This course is an exploration of two questions: What distinctive contribution does film make to our self-understanding, to our understanding of what it is to be a human being? What contribution can an active philosophical enquiry into the relationship between philosophy and film make to that self-understanding? Our method will be to explore the relationship film and human experience. The course will be divided into three modules. In the first one we will consider some of the formal aspects of experience and of film by considering how the formal resources offered by film as a medium tend to be deployed for