Few people know that Sergei Eisenstein, one of the masters of modern cinema, was
originally a mechanical engineer. Not only that; his filmmaking is informed
through and through by inventive tropes of engineering. In this course, we study the
rhetorical art of invention (heuristics) as it is applied in filmmaking through close
examination of ten masterpieces of cinema. Students will take away from the course
a deeper understanding of how rhetorical invention can be used in non-verbal areas
of learning as well as a set of skills related to film-making and film criticism.
