Silences of the sea

John Wyver writes: To the ICA on Saturday last for another fascinating programme in Michael Witt’s Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned series. This has been a revelatory season, shown more or less monthly, of films by Godard and others that, as Witt claims, ‘sheds light on the huge and varied phantom body of unmade and abandoned ventures that lies behind or in the intervals in his completed oeuvre.’ The screenings have been spun off from Michael Witt’s essential book Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects, published by Bloomsbury, and now with a comparatively affordable paperback promised for September. Each line-up has been full of rare treasures, and Saturday’s quartet of films loosely themed as ‘History’ was as rich as the other showings that I have been able to get to. At the heart of the screening was JLG’s 2004 Notre Musique, a film that I continue to find both engrossing and mystifying. Structured in three distinct acts, with an opaque central narrative, it is about…