How to View and Appreciate Great Movies

by Eric R. Williams

What makes a movie “great”? Was it a particularly well-acted scene? The dramatic lighting? The emotion of the music? The tension that has built up? A powerful choice of words? The answer is, simply, yes.

Sit down with renowned professional filmmaker, author, and award-winning professor Eric R. Williams to unpack the elements of more than 250 “great” movies - some well-known, others less so - including Casablanca, Jaws, The Godfather, Star Wars, Rocky, Do The Right Thing, The Wizard of Oz, and more in order to gain insights and secrets that will change the way you view films. You’ll discover how from the moment you sit down, great filmmakers control every sensation the movie experience evokes: tremors or tears, goosebumps or giggles, and why it is that we invite them to do this. You’ll also uncover the tricks used to help us suspend our disbelief, let go of our cynicism, and buy into a story using sounds, scores, lighting, color, special effects, and more. You’ll discover how even these seemingly small details can greatly enhance or detract from the theme, atmosphere, and plot.

Professor Williams often refers to filmmaking as a magic show. And once you pull back the curtain to see the creative process from the filmmaker’s point of view, the magic show can never be the same again. But understanding the intent of each aspect of moviemaking - from lighting to language, color to characters, stars to scores - arms you with new set of creative and analytical tools with which to bring to the theater or to revisit your old favorites. These insights will strengthen your love and appreciation for what’s unfolding before your eyes.

Roger Ebert once said, “Every great film should seem new every time you see it” and that’s exactly what How to View and Appreciate Great Movies ensures.

Genres: Nonfiction, Audiobook, Film, Art, History, Media Tie In

Audible Audio

First published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Amirsaman]

بیشتر کورس بر وجوه فیلمنامه‌ای تاکید می‌کند (شاید چون زمینه‌ی کار سینمایی لکچر-دهنده بیشتر روی فیلمنامه بوده است)؛ با این حال همان چند جلسه‌ای که تکنیک‌هایی از جمله میزانسن، نور، صدا، موسیقی، تدوین، رنگ، دوربین، بازیگری، و خصوصا جلوه‌های ویژه بررسی می‌شوند، برای من جذابیت فوق‌العاده‌ای داشتند. در واقع با این کورس از کلیشه‌های نظریه‌ی فیلم دور می‌شویم و یاد می‌گیریم که حتی فیلم‌های امریکایی هالیوودی نیز پر از هنر سینما هستند. بنابراین این کورس برای افزایش سواد سینمایی از منظر سینمای بدنه‌ی امریکا کاربرد دارد؛ امری که بسیار دست کم گرفته می‌شود لااقل در محافل هنری‌تر سینمایی ایرانی. لیستی درست کرده‌ام در لترباکسد از فیلم‌های اساسی مورد اشاره در کورس:
https://letterboxd.com/amirsaman/list...

[Annie]

There are 24 lectures covering different aspects of film appreciation (e.g., story structure, genre, theme, framing, sound, special effects, music, color, and point of view). There are some elements that the audience already intuitively understands the purpose, such as characters having their music (e.g., Star Wars) or color appearing in key moments (e.g., red in The Sixth Sense). If you're the type who appreciates Easter eggs and the significance of a character's name in a movie, this is a great introduction to film appreciation.

[Kiera Beddes]

An excellent series of lectures on how to view and appreciate great movies. Each lecture breaks down a different component of analyzing movies to build cinematic literacy. This is a great addition to Reading the Silver Screen by Thomas Foster or Filmish by Edward Ross.

[Mel]

I thoroughly enjoyed these lectures and got a great deal out of them. After just one chapter I began noticing more in movies than I do normally.
Some of the Great lecture releases can become out of date quickly but this one is fairly timeless because all the principles can be applied to movies made at any time in history.

[Jon]

Just what I was hoping it would be - a filmmaker's take on how to improve one's viewing of movies.

[Mark]

A well organized series of lectures that help movie viewers better appreciate what they see on screen.

