Noël Burch

Noël Burch was born in San Francisco in 1932. He arrived in France in 1951 and graduated from the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in 1959. He became Pierre Kast's assistant on Le bel âge (1960), before directing the acclaimed short film Noviciat (1964). He then devoted himself to film criticism, notably for Cahiers du cinéma from 1968 to 1972. He also taught film history and theory at university, and published a number of works, including Theory of Film Practice (1969), To The Distant Observer (1983) and _The Infinite Skylight (_Jean Mitry Award, 1991). Influenced by Anglo-Saxon academic approaches, he turned his attention to gender studies in 1997, in an essay entitled The Battles of the sexes in French cinema, 1930-1956.