‘How I’d love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little in my chronic failure to take action’, writes Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet, a work that would qualify, in conventional terms at least, as unfinished. ‘But do my words ring in anyone else’s soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?’ When Pessoa died in 1935 these lines were found on one of hundreds of loose sheets of paper contained in a trunk in his Lisbon apartment. Pessoa never ordered or made selections from these fragments, though he had long intended to. They were eventually published almost fifty years after his death. Yet to read The Book of Disquiet is to realize that considering the work unfinished, or not in the form it should be, is to miss the point of this ‘factless autobiography’ and of Pessoa as an artist.
That Jean-Luc Godard planned to make an adaptation, to be titled The Film of Disquiet, seems entirely fitting, for Godard was another artist whose oeuvre does not separate neatly into the finished and unfinished. The details of the Pessoa project—it was conceived in 1994 as ‘a sort of song of gestures, the gestures of cinema’ and scheduled to be shot in Portugal—are among the many revelations in Michael Witt’s Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects. 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. Witt describes this as a ‘negative’ history, in which ‘the invisible work of project conception and development, meetings, planning, negotiations, deal-making and interpersonal human relations that lies behind unmade and abandoned ventures is as integral and significant a part of cinema history as the completed films’. Other film critics and scholars have also advocated such an approach. Witt cites a number of previous explorations of the world of ‘shadow’ or ‘phantom’ cinema, as well as the following proposal by Jean-Louis Comolli, from his Cinéma contre spectacle (2009): ‘A subterranean history, a negative history, needs to be written. A history of what was not possible, what was eliminated, could reveal the real dimension of what did take place. Shadows are a part of the picture.’
A ‘negative’ perspective promises fresh insights into the work of directors we think we know well, and into the changing conditions of filmmaking (and non-making). The concerns, motifs and stylistic traits that distinguish their completed works may not be as present in their non-corpus; likewise, the uncompleted projects may reveal preoccupations that are marginal, or missing entirely, from their finished work. This shift in emphasis—or expansion of attention—can enrich our portrait not only of an individual artist, but also of the time in which they worked. Most obviously, what a filmmaker was able to realize, and what they were not, may tell us what kinds of project—which subjects, forms, genres—could garner sufficient financial backing. In this sense, the ‘negative’ history of a filmmaker is also a prism onto an era, refracting the wider social, cultural and political circumstances that have shaped cinema. While Witt does not insist on this himself, he provides substantial social and historical context for us to consider.
For his experiment with the negative approach, Witt has chosen the filmmaker he knows best. A professor of cinema at Roehampton University, he has written extensively on Godard, including Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (2013), a study of the monumental Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) which emphasizes the importance of audiovisual history in his work. This built on Witt’s 2004 reconceptualization in nlr of Godard as a multimedia artist for whom cinema was only one medium, to be placed alongside video, sound composition, graphic art, text, photography and installation. This artistic range already makes the Godard corpus unusually large and varied. As Witt notes, Godard ‘worked ceaselessly’ and ‘the line between life and art, and between work-in-progress and finished artwork, was always blurred and often non-existent’.
Witt explains that he first became aware of the vast extent of Godard’s uncompleted works during his doctoral research into the 1970s collaborations with Anne-Marie Miéville. The filmography at the end of the book, listing films realized and unrealized, gives a sense of scale—Godard’s corpus takes up seven pages, the non-corpus twenty-three. Witt admits that his list of incomplete works is ‘inevitably provisional’ (itself likely to be incomplete) as ‘additional items will undoubtedly be discovered’. He compiled his non-corpus by consulting the vast material published on Godard, as well as some 250 interviews with the filmmaker and his collaborators. One prerequisite of a negative approach is clear criteria. What constitutes an unmade or abandoned project, as distinct from a passing idea, or something more accurately understood as the precursor to a completed work? Witt describes his method as follows:
To establish the non-corpus, I compiled a list of all the unrealized projects I came across, including comparatively fleeting ideas that Godard alluded to only once or twice. Over time this list grew to 380. It includes the many projects where he said ‘I’d love to make a film on . . .’, or ‘For a long time I wanted to make a film about . . .’, but not those—such as Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980) and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) and aids and Its Metaphors (1989)—that he suggested would make lovely films, but where he did not express any indication of wanting or intending to adapt them himself. I omitted too those films that were known under alternative working titles at some point during their production, but which were fundamentally the same project.
Witt’s primary sources were what he refers to as the avant-texte: a diverse range of preparatory materials including letters, photographs, notebooks, treatments, scripts and abandoned footage, as well as mundane items such as invoices and other financial documents through which the flow of Godard’s ideas can be traced. Explaining the appeal of his approach, Witt cites Diderot’s evocation of the relationship between sketches and finished paintings, and his advocacy of the former on the basis that they capture ‘the moment of the artist’s zeal, his pure verve’. He proceeds by dividing Godard’s unrealized works into five thematic categories—literature, cinema, theatre, television, politics and history—which compose the book’s six chapters. Each proceeds chronologically, tracing the evolution and abandonment or fizzling out of a vast range of projects, with extended attention paid to those Witt considers most salient. Some of this exploration is forensic, notably the ‘genetic studies’ of two completed works—Masculin féminin (1966) and the Voyage(s) en utopie exhibition held at the Pompidou in 2006—included to demonstrate how Godard’s completed works were ‘frequently the culmination of antecedent waves of organically evolving plans, propositions and approaches’.