CULS2293 Understanding Movies

Understanding Movies: An Intro to Film

CULS2293, Fall 2025

Mount Saint Vincent University

 Course Description: 

This course is an introduction to and analysis of the codes, conventions, and contexts of fiction films, including a brief history of their development from the silent era to the present day. This includes a critical approach to film as an art and a form of media. Film has a strong impact on our understanding and engagement with society and culture; understanding how this medium makes meaning offers us more of an opportunity to understand our own positionality within that society and culture. This course involves a critical understanding of film as form and object, but it does not include instruction in the creation of film narrative or documentary. 

Weekly Schedule & Readings:

  • Weekly Schedule:
  • Week 1 – Introduction
  • A useful resource you may want to refer to during the entire course is: Dixon, Wheeler Winston and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Glossary of Film Terms,” in A Short History of Film, 3rd Ed., Rutgers University Pres, 2019, pp. 407-10.  
  • Week 2 – What is Film? 
  • Readings:
    • Dixon, Wheeler Winston and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “The Invention of the Movies,” in A Short History of Film, 3rd Ed., Rutgers University Pres, 2019, pp. 1-21.
    • Gendler, Alex. “Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.” TedEd, 2015. 
  • Supplemental:
    • Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave [1973],” in On Photography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, pp. 1-24.
  • Screening: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Herzog, 90mins, 2010), TubiTV Link: https://link.tubi.tv/GCvSOVK4eWb
  • Week 3 – Setting the Scene
  • Screening: The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 99mins, 2014)
  • Week 4 – Editing the Shots
    •  Bordwell, David. “The Introduction of Sound,” in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style& Mode of Production to 1960, edited by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, 2nd ed., Routledge, 1988, pp. 536-47. 
    • Chilton, Martin. “The Sound of Fim Musicals: How Songs Shaped Showbusiness on the Silver Screen,” uDiscoverMusic, 1 January 2025, https://www.udiscovermusic.com/in-depth-features/film-musicals/
  • Supplemental:
  • Screening: Singin’ in the Rain (Donen & Kelly, 103mins, 1952)
  • Week 5 – Auteur & Style
  • McMahan, Alison. “Introduction,” in The Films of Tim Burton: Animating Live Action in Contemporary Hollywood, The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., 2006, pp. 1-19.
  • Supplemental:
    • De la Prida, Rubén. “Mise-en-Abyme as Narrative Strategy in the Films of Wes Anderson,” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 39, no. 8, 2022, pp. 1767-1786. 
  • Screening: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Burton, 127mins, 2016)
  • Week 6 – The Gaze
    •  Truscello, Michael and Renae Watchman. “Blood Quantum and Fourth Cinema: Post- and Paracolonial Zombies,” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 40, no. 4, 2023, pp. 462-83, (published online: 22 January 2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2022.2026273 
    • Sassatelli, Roberta. “Interview with Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze, and Technology in Film Culture,” Film, Culture, & Society, vol. 28, no. 5, 2011, pp. 123-43.
  • Supplemental:
    • Halberstam, Judith. “The Transgender Gaze in Boys Don’t Cry,” in Screen, vol. 42, no. 3, 2001, pp. 294-98.
  • Screening: Blood Quantum (Barnaby, 96mins, 2019)
  • Week 7 – Documentary Narrative
  • Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Questlove & Tulchin, 118mins, 2021)
  • Week 8 – Hero Narrative
  • Supplemental:
    • Bay, Jessica and Jonathan Osborn. “Of Animals and Aliens: Identifying with the Non-Human Other in Guardians of the Galaxy.” In Animal Heroes, Villains and Others: The Narrative Functions of Strange and Familiar Creatures in Film and Television, edited by Karin Beeler and Stan Beeler, Lexington Books, 2022, pp. 135-151.
  • Screening: Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 121mins, 2014)
  • Week 9  – Transmedia Storytelling
    •  Tak, Mudabbir Ahmad. “Transmedia Storytelling-The Dispersion of Meaning in Film Franchises,” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 41, no. 5, 2024, pp. 707-23.
    • Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” from Pop Junctions: Reflections on Enterntainment, Pop Culture, Activism, Media Literacy, Fandom and More, 21 March 2007, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html
    • Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Storytelling 202,” from Pop Junctions: Reflections on Enterntainment, Pop Culture, Activism, Media Literacy, Fandom and More, 31 July 2011,  http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html (the video mentioned in the text is no longer available, but the information in the text is still useful).
  • Screening: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Russo & Russo, 136mins, 2014)
  • Week 10 – Global Film
    •  Berry, Chris. “Wolf Warrior 2: Imagining the Chinese Century,” in Film Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 2, 2018, pp. 38-44.
    • Teo, Stephen. “The Chinese Film Market and the Wolf Warrior 2 Phenomenon,” in Screen, vol. 60, no. 2, 2019, pp. 322-331.  
  • Screening: Wolf Warrior 2 [Zhan lang 2] (Wu, 123mins, 2017), TubiTV Link: https://tubitv.com/movies/100002661/wolf-warrior-2 (Mandarin with English subtitles. Tubi also has an English dubbed version but be warned that it is terrible).
  • Week 11 – National Cinema: Canada
    •  Elder, R. Bruce. “Introduction,” and “Part One Introduction,” in Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989, pp. 1-15.   
    •  Whitehead, Jessica Leonora. “Hollywood Goes North: The Making of a ‘Canadian’ War Epic, Captains of the Clouds,” in Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 27, no. 2, 2018, pp. 23-47.
  • Supplemental:
  • Screening: Dawn, Her Dad and the Tractor (Thompson, 90mins, 2021), TubiTV Link: https://tubitv.com/movies/100016184/dawn-her-dad-and-the-tractor
  • Week 12 – Animation
    •  Krämer, Peter. “Toy Story, Pixar and Contemporary Hollywood,” in Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature, edited by Susan Smith, Noel Brown, and Sam Summers, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, pp. 7-20. https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781501324949&st=toy+story   
    • Inge, M. Thomas. “Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Art, Adaptation, and Ideology,” in Journal of Popular Film & Television, vol.  32, no. 3, 2004, pp. 132-42. 
    • Screening:  Turning Red (Shi, 100mins, 2022)
  • Week 13 – Film as Spectacle
    • Gunning, Tom. “’Now You See It, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions,” in Velvet Light Trap, vol. 32, 1993, pp. 3-12.
    •  “The Rise of Film Tik Tok.” kikikrazed, 2 November 2020. YouTube Link: https://youtu.be/iqajurNSp1Q?si=zi_qxIMoSWK901XT Approx. 14mins. 
  • Screening: Be Kind Rewind (Gondry, 102mins, 2008)

 Course Evaluation: 

Discussion/Participation                              25%                 

Scene Analysis                                               15%                 

Film Analysis 1                                              15%                 

Film Analysis 2                                              15%                 

Final Argument                                            30%                

“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world” – Jean-Luc Godard 

“I’d rather entertain and hope that people learn, than teach and hope that people are entertained” – Walt Disney