How to View and Appreciate Great Movies

By: Eric Williams, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Eric 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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2018 The Great Courses (P)2018 The Teaching Company, LLC

Very helpful, but…

There really are other movie experts to quote besides Roger Ebert. After a dozen of his “Finally I’d like to quote…” it got rather tiresome. That was especially true when the Ebert quote was sometimes not at all insightful. But that’s a very minor criticism. Overall, a worth while listen.

Great Introduction to Film Appreciation

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.

A good intro to the subject.

This was a well thought out series of lectures. The information presented is a nice base of knowledge on which to grow some deeper understanding of film criticism.

That said, this audio series of lectures is in desperate need of an editor. There were points where the speaker lost his place in the notes or made mistakes and the audio just kept going.

Not the way I appreciate great movies

I feel as though this is a misleading title. While these lectures have a bunch of great information on film and the idiosyncrasies of story telling this is not needed to enjoy a great movie. There is too much dissection and analyzing of characters, thought process, story arc, and mise-en-scène mentioned that makes watching a great film more like work than enjoyment. Perhaps it’s just me but I just like to turn my brain off and go on whatever ride the film will take me on and not begin to over analyze everything about it.
Perhaps a Great Course for those with more intellectual tastes than mine.

I need to watch more movies

I wish I could have known every movie he referenced, I guess I can’t quite refer to myself as a movie buff, until I see all these movies.

The title is misleading

It's essentially an intro to film class, which I took in college years ago. Same films there with few additions. I really LOVED the section of Special Effects. I love film so I think it's neat to have a sort of pocket guide to the best films of all time. There is not a big difference between this version and other versions.

very informative

Really found it enjoyable.
Built my appreciation for the cinema.
The "No Country for Old Men" theory is brilliant.

A good introduction

This was one of Audible’s freebies and I took it. I’m not really a movie buff, but I’m glad that I listened to this course. It helped me understand movies a lot better and gave me a few titles that I’d like to find and see. And, this one does include a PDF with photos, charts, colors, etc., as well as a summary of the lectures. 

Some of the topics are very similar to what you would get in a course teaching you to appreciate great literature. There is a lecture on the universal story types that almost all great stories and movies fall into. There is a discussion of genre, how the author/filmmaker uses and sometimes breaks audience expectations, the use of tension, how to let people get to know a character by choosing what details to reveal instead of just describing them, etc. Then there are lectures dealing with visual cues that are unique to movies, though some may still be common to other visual arts, such as how to frame a shot, camera angle, whether the camera is stationary or moves with the subject, etc. There are two chapters on special effects. 

And, it’s all illustrated with tons of examples, most of which are movies that I’ve never seen, but I didn’t have to because the professor’s descriptions were so clear and the PDF was there to back it all up. Maybe it would have been better with some actual clips, but I’m not sure that, in most cases, they would have been any improvement over the still shots that he gave us. And, Professor Williams was engaging and interesting. There were some long pauses but it never got boring. 

Yes, I have to say, I enjoyed it and for someone who almost never watches TV and has never really been one to go out and see movies, that’s probably a pretty good complement.