[Adam]

This Great Courses offering is something of a "Film Appreciation 101" course. It offers a very basic entry-level introduction to different aspects of film and how to analyze a director's choices.

The professor is knowledgeable, personable, and moves at a good pace. He ends each chapter with a quote from "the late, great Roger Ebert," which is relevant but gets a little tiresome. One aspect of this course that I found appealing is that he used examples from mostly well-known, popular films. The Godfather, Do The Right Thing, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, etc. I know too many cinema studies majors who only speak in tones of "this obscure Czech director" or "you must see this lesser-known Fellini film." This is a course for viewers who are interested in cinema and with an average level of film literacy. He also does a great job setting up the context of his examples. So while it is helpful to have seen the film he is discussing, if you haven't, the examples are still made clear.

Some of the storytelling aspects of the course were redundant for me, but I have multiple degrees in English and Literature, so maybe other students of this course would learn something new about The Hero's Journey, plot, and how characterization works. For my money, the film-specific lectures were the most valuable. Sound design. Set design. Cinematography. Use of color. Film scores. I knew a little about each of these topics, but each lecture taught me something new and valuable. If he offers other, more in-depth courses, I would certainly be interested.

[Mark]

A nice easy way to learn a bit more about "Film" then just watching a movie. Exactly what I wanted.

[Michael Downey]

Being a cinefile my whole life I love how this book celebrates film

[Dave Taylor]

"How to View and Appreciate Great Movies" is one of those rare lecture series that actually delivers on its title. Presented by filmmaker, screenwriter, and Ohio University professor Eric R. Williams, The Teaching Company course consists of 24 roughly 30-minute lectures examining not just what makes a movie good, but how all the pieces of filmmaking work together to make us think and feel what the filmmakers intend. Williams covers hundreds of films along the way, moving from storytelling and genre into the mechanics of production and finally character and performance. I listened to the audiobook version and found it truly excellent, fascinating and packed with insights that immediately change how I watch films. And, as a film critic, I watch a lot of films.

The range is impressive. “The Language of Visual Storytelling” explores color, space, line, shape, camera movement and composition, while “Building Screen Space: Blocking and Framing” examines how the placement of actors and cameras can communicate without anyone saying a word. “The Cutting Room Floor: Powerful Editing,” “Sound Design and Acoustic Illusion,” “Scoring the Story: Music in Film,” and “Color and Light: Elements of Atmosphere” similarly pull apart filmmaking techniques we often experience without consciously noticing them. Williams also spends considerable time on actors, characters and screenwriting, a natural strength given his own screenwriting background. At times, however, it gets a bit too academic. Who knew the hero’s journey could apparently require 17 (or was it 32?) distinct sections and subsections? Williams is also quite fond of categorizing things. Did you know cinema has super genres, macro genres and micro genres?

Those are minor complaints, however, because Williams accomplishes something much more important: he makes you want to watch or rewatch movies. I finished the series with a long list of films I either haven’t seen or now want to revisit, from Citizen Kane and Casablanca to Blade Runner and Raging Bull. I’ve watched and written about a lot of movies over the years, yet this course still expanded my film-viewing horizons and gave me a richer vocabulary for understanding what happens between screenplay and screen. That’s about the highest praise I can give a course on appreciating movies: I came out of it appreciating movies more.

[Joseph]

Elementary, but made unnecessarily complicated by (ironically) boxing the entire concept into dozens of “micro-genres” and macro-genres and super-genres, like nested dolls, and then he’s like: “they’re all interchangeable!”

This “course” is for beginners, people who currently have zero appreciation of film.

I gave up around the first third.

[Hamish]

Interesting, albeit with some significant flaws.

Intellectually, it tends to be quite shallow. I couldn't discern much logic in the topic order. More historical context at the start would've been helpful.

