Film theorist

Dziga (Dzyga) Vertov (, ) January 2, 1896–February 12, 1954) was a Russia pioneer documentary film and newsreel director. His brothers Boris Kaufman and Mikhail Kaufman were also notable filmmakers. Born Denis Abelevich Kaufman into a family of Jew intellectuals in...

François Roland Truffaut (French ; February 6, 1932 – October 21, 1984) was one of the founders of the French New Wave in filmmaking, and remains an icon of the French film industry. In a film career lasting just over a quarter of a century, he was screenwriter,...

Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (; January 23, 1898 – February 11, 1948) was a revolutionary Soviet Russian film director and film theorist noted in particular for his silent film Strike, Battleship Potemkin and October, as well as historical epics Alexander Nevsky and...

Hans Richter (April 6, 1888 – February 1, 1976) was a painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, film-experimenter and producer. He was born in Berlin in a well-to-do and died in Minusio, near Locarno, Switzerland. Richter's first contacts with modern art were in 1912...

Andrew Sarris, born on October 31, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, is a U.S. film critic and a leading proponent of the auteur theory of criticism. He is generally credited with popularising this theory in the Americas and coining the half-English, half...

Jean-Luc Godard (French ) (born 3 December, 1930) is a French and Swiss filmmaker and one of the most influential members of the Nouvelle Vague, or "French New Wave". Born to Franco-Swiss parents in Paris, he was educated in Nyon, Switzerland, later studying at the...

Kaja Silverman is an American film theorist and art historian. She received a Ph.D. in English from Brown University. She taught at Yale University, Trinity College, Simon Fraser University, Brown University, and the University of Rochester before joining the Rhetoric...

Claude Chabrol ( in French) (born June 24, 1930, Paris) is a French film director and has become well-known since his first film, Le Beau Serge (1958) for his chilling tales of murder, including Le Boucher (1970). He is credited with starting the nouvelle vague French...

Slavoj Žižek (born 21 March 1949) is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic. He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at...

Maya Deren (April 29, 1917, Kiev – October 13, 1961, New York City), born Eleanora Derenkowsky, was an American avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist of the 1940 and 1950. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, poet, writer and photographer. Deren was born in Kiev...

Stan Brakhage (January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003) was an American non-narrative filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the most important experimental film of the 20th century. He worked with various kinds of celluloid: 16mm, 8mm, 35mm, and IMAX, and was a practitioner of...

André Bazin (April 18, 1918 – November 11, 1958) was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist. Bazin was born in Angers, France, in 1918. He started to write about film in 1943 and was a co-founder of the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951...

Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian-born author and Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her doctorate in Modern Languages and Literatures from Bocconi University in Milan before coming to the United States....

Siegfried Kracauer (February 8, 1889, Frankfurt am Main–November 26, 1966, New York) was aGerman writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist. Born to a Jew family in Frankfurt, Kracauer studied architecture from 1907 to 1913, eventually...

Christian Metz (1931-1993) was a French film theorist, best known for pioneering the application of Ferdinand de Saussure's theories of semiotics to film. During the 1970s, his work had a major impact on film theory in France, Britain and the United States. In Film...

Rudolf Arnheim (July 15, 1904 – June 9, 2007) was a German-born author, art and film theorist and perceptual psychologist. He himself said that his major books are Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954), Visual Thinking (1969), and The Power...

Jacques Rivette (born March 1, 1928) is a French film director. With Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette is considered to be the most experimental of the French New Wave directors. Like Godard, he had a background in film criticism, but he also loved popular American...

Béla Balázs (4 August 1884, Szeged – 17 May 1949, Budapest), born Herbert Bauer, was a Hungarian-Jew film critic, aesthete, writer and poet. He was the son of German-born parents, adopting his nom de plume in newspaper articles written before his 1902 move to...

Laura Mulvey (born August 15, 1941) was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position. ...

Éric Rohmer (born Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer, April 4, 1920, Tulle, France) is a French film director and screenwriter. He is regarded as a key figure in the post-war New Wave cinema and is a former editor of influential French film journal Cahiers du cinéma. ...

Claire Johnston (1940-1987) was a feminist film theoretician. She wrote seminal essays on the construction of ideology in mainstream cinema (Hollywood and European auteur cinema).

Dai Jinhua (1959) is Chinese feminist film critic. She teaches at Peking University as well as in the United States.

Robert McKee is a creative writing instructor who is widely known for his popular "Story Seminar", which he developed when he was a professor at the University of Southern California. McKee is the author of a "screenwriters' bible" called Story: Substance, Structure,...

David Bordwell (born 23 July 1947) is a prominent American film theorist and author. He is the Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, Emeritus in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is married to Kristin Thompson, with...

William Moritz (May 6, 1941-March 12, 2004), film historian, specialized in visual music and experimental animation. His principle published works concerned abstract filmmaker and painter Oskar Fischinger. He also wrote extensively on other visual music artists who...

Peter Wollen (b. 29 June 1938 London) is a film theorist and writer. He studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. Both political journalist and film theorist, Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969), helped to transform the discipline of film studies by...

Michael Betancourt (b. 1971, New Jersey) is a critical theorist, art and film historian, and animator. His principle published works focus on the technologies of visual music, new media art and theory, and formalist study of motion pictures. He is the curator at the...

Carol J. Clover, born in 1940, is a professor of film, rhetoric, and Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley. . She has been widely published in her areas of expertise. Her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film achieved...