Hailed as a leading innovator of visual montage, unique storytelling style, and ground-breaking cinematography, Jean-Luc Godard is a prominent pioneer in sculpting complex soundtracks altering the familiar relationship between sound and image, but his achievements in sound have been largelyoverlooked. Such a lacuna in the extensive research on Godard's work is unfortunate, as Godard's lifelong preoccupation of exploring self-reflexively all aspects of filmmaking particularly affects film music. With the novel approach of metafilm music, extrapolated from Jean-Luc Godard's oeuvre, thisbook not only closes up a crucial gap in Godard research, but also offers detailed analyses of the music as metafilm music in Contempt, Alphaville, Band of Outsiders, Pierrot le fou, First Name: Carmen, Histoire(s) du cinéma, among other films and video productions. The innovative scholarly conceptof metafilm music, enriching the burgeoning field of music in audio-visual media, describes how Godard thinks about film music with film music. This book thus provides a thorough examination of Godard's self-reflexive approach to film music which has resulted in a lifelong creation of multi-layeredsoundtracks pushing the envelope of film music and sound to the limit.About the Author: Michael Baumgartner teaches at Cleveland State University. His research focuses on music in relation to cinema, theater, and visual arts, music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the exploration of the narrative capacity of music. He is the author of the monograph Exilierte Göttinnen: Frauenstatuen im Bühnenwerk von Kurt Weill, Thea Musgrave und Othmar Schoeck (2012) and the co-editor of the three anthologies Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War; Music, Ideology, Commerce, and Popular Cinema in Europe: 1940s to 1980s; andMusic, Process, Narration, and Art Cinema in Europe: 1940s to 1980s (2020-22).