Jean Mitry: Film Structures
I. Preliminaries 1. Cinema before the arts 2. Cinema and creation 3. Cinema and language 4. Word and image II. The filmic image 5. The image itself 6. Structures of the image --Shots and angles --The frame and its determinations --Participation and identification 7. Aesthetic of the image

The “phi phenomenon”: perception and cognition of motion.

persistence of vision phi phenomenon indexical analogical

Double nature of the photographic image
V. Time, space, and the perceived real 13. Consciousness of the real VI. Dramatic time and space 14. Search for a dramaturgy 15. Foundations and form
Jean Mitry: film structures
Jean Mitry: Aesthetic and Psychology of Cinema
1. Film structures: essential core of traits that define all film experience. 2. Film forms: stylistic choices that determine different psychological variations of the basic film experience. 3. The expressive and symbolic capacities of film. 4. The elaboration of a set of critical standards. 5. Film theory in relation to aesthetic theory.


indexical in that it points to the prior existence of the represented thing or event; analogical in its recording process, which moulds itself spatially on represented thing or event. Resemblance by spatial doubling.

persistence of vision phi phenomenon
Jean Mitry: film structures

Double nature of the photographic image


Realism vs. formalism. Does film present a perceptual and psychological doubling of the world or a formal, aesthetic rendering of the world? "The basic nature of the image is to be an image of something" (30). The image is indexical and analogical.

The image as “psychological” sign: “a representation incorporating a body of stimuli perceived in a similar way to the perception of the thing itself….” (38).



Double nature of frame: both closed and open The montage effect
Jean Mitry: film structures

The “phi phenomenon”: perception and cognition of motion.
Jean Mitry: film structures

The image as analogon: the film image is a directed reality:
III. Rhythm and montage 8. The beginnings of montage 9. Rhythm in music and rhythm in prosody 10. Cinematographic rhythm
Jean Mitry: Film Forms
IV. Rhythm and mobile framings 11. Mobile camera [caméra libre] and depth of field --The principle of "nonmontage" and the global real --The mobile camera --Psychology of tracking shot --Depth of field --Cinemascope and Polyvision --Fascination and distanciation --The subjective camera --The semi-subjective image --Oblique images 12. Word and Sound