“As good a way as any towards understanding what a film is trying to say to us is to know how it is saying it” (André Bazin). This course focuses on how films and other arts of the screen say what they have to say. It serves as an introduction to the study of screen arts and cultures, providing students with a basic set of tools for analyzing moving images. For this purpose, we will break down the complex processes of filmmaking in order to understand the many different aspects that determine the meaning of a finished shot, scene, film, or other forms of moving images. We will look at the basic components of style – from mise-en-scène through cinematography to editing and sound; we will consider different principles of narration as well as the construction of non-narrative films and digital media; we will familiarize ourselves with the basic terminology for film analysis; and we will explore the relation between form and culture in the screen arts.