Jean Mitry

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Jean Mitry (1907-1988) is a film theorist, critic and filmmaker, co-founder of France's first film society and later of the Cinémathèque Française in 1938.

The first lecturer of film aesthetics in France, Mitry was one of intellectuals first responsible for, in the words of Dudley Andrews, "taking film studies out of the era of the film club and into that of the university". His definitive works are largely considered to be The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema and Semiotics and the Analysis of Film.

He is one of few major film theorists who have actually worked on the producing films. He has worked on three award-wining films: editing Alexandere Astruc's short "Le Rideau Cramoisie" (1953), filming and editing his own two films, "Pacific 231" (1949) and "Images pour Debussy" (1952).

This article previously falsely credited Histoires du Cinema to Mitry instead of Jean-Luc Godard. The author was most likely thinking of Henri Langlois who was set to deliver a series of lectures or speeches entitled Histoires du Cinema before his death at which point Godard took up the task eventually transforming the lectures into Histoire(s) du Cinema, an eight hour video