Earlier this summer I read this old book about analyzing films from when my father took a similar course in college. What struck me about <u>Looking at Movies</u> and (even more so) about <u>Film Analysis</u> was that most of what seemed like the most fundamental information was the same. While I'm sure the study of films has evolved a lot in the... er... unspecified number of years since my father studied the subject, the fact remains that <i>Psycho</i> is still scary, <i>Citizen Kane</i> is still powerfully ambiguous, and people are generally as thrilled to see train crashes as they were 1895. These responses, in my opinion, transgress the intellectual to represent a physical and intuitive reaction as powerful now as ever. What beauty the cinema can offer has always lied in its capacity to tell a captivating story and tell it well... to use more definitive words, movies' "content" and "form". To study film is to know and use that distinction in order to learn about the consequent relevancies: the cultural context of a plot or premise, complicated visual and audial connotations, and the underlying array of philosophies that ultimately determine what a film is truly "about". The origins of such a subject are important because to study what makes our entertainment compelling is, inevitably, to study and understand our own many desires, fears, and dreams.