This course will engage one of the most prominent and important figures in film history: travel. We will investigate this figure as it evolves historically from 1895 to the present and at the same time examine the particular practices and permutations it has inspired as travelogues and documentaries, movie genres such as the road movie, and film’s ideological and economic engagements with borders and globalization. Such a rich vehicle will additionally open numerous theoretical questions in film aesthetics: for example, about mobile and immobile spectatorship, about “traveling shots” and aesthetic realism, and about subjectivity and ethnographic filmmaking. Since our topic parallels the 2006-07 theme of the Penn Humanties Forum, we will also take advantage of the various university lectures, presentations, and exhibitions around the university as a way of broadening and complicating the issues we find in film history. In addition to gaining more intellectual mobility about film and the larger implications of “travel” as a mode of experience, we will, I am certain, become better writers and more independent researchers.