Film Language and Form

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How is meaning created in film? How is it distorted? What makes a viewer move through points of view and emotional states? How does the manipulation of cinematic components communicate or distort reality? This course examines the audiovisual language used to construct and distort meaning and experience in cinematic media. Through screenings, lectures, readings and assigned creative projects, students dissect the grammar, structural devices used in material ranging from the explicitly commercial and rhetorical, such as advertising and children?s programming, through historical and contemporary film and video art work. In the process of learning to unlock and decode the language of film, students also increase their narrative literacy and become conversant in the terminology and grammatical conventions of film and video production.