The course aims at giving the basic educational elements to develop a certain critical thinking of the cinematic vision. In order to reach such a goal, a number of salient episodes in the history of world cinema will be studied, by making reference to the conceptual categories elaborated by Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the cinema (the Movement-Image and the Time-Image). Several concepts will be taken into consideration: Griffith’s “organic composition”, Stroheim’s “primordial” movement and the “intensive” one of the German Expressionism, the “dialectic” approach to film editing of the Soviet filmmakers, and the “quantitative” one of the French pre-war cinema, the big and small shape of the “image-action” of the Hollywood cinema, the “optical-sound” nature of the modern cinema. The history of the cinematic image will be retraced through the study of general notions about films, film directors, and the most relevant genres since the birth of the cinema up to now. Great personalities will be highlighted and, at the same time, the formation of models and codification processes, both stylistic and narrative, are going to be caught.