[Scott Diamond]

Was OK. Learned some things of course but can't see I agreed with lecturer's perspective on everything and too much of course was tied up on interpretation or big scenes from movies (somewhat like Chris Farley on SNL) rather than general theory of great movies

[Helen]

This Great Course was one of my top three favorites, and the most useful I have watched! I learned skills useful in appreciating every video I see for the rest of my life! Highly recommended to all teens and adults!

[Jeff J.]

A good guide to film appreciation despite the author’s aversion to cgi.

[Oscar]

Lyd bog-

[Brian Baughman]

Listened on Audible via the Great Courses. Energetic professor. I learned a lot about the foundations of movies, genres, insights from famous films, etc.

[Amy]

It's...FINALLY...done. It took me over a month to watch this lecture series on Hoopla, both due to the limited number of things Hoopla allows one to borrow and because I found the lecturer to be more than a little confusing or unbelievable by turns, among other things.

To start with: I picked up How to View and Appreciate Great Movies because I'm not really into visual media. I don't watch many movies and it's rare that I actually finish a TV show (the last one was eighteen, thirty-minute animated episodes and no, it was not a kids' show; I take no responsibility if you show The Legend of Vox Machina to your small child), so I figured this might be a good way to expand my horizons a bit. It was a bit of letdown when the lecturer spent the entire first lecture talking about movies specifically in a theatregoing context because it was somewhat unusual for most everyone to see movies in theatres even before COVID and, postCOVID, things that were annoyances (expensive snacks, lots of other - potentially annoying - people, etc) are just flatly reasons not to go for audiences that spent about two years watching everything - even new releases - in pajamas in their homes. Subsequent lectures made it clear that he wasn't only talking about movies in the context of theatres (otherwise I would have dropped the series, as there'd be no point), though he maintains that films are made for theatres and can't be enjoyed 'properly' in a different setting.

One of the first topics discussed is genre and it is...very weird. For starters, he seems stuck on american conceptions of genre despite framing the lecture series as applying to movies from all over the world (up to and including send off encouragement to watch foreign films in the last lecture). For example, though being far away from the world (camping in the middle of nowhere, for example) is inextricable from american horror as a genre, it is not necessarily part of other cultural conceptions of horror. British horror, for example, is traditionally set in urban areas and, while there is a very large and well known body of 'murder mystery in an english village' works, those are not horror the way the lecturer goes on to talk about it. Furthermore, he frames genre as supergenre -> macrogenre -> microgenre and while some of it makes sense other parts sound like bullshit. After some explanation, macro and microgenres seem logical (for example, the heist macrogenre has under its umbrella the procedural, impossible endeavor, and character focused tale as microgenres), but I cannot wrap my mind around the idea of supergenres. Disaster-survival flicks are in the crime supergenre because they're escapes? I guess, maybe, but actually...no.

Purely from an information perspective, the other lectures are fine, I guess, in that I didn't see any major problems with content and wasn't anywhere near confusing. They were, not good for two similar and intertwined reasons: with only a handful of exceptions, this series just flat out refused to use music or clips/stills from the films used as in-lecture examples. Instead, they would use what looked like screenshots of somebody's Sims game made to closely resemble the characters and scenes being used as examples and it drove me crazy. I chose to watch this series specifically because I thought the visual media, being the star of the lectures considering they're what's under discussion, would need to shown as examples. After all, when one teaches about literature, do we not quote the text? But, for some strange reason here, that was not the case and it was legitimately distracting. Every single time one of those stand-in Sims graphics came up I promptly got distracted thinking about why they didn't just play the relevant clip or show a still (in the vein of 'there's no way an educational lecture series is anything but fair use, especially when showing clips that might be a minute or two long, so it can't be copyright issues but I can't think of any other reason someone would hamstring their production like this...' and so on and so forth) to the point where I completely miss minutes of the lecture and had to rewind to catch what I'd missed.

All in all, this was a solidly okay series (except for the couple lectures on genre) suffering from actively terrible presentation for some reason I cannot fathom. If you must listen to this, listen to the audio only because the video presentation is worse than useless.