Born in Avignon he initially trained as an engineer but started contributing film criticism to Cahiers du cinéma in the late 1960s.

[2] His thought and analysis, rigorous and seductively expressed, have had a definite impact on the theoretical study of cinema, even beyond France's borders.

His intellectual work, which began in the context of a film criticism magazine, took on a rational form when he became a teacher and then a university lecturer.

The aim of Aumont's work is more critical than historical, as shown by Du visage au cinéma (1992), which takes as its starting point the great silent cinema/talking cinema divide, then goes beyond it to investigate how one of the most nota-ble powers of film art, the close-up, has transformed the very notion of portraiture.

Among his works on aesthetics and the visual is a singular text (Amnésies, 1999), which was the first to focus on Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma.