Have you ever wanted to become a film critic? Now, you can officially learn how to become one for free.
The Film Experience is a 23-lecture course from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that teaches you how to become a movie critic. The program is free on their OpenCourse Ware site and includes lectures, study materials and other information you need to learn how to become a movie critic. MIT has also created a list of videos, starring MIT’s Film and Media Studies program founding professor David Thorburn, into a single Youtube playlist.
Thorburn’s lectures begin with the introduction to film as a cultural form at the top of the playlist, which itself begins with the question “What is film?”
Thorburn He then goes into the history of filmmaking with silent comedies ranging from the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, to the Hollywood studio era and Alfred Hitchcock, to American film in the 1970s and Italian neorealism to François Truffaut and Akira Kurosawa.
After you have a firm grasp of film history, you will have the ability to decode the language of film and have a better ability to critique movies.
