The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema

Front Cover
Indiana University Press, 1997 - Performing Arts - 403 pages

[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.

 

Contents

Cinema and Creation
4
Cinema and Language
13
THE FILM IMAGE
28
RHYTHM AND MONTAGE
89
RHYTHM AND MOVING SHOTS
168
TIME AND SPACE OF THE DRAMA
276
NOTES
381
INDEX
389
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1997)

Jean Mitry (1907-1988) was Professor of History of Aesthetics and Semiology of Film at Paris I University. The author of numerous works on cinema and the history of cinema, he is best known for Histoire du cinema: art et industrie, Dictionnaire du cinema, and Le cinema experimental: histoire et perspectives. Christopher King is the director of many TV series and plays for both BBCTV and ITV networks in the U.K.

Bibliographic information