The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema

[Jean Mitry] is the Aristotle of film." --R.D. MacCann

This text marks a watershed in film theory. Mitry sums up the first fifty years of theoretical writings on the cinema..." --Richard Abel

The rediscovery of Mitry could change the parameters of film teaching, breaking down the boundaries between the real and the formal, forcing us to see how they are inexorably fused together." --Leo Charney

Christian Metz wrote that with this work, an entire era of film...
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[Jean Mitry] is the Aristotle of film." --R.D. MacCann

This text marks a watershed in film theory. Mitry sums up the first fifty years of theoretical writings on the cinema..." --Richard Abel

The rediscovery of Mitry could change the parameters of film teaching, breaking down the boundaries between the real and the formal, forcing us to see how they are inexorably fused together." --Leo Charney

Christian Metz wrote that with this work, an entire era of film literature ends. Perhaps because it was so imposing, people like Metz turned in different directions--semiotics, structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and so on." --Charles Maland

Jean Mitry's Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema presents a formalist, phenomenological approach to the aesthetics of cinema. It provides a historically interesting basis for a full-blown auteurist aesthetics, which continues to form the basis for a great deal of thinking about film. Mitry's book is also the basis out of which the semiotics of Christian Metz and others flourished in the late 1960's. It supplies the missing link between the classical film theorists like Balacz and Munsterberg and the film semioticians like Metz, who came later. Mitry is the apotheosis and grand summation of the psychological and formalist views of film. This one-volume condensation of the classic work concentrates purely on film matter. In it, Mitry discusses such topics as the film image, rhythm and montage, rhythm and moving shots, and time and space of the drama.