Jean Mitry

What: Read and discuss a portion from Jean Mitry’s The Film Image

When: Monday 23 Nov. 2015, 4:30-6:30pm

Where: Jarman Studio 7

Access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7WkAYBe7avrekhMNU5HUVdOZmc/view?ts=5639f60a

Jean Mitry is an often overlooked figure in the history of film theory. He was deeply imbedded in French film culture. He is credited as being a co-founder—along with Georges Franju and Henri Langlois—of the Cercle du cinéma film club, which would lead to the establishment of La Cinématheque française in 1938. Later, Mitry would become a major player in the institutionalization of film studies in France (and the world) and one of the first to teach university courses on film history and theory.

Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (1963) was published at a transitional time for film studies. More than just the introduction of film studies to university curriculums, the 1960s involved a paradigm shift in film theory towards semiotics—which in France was most notably influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure’s theories of semiology. Mitry’s book might be seen as a link between the classical film theorists Tsuch as Balazs and Arnheim and the film semioticians that would appear in the wake of Christian Metz’s writings. In this excerpt one can see aspects of Mitry’s attempt at a systematic theory of film aesthetics, with a focus on the psychology of the film experience and how one might understand film as a medium of symbolic expression (Jake Whritner 2015).