Jean-Luc Godard, Intertextuality, and Digital Remix Culture

This chapter explores the transformative impact of digital technology on Jean-Luc Godard’s approach to intertextuality and historical research in his late essayistic works. Through textual analysis of Film Socialisme and The Image Book, I argue that Godard employs digital editing strategies enabled by digital archiving and editing technology not only to materially quote and rework existing audio-visual materials, but also to critically reflect on the nature of spectatorship in the new media age. By altering aspect ratios, experimenting with colour schemes, adjusting brightness levels, and playing with temporality, Godard transforms his citations, rendering them qualitatively different from their original forms, therefore foregrounding the ontological and material characteristics of digital media. Examining the thematic and aesthetic treatment of media difference and mutation in Godard’s late work, I show that these cinematic essays engage with the formal possibilities afforded by digital technology and, in doing so, self-reflexively address many issues central to digital culture, including the democratisation of the archive, new methods of conducting historical research, and the nature of intellectual ownership.