The author describes how he instructs students in his introductory film course to show how one can reveal a film's ideological dimensions in teaching. In this article, the author traces the progress of his student's arc of learning, from their relative lack of awareness of film's influence on the construction of identity to a more sophisticated recognition of film's "cumulative effect"--that is, how film aesthetics, narrative, and genre essentially constructs a "point of view" and thus, presents a specific way of thinking about what is represented. The author concludes with a list of further readings on film, genre, and classical Hollywood cinema.