Book on Jean-Luc Godard for Reaktion

The aim of this project is to write for Reaktion Books a synthetic, original and accessible study of Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most important artists of the second half of the twentieth century.
The book will present a new understanding of Godard as a multimedia artist rather than as a filmmaker. I will demonstrate that alongside his well-known feature films, Godard's work in video, television, the spoken and written word, graphic art, collage, sound composition, acting and performance together form the 'invisible majority' of his artistic corpus that film critics and scholars have generally ignored or misrepresented. By reconfiguring the basic understanding of what constitutes Godard's oeuvre, my book will make possible new critical perspectives and methodological approaches, and that will be an important step forward in itself.
The second major proposition that I wish to make is that once the corpus has been reconfigured in this way, it then becomes possible to approach Godard's career from a fresh angle that would focus less on the textual interpretation of individual films and more on the artist's working practices and methods, as well as his collaborations with key individuals, groups and institutions. For me it is these complex interpersonal working relationships that form the real dynamic centre of Godard's creative work, of which the individual 'works' (film, text, picture, action) are in fact no more than provisional material traces of an ongoing experiment.
The book is organized into an introduction and seven chapters, each of which identifies a 'mode of operation' or working method in Godard's career: CRITIC, INVENTOR, ESSAYIST, ACTIVIST, PERFORMER, PERSONALITY, and HISTORIAN. Although these modes of operation are constant throughout the whole work, I present them chronologically for the sake of clarity of exposition, starting with Godard the critic in the 1950s and finishing with Godard the historian in the present day.
My hope is that this book's accessible format and polemical style will engage a broad readership and enable a genuine, well-informed debate about one of the most famous unknown artists of our time.