Reading with Jean-Luc Godard

By his own confession, Godard’s first ambition was to be a published author. He made films because he couldn’t write books; but then he filmed books. Be they pulp novels or philosophical tracts, classical dramas or political pamphlets, in the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard books are everywhere. Dialogue and narration are packed with quotations from his favourite reading, and the physical objects are there not just as background props but are constantly to the fore, in inserted close-ups of covers, in pans along packed bookshelves, in rooms stacked high with books.

His characters are constantly picking up books and reading from them. In Reading with Jean-Luc Godard, world experts on the most renowned living filmmaker pick up the books that have had the most impact on his films and read those books and films together, unpacking his library as a way to unpack his cinematic oeuvre.

Detailed essays on authors who have influenced Godard’s work as a whole (Aragon, Bergson, Duras, Faulkner, Malraux, Mao, Ramuz, Sartre) are complemented by briefer notices on particular texts, including his several adaptations of novels or plays, while the editor’s introduction analyses in depth the place of writing in Godard’s cinema. Reading with Jean-Luc Godard will not only be an invaluable tool for the study of Godard’s films: the volume aims to shed new light on the cinema’s long-standing, and ongoing, dialogue with the printed word.