Summer Film School is a great way to learn how to recognize and analyze the unique conventions movies use to have flat, giant images on a wall make us laugh, weep, and cheer.
Broken into four classes, Summer Film School will focus on genres, which are the stylistic categories we use to define films based on their settings, tone, dialogue, plots, and themes. To unpack that way of packaging films, the course will survey (1) Film Noir, (2) Musicals, (3) Westerns, and (4) Horror Films.
Lectures will run ~30 minutes on each subject before screening a classic film. After the film, there will be a discussion of how the film situates itself within the genre discussed in the lecture.