Jean-Luc Godard: Thinking film according to the history of cinema

What was cinema, and what will it be? The Swiss-French director Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) wrote the history of cinema in the medium itself like no other, for example in his monumental film essay Histoire(s) du cinema. At the same time, Godard ascribed to cinema a role of historical witness to the catastrophes of the 20th and 21st centuries, a responsibility that goes far beyond the horizon of a history of the art form of film. And finally, he was quick to ask himself what would come after cinema: what would happen to the history of art after this “invention without a future”, as Louis Lumière once called his own creation. At a moment in media history when film no longer appears only in the cinema, but in a wide variety of configurations, this volume takes Godard’s work as the starting point for a polyphonic reflection on the histories and futures of cinema. With contributions by Jacques Aumont, Raymond Bellour, Nicole Brenez, Georges Didi-Huberman, Lorenz Engell, Daniel Fairfax, Vinzenz Hediger, Rembert Hüser, Adrian Martin, Volker Pantenburg, Regine Prange, Martin Seel, Philip Ursprung, Michael Witt.