We’ve actually been finished with this course for a while now but I only recently realized that I never did write my usual post summarizing my experience with it. So here it is and just for the record it is taught by professor Scott Higgins of Wesleyan University.

As its title suggests, the course talks only about Hollywood films and it focuses on what Hollywood uses to achieve its objectives. Higgins emphasizes again and again that its films aren’t meant to inform or to make you think. Instead, they are meant to make you feel. This course examines in detail how Hollywood accomplishes this through black-and-white visuals, sound and finally color as the new technologies become available.

Content-wise, the course consists pretty much only of the video lectures which admittedly are pretty lengthy. They do include in-video quizzes which the Coursera platform allows for and the professor claims is for the purpose of aiding retention but I don’t think they add all that much. There’s also an end of course quiz but Higgins is pretty frank about how he feels it is rather pointless and notes that he only made it because Coursera’s rules require it. In any case, it only consists of the same questions that were used for the in-video quizzes. He does note that the point of humanities courses is to discover new ways of thinking and to prompt discussion but I don’t believe that there is much official presence on the discussion boards. I haven’t spent much time there myself but from what I’ve seen the quality of the discussion among students isn’t terribly high either.

The good news is the actual lectures themselves are very, very good, even if the video quality is webcam-level work, oddly enough for a professor who so prizes film form. It also happens to be pretty much what my wife and I need, given our current level of knowledge about movies. As the professor states, the techniques that Hollywood employs work below the conscious level so that you feel the emotional affect without needing to think about them. Yet this often leads to the audience being unaware of how all this is achieved by the very many conscious, deliberate and complex decisions by very skilled and knowledgeable people behind the scenes. One of my favorite observations from the course is that nothing is real in a movie production and that a great deal of effort is spent on making artificial sets and situations look real and natural to the audience.

To give students an appreciation of what these techniques are and how they change over time, the list of films to watch begins in the silent era where directors have only black and white visuals to play with. This sounds limiting but as the professor’s choice indicates, at the very apogee of the silent era, the industry’s mastery of the medium is such that they can indeed perform visual magic. Sound adds a new tool into the repertoire but it takes time for filmmakers to learn how to use it and in the meantime, technological constraints mean that the visuals actually take a step backwards in quality while the kinks are worked out. It’s a fascinating process that is predictably repeated again when color comes into play.

My main complaint with regard to the content is that the selection of films are dominated by romances. I kind of get why the professor made this decision. With only enough time for ten films, being able to see how the new techniques change things from one film to another is easier if you stick to a single genre. For example, the professor talks frequently about the “embrace”, so it’s a concrete example that you can directly compare across films. Even so, it does feel like a very skewed picture of what Hollywood produces. I think having Higgins share his insight on a broader set of films would be very valuable. The other niggling problem is that the lectures on the early silent movies do make use of video clips but later ones only use stills for some inexplicable reason. I think even the professor felt a bit awkward when he had to switch back and forth between stills.

Overall I’ve had a pretty fantastic experience with this course and as the professor promised, it really has given us new insight into the ineffable qualities that make a good film actually feel good. I suppose it may be a bit too introductory for those already well-versed in the subject but it worked at just the right level of complexity for my wife and myself. I’d recommend it highly for anyone who loves cinema.