"Openings". With examples from 1943 to 2013, from China to Iran, Australia to Finland, we look at how to open a film:...

"Believability". It's easy to spot, but not so easy to understand. Believability is about simple human stories, the t...

"Conversation". A basic human interaction -- how to make it cinematic? "Framing". Frames describe and paint the scen...

"Staging". Scene staging is an element of film form pointing clearly to cinema's origin: theater. "Journey". Movemen...

"Adult/Child". Most famous movie genres -- war pictures, westerns, etc. -- are about adults, but in this chapter, Jan...

"POV". Is cinema the art of point of view? Jocelyn Moorhouse, Ida Lupino, Edith Carlmar, Sofia Coppola, Liliana Cavan...

"Bodies". Bodies in cinema can be enticing, athletic, or brutalized. Jane Fonda narrates this chapter about how some ...

"Home". Refuge, shelter, or prison? Sharmila Tagore narrates the story of home on-screen in the great films of Edith ...

"Politics". Another aspect of everyday life. From silent cinema to the twenty-first century, movies from the visually...

"Melodrama". A genre as popular as comedy, but what are some of the great scenes in melodrama? Sharmila Tagore narrat...

"Tension". Thrillers, and so much more. We look at gripping scenes in films as diverse as Joel DeMott's documentary D...

"Reveal". How does Lynne Ramsay do a reveal, in Morvern Callar? How does the great actor-director Kinuyo Tanaka? Or S...

"Life Inside". Novels are great at describing thoughts, but how do films do so? In this chapter, we see how great dir...

"Death". The biggest subject in life, the most universal subject -- no wonder that Japan's Kinuyo Tanaka, Canada's Ca...