Based on the assumption that critical viewing can broaden the range of films one can respond to, increase understanding, and ultimately lead to an intensification of subjective response, this book offers a critical approach to experiencing movies. After explaining the critical method to be used, several films in the context of different aesthetic questions are discussed and related to the mimetic and expressive capacities of cinema. The silent cinema is traced as it develops these capacities through visual composition, camera movement, and editing, and some of the technical advancements are explored that improved the medium and liberated its powers of expression. Documentaries, three movements that developed different kinds of realism, and five films which take as subject matter the creative filmmaking process are discussed. Ways in which films can be mythic are suggested; evaluation problems with political films are analyzed; and finally, all issues discussed are incorporated into a full treatment of one film. (RH)