Mitry, Jean

(1907-1988)

   Actor, director, and film historian. Jean Mitry was attracted to a career in cinema out of a sheer love of the medium. As a young man, he had attended ciné-clubs, and in 1928, he worked as an assistant director to Pierre Chenal. Mitry went on to direct. His films include Pacific 231 (1949) and Énigme aux Folies-Bergère (1959). He also went on to try his hand at acting, appearing in Jean Renoir's La Nuit du carrefour (1932), and at screen-writing, writing the dialogue for Pierre Weill's Trois dans un moulin (1936).

   Ultimately Mitry would decide that sharing his passion for the cinema was his calling. He became a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) when it was founded in 1945. He also cofounded the Cinémathèque Française with Henri Langlois and Georges Franju. Perhaps Mitry's most important contribution to film, however, is his enormous film history, titled Filmographie universelle. He also published a theoretical work on the cinema, titled Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma. Mitry died in 1988.

   Historical Dictionary of French Cinema by Dayna Oscherwitz & Mary Ellen Higgins