It was important for me to try to expand the range of experience of films for students and in doing so to question the kinds of films that they were accustomed to as well as assumptions about the central importance of story and script. The students have a poor to non-existent film culture beyond what is offered on television and on the circuits in a provincial city in Florida whose film offerings are slight, repetitive and dominated by American films on general release. The centre of the programme is story and script. The faculty is for the most part not academics but professional scriptwriters, directors, cinematographers coming from the industry. My students are given a vocational professional training in film production. The worksheets were informed by the context in which they were offered and by the wider context of film studies.

The writings that are presented here are a selection of these worksheets. The worksheets were prepared rapidly usually early in the morning before the nine am class. I thought the hour was best spent in dialogue with the students and I therefore wrote out a worksheet for them to take the place of lectures that were not possible because of scheduling constraints. A feature film was screened each week in class leaving only one hour for tuition. The classes met once a week for three hours only. These writings were prepared for students in a film history class. I teach classes in criticism and history in an essentially film production department.

Naturellement film 2002