Jean Mitry was a French film theorist, critic and filmmaker, co-founder of France's first film society and later of the Cinémathèque Française in 1938.

The first lecturer of film aesthetics in France, Mitry was one of the first intellectuals responsible for, in the words of Dudley Andrew, "taking film studies out of the era of the film club and into that of the university".[citation needed] His definitive works are largely considered[according to whom?] to be The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema and Semiotics and the Analysis of Film.[citation needed]

Mitry was one of few major film theorists who actually worked with film production. He was editor of Alexandre Astruc's short film Le Rideau Cramoisi (1953) and director of two films of his own, Pacific 231 (1949) set to Arthur Honegger's music and Images pour Debussy (1952) set to the music of Claude Debussy.