Michael Witt is Professor of Cinema and Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (Indiana University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of For Ever Godard (Black Dog Publishing, 2004), The French Cinema Book (BFI, 2004), and Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2006). He recently contributed an introductory essay to the first publication in English of the lectures on cinema history that Godard delivered in Montreal in 1978: Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, edited and translated by Timothy Barnard (Caboose, 2014).
This article examines a little-known compilation film titled Sauve la vie (qui peut) that Jean-Luc Godard created in 1981 within the framework of a series of lectures on cinema history that he delivered in Rotterdam in 1980-1981. To make this compilation film he combined sections from his Sauve qui peut (la vie) with extracts from four other films. Based on archival research, the article considers the context for the screening, the film’s structure, Godard’s wider engagement with the filmmakers whose work he incorporated, the prints he used, my attempts to reconstruct the film, and its reception in 1981 and today.
