make sense for those deeply familiar 
with his completed works, it in fact provides a wonderfully complex 
portrait of a filmmaker in his historical context, whose influence 
continues to be felt across a range of disciplines – film production and 
direction, film history, film criticism and film theory to name but a 
few. The study of Godard’s unmade and abandoned projects excavates the 
unseen work and in so doing deepens our understanding of the visible, 
completed audiovisual artefacts. In short, this highly readable book is 
an invaluable text for anyone interested in the life and work of 
Jean-Luc Godard.' — Paul Sutton, /Quarterly Review of Film and Video/, 
43/6, 2026

‘A dazzling array of Godardian might-have-beens from the most meticulous 
and thoughtful of Godard scholars.’ — Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Critic, USA

‘“A book does not begin or end, at most it pretends to”, said Mallarmé. 
This is the dizzying impression that Michael Witt gives us by revealing 
the vast panorama of “dark matter” surrounding Godard’s diverse 
completed works – an obscure network made up of all his planned, 
aborted, failed or unrealisable projects that were never entirely 
abandoned but lingered on and were carried forward or carved up in a 
continuous work-in-progress. What a job! …The historian’s incredible 
investigative work (he combs through every possible interview, 
summarises collage scripts and their successive versions, and 
reconstructs the back-and-forth of the filmmaker’s creative process) not 
only brings to light the myriad echoes of the “non-corpus” in the 
completed works but also throws the doors to the Godardian factory wide 
open.’ — Pierre Eugène, /Cahiers du cinéma/, March 2026

‘Michael Witt has set a high bar for what it means to analyze a 
film/media director’s body of work, and to locate its heteroclite 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.’ — Janet Bergstrom, Research Professor of Cinema 
and Media Studies, UCLA, USA

‘The book is a meticulous investigation of the Swiss–French director’s 
“non-corpus”, as well as an experiment in a different kind of cinema 
history.’ — Emilie Bickerton, /New Left Review, /January/February 2026

'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

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