This book serves as supplementary material to the text "American Cinema/American Culture". it is designed to enable you to gain a working knowledge of American film history, from the silent cinema to the present day; to develop your cinematic literacy; to understand how the technology of the cinema relates to film art; to see and understand the place of Hollywood film in American popular culture; to grasp a fundamental understanding of the economics of the film industry; to understand the role of genre in American film history; to develop a more sophisticated conception of "realism" as it relates to motion pictures; and to question your own role as a passive spectator, and increase your ability to watch films actively and critically.