>>these books seem so comprehensive that I am concerned about how >>to use class time in a way that will not seem redundant to the students. they are comprehensive, in my experience too comprehensive to be fully and readily assimilable, though i have to admit that this may be a function of the level of the enrolled students . . . mine in general tend to be non specialist students taking my courses as a distribution requirement, and i find that for them B&T Intro is too theoretical . . . the B&T History, like almost all other histories, is so full of names and dates, that the course can easily become one of rote memorization with little real understanding . . . so y you may want to play around with alternative text possibilities but whatever text you end up using, every reading assignment is likely to cover more stuff more superficially than is ideal . . . after all, squeezing a century of world film history into 14 weeks is hardly reasonable in the first place . . . so what i do is choose one little corner of the reading and in class explore it carefully, slowly, and in great detail with many examples . . . for one obvious example, no reading of soviet montage theory, however careful, will suffice to give students who've grown up on one version or another of continuity editing a real sense of just how the two differ . . . an in class exercise can make those differences more vivid: i ask my students to collectively contrive a brief dramatic moment and then i ask them to imagine how they would film it, first using continuity editing and then trying --to the extent that they can--employing something like a soviet montage approach . . . and i specifically ask them to include an example of the kuleshov bit whereby the meaning of an individual shot is generated only by virtue of its relationship to the shot that follows it . . . all of this is very loose, of course -- remember that these are students who have never even seen a movie camera -- but the general principles begin to come alive in ways that no textbook can even approximate hope this helps mike ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.ScreenSite.org