Understanding Movies: An Introduction to Film Studies

Course Code: ARTS 138

Academic Year: 2024-2025

This course introduces students to the historical principles and technical elements of film analysis. Beginning with an overview of how film developed into the foremost art form of the last 100 years, the course will examine how films use images and narrative structures to communicate a wide array of human emotions, experiences and meaning. Students will learn to analyze how photography, mise-en-scene, movement, editing, sound and acting work together to produce layers of meaning in a film. They will also examine how different narrative forms, styles and popular genres have developed both inside Hollywood and internationally. Special consideration will be given to our experience of film as spectators and the different ways that movies have been produced, exhibited and enjoyed over the course of the last century. In addition, various theoretical perspectives will be addressed in order to assess the larger social and political implications of film for contemporary cultural experience.