What makes movies unique? This course is a semester-long answer to that question, exploring films across a wide range of countries and periods, from silent movies to recent trends. We start by looking closely at how filmmakers have used formal elements—storytelling, camera movement, composition, color, and sound—as we build the tools, skills, and vocabulary of close reading. We then explore such topics as realism, including documentaries, neo-realism, and the Dogma 95 movement; art cinema, especially French New Wave and other innovations of the 1960s; the history of Hollywood studio filmmaking, particularly in the 1930s and 1970s; and the contrasts between Hollywood's film industry and other national cinemas in Europe, Asia, and the Soviet Union. Screenings are mandatory.