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ix A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S Writing this book has been a very long road. I began it as a childless Albertan; I finish it as a Nova Scotian father of two school-age boys. It began with the support of James Naremore and Joan Catapano, and I have remained grateful for that throughout this process. It was brought to fruition by Lisa Quinn, WLU’s indomitable editor, and I am also grateful for the faith and confidence she has always shown. That process unfolded in the context of very supportive colleagues at several institutions. At the University of Alberta, I am especially grateful to my compadres in Film Studies: Bill Beard, Liz Czach, and Elena del Río. In Halifax, I am in the perpetual debt of Sol Nagler and Darrell Varga (both of NSCAD University) and Jen VanderBurgh (Saint Mary’s University), and I am proud of the little cine-critical fleet that we are assembling together. At Dalhousie, I have been supported by the Canada Research Chairs program, and I am very happy to acknowledge their role in this. A number of undergraduates have helped here, and I thank them. When I was at the University of Alberta, I drew on the support of David Burke, Olivier Creurer, Conor Morris, Celia Nicholls (now studying at the University of Warwick), and Kate Rennebohm (now studying at Harvard University). At Dalhousie University, I am grateful to Emily Macrae (a student at the University of King’s College). All of them, it is worth noting, are also alumni of the Telluride Film Festival’s Student Symposium. Marcy Goldberg (Universität Zürich) was very supportive of this project early on, and I always think of her as my most trusted “Swiss connection.” I am certainly grateful to her for giving me permission to reprint her translation of an interview with Anne-Marie Miéville. On that front, thanks also to Danièle Hibon (Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume) and Janine Euvrard (24 Images’s Paris correspondent) for permissions to reprint. D. B. Jones (Drexel University) and Marsh Murphy (Metro Cinema Society) were the first colleagues to read bits of this, and they gave me good support and, just as important, skeptical criticism. I am also grateful for feedback and advice from Jonathan Rosenbaum. x Acknowledgements On the matter of seeing material, not always an easy task with these two, I have numerous debts. Denis Lacroix (University of Alberta) was a great help in acquiring copies of the television material; he is a real librarian’s librarian and a very good teacher, and I miss his wise counsel a lot. That is also true of Pierre Véronneau (Cinémathèque Québécoise), who helped out with some of the darker corners of the 1980s. Oksana Dykyj (Concordia University) is the keeper of the records of Godard’s time in Montreal, and I thank her for her help. Douglas Morrey (University of Warwick) provided an indispensible and totally fascinating DVD for me at a crucial juncture, and I am very grateful indeed. I owe a great deal to Tom Luddy. For my purposes here, I will just thank him for talking to me about his time working with Godard and for clarifying some of my thoughts about Godard’s use of video. And I will also say that over the past few years I have developed a new test for starting a research project, which I hereby dub “the Luddy Litmus”: if it turns out that Tom has played some key role in making this part of world cinema more widely known and understood, then I know that it constitutes a project worth pursuing. Sasha and Bubba have improved my French a lot; they have also improved my life immeasurably in every imaginable way. And Sara Daniels, as always, deserves the biggest thanks of all. ...

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