What is film? What is its relationship with language and with reality? What is the balance of power between film form, ‘author’, culture and spectator? This intensive course provides an historical overview of the evolving body of major theories that have explored these questions.  It examines the theoretical movements that have attempted to make sense of the aesthetic, cultural, and psychoanalytical dimensions of film.  Topics considered include: formalism, realism, the auteur, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminist frameworks, genre analysis, spectatorship, cultural studies, the transnational, and digital and post-cinema debate.