This course surveys key strategies for viewing, listening, and writing about film and media form, with a focus on live-action and animated films. Students will delve beneath the surface of traditional narrative analysis, to explore how moving-image works operate in unique audiovisual ways. A first major component of the course will establish a comprehensive vocabulary for analyzing the basic elements of film form: mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. Looking closely at examples shaped by classical narrative cinema, as well as other cinema traditions, students will examine how film elements work together in interconnected ways to form meaningful patterns. A second major component of the course will explore how audiovisual elements operate across different genres and modes like documentary, art cinema, independent cinema, and avant-garde cinema. Lectures and required screenings are accompanied by seminars, in which students actively develop and practice formal analysis and interpretive skills.

This course is subject to priority rules; see here.