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.

Jean Mitry: Film StructuresI. Preliminaries

1. Cinema before the arts2. Cinema and creation3. Cinema and language4. Word and image

II. The filmic image5. The image itself6. Structures of the image

--Shots and angles--The frame and its

determinations

--Participation and identification

7. Aesthetic of the image

III. Rhythm and montage

8. The beginnings of montage

9. Rhythm in music and rhythm in prosody

10. Cinematographic rhythm

Jean Mitry: Film FormsIV. Rhythm and mobile framings 11. Mobile camera [caméra libre] and depth of field

--The principle of "non- montage" 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

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

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

Double nature of the photographic image indexical analogical

Double nature of frame: both closed and open The montage effect

Jean Mitry: film structures The “phi phenomenon”: perception and

cognition of motion. 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." The image is indexical and analogical.

indexical in that it points to the prior existence of the represented thing or event;

analogical in its recording process, which molds itself spatially on represented thing or event. Resemblance by spatial doubling.

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

Jean Mitry: film structures The image as analogon: the film image is a

directed reality: “. . . the image, though analogous with what it reveals, always adds something to what is revealed.”

The duality or conflict of existence and essence, between the represented object (immediate image) and its representation (imposition of form through framing or aesthetic choice).

The image is “transcendent” but only in the sense that it presents a more intensely perceived and signified reality.

Jean Mitry: film structures Double nature of the frame

Frame as enclosed self-sufficient space, or frame as partial fragment of essentially open and endless reality?

The frame presents "the fundamental condition of film form." It borders and constitutes an aesthetic world, dividing film from "reality."

The duality or dialectic between frame and image: the structure of film necessarily involves and presupposes two levels of composition:

dramatic composition (or "represented reality") organized in space (and also, of course, in time) and

aesthetic or plastic compositions, which organizes this space within the limits of the frame, regardless of the field of vision.”

Alternatively, it enables a temporal perception--the sense of frames succeeding one another in time, of an unfolding, open-ended aesthetic world.

Jean Mitry: film structures The montage-effect.

The symbolic meaning that a shot acquires in context, in a specific set of associations.

"A new power arises when we bring together two or more shots--they acquire a value which they would not have except in this association. Through montage the shot functions in the sequence as words function in the sentence--where the subject and verb and adjective find full meaning only in their interrelationships."

Jean Mitry: film structures

Jean Mitry: film structures

Jean Mitry: film structures Mitry contra Bazin: montage is not

simply an effect of editing. montage within the shot: deep focus montage through movement within the

frame montage through camera movement

Jean Mitry: subjective images

1. the purely mental image2. semi-subjective or associated

image 3. truly subjective or analytical

image4. the "imaginary" or fantasy

sequence5. image of memory (flashbacks)

Mitry’s theory of signification Transcendent or analogical sense (perception)

the immediate image the “transcendent” image

Aesthetic or “transpositional” sense (signification)

Framing Dialectic between frame and movement

Signification or symbolic sense (symbolization) “Image-making data” (compositional forms)

transform represented reality as “image-data” Representational form gives the represented object

its particularity; in this way the signifier can point to a signified or symbolic meaning.