Seeing from scratch: fifteen lessons with Godard, with the postcard game

Abstract

Study of Film Museums is shorter than the standard length for scholarly monographs. It could easily cover more. Whilst reading the text, I frequently found myself needing to go check online for additional information. This may on the one hand be a shortcoming as the details could have been in the book. But on the other hand, it could also be interpreted as a factor that confirms the book as sufficiently interesting to prompt further investigation. I give it the benefit of the doubt: it is a useful study that I wholeheartedly recommend. As a final aside, though, I do notice in this book a trend in the publishing of scholarly monographs that I have also noticed in recently published texts: no longer is there a bibliography at the end of the book. Rather, there are separate bibliographies at the end of each chapter. Besides the often-unnecessary repetitions, this practice is in breach of the style manuals’ standards for presenting scholarly monographs. Yet, it seems this is the new standard that profit-craving publishers impose: a sustained longer piece of writing is cut into manageable and ‘sellable’ chunks. As publishers ‘rule,’ this new standard will prevail. But it also spells out the end of the coherent treatise as an intellectual project.