Researchers who time films with a stopwatch have found that the average shot in a 1940s Hollywood film lasted around eight to ten seconds, while many recent action films cut every two or three seconds. Most viewers never notice either rhythm. That is the first lesson of film study: cinema is built from choices designed to be felt rather than seen. Film analysis means slowing down to notice those choices and asking what they do to the viewer. This level gives you the basic vocabulary: the shot, what sits inside the frame, how shots are joined, and sound.

The shot and the frame

A shot is a continuous run of film from one camera, unbroken by a cut. It is the basic unit of cinema, much as the sentence is a basic unit of writing. Every shot is framed: the rectangle of the screen decides what the audience sees and what stays hidden. Filmmakers describe shots by how much of a person fills the frame. An extreme long shot shows a landscape in which people are tiny; a long shot shows a whole body from head to foot; a medium shot cuts the figure at the waist; and a close-up fills the frame with a face or object, inviting intimacy or emphasis.

Camera angle carries meaning too. A low-angle shot looks up at its subject and tends to make it seem more powerful, while a high angle looks down and can make a person seem small or trapped. The camera can also move. It can pan from side to side, tilt up and down, or travel on tracks beside the action. A moving camera can follow a character, reveal a surprise or create unease.

Everything placed in front of the camera has a name of its own. Mise-en-scène, a theatre term meaning "putting into the scene," covers setting, costume, lighting, props and the placement of actors. Lighting alone can change a mood: hard light with deep shadows feels tense, soft even light feels calm. Depth is another choice. In deep focus, near and far objects are both sharp, so the viewer's eye can roam the image; Orson Welles and his cinematographer Gregg Toland made famous use of it in Citizen Kane (1941).

Editing: joining shots

Editing is the selection and joining of shots, and the cut is its basic tool. Hollywood developed a set of habits known as continuity editing, which aims to make cuts invisible so the story seems to flow without interruption. Its best known rule is the 180-degree rule: the camera stays on one side of an imaginary line drawn between two characters, so that each keeps facing the same direction on screen. Break the rule and the viewer feels a small jolt of confusion. Related techniques include the shot and reverse shot used in conversations, the eyeline match (we see a character look, then cut to what they see) and cross-cutting, which alternates between actions happening in different places, often at the same moment, building suspense as a rescuer races toward someone in danger.

Editing can also draw attention to itself. A jump cut removes a slice of time from the middle of a shot so that the image seems to lurch forward; Jean-Luc Godard used it boldly in Breathless (1960). A match cut links two shots through a shared shape or movement, such as the bone tossed into the air that becomes a spacecraft in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Sound

Sound is half the experience, though viewers seldom credit it. The key distinction is between diegetic sound, which comes from the world of the story (dialogue, footsteps, a radio playing in the room), and non-diegetic sound, which the characters cannot hear, such as a musical score or a narrator. The terms come from diegesis, a Greek word for narration that film scholars use for the story world. Filmmakers love to move sound across that border: music that seems to be the score turns out to be playing on a character's car radio. Silence can be as strong as noise. Cutting all sound for a moment can make an entire audience lean forward.

Worked example: the shower scene in Psycho

Take the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). It lasts under a minute on screen but is built from dozens of brief shots, and the crew spent about a week filming it. The knife is never shown entering the body. Instead, rapid editing makes viewers believe they have seen far more than they did. Close-ups of a screaming mouth, the shower head, a hand tearing down the curtain and water swirling into the drain carry the violence by suggestion.

On the soundtrack, Bernard Herrmann's string section stabs in short, shrieking notes: non-diegetic sound that imitates the action. Underneath runs the diegetic hiss of the shower, and when the score stops, only that ordinary sound remains, which makes the stillness worse. Then a match cut joins the dark circle of the drain to a close-up of the dead woman's eye, with the camera slowly spiraling outward.

Notice how much of the horror is made by the editor and composer rather than shown. The scene also had to satisfy censors who would never have approved a graphic stabbing, a reminder that technique and rules shape each other (Level 6 returns to this). A viewer who can name the parts, close-up, rapid cutting, non-diegetic score, match cut, can explain why the scene works instead of only saying that it does. Turning a feeling into an observation is the skill the rest of this course builds, and it is a citizen's skill as well, because images that move us have usually been designed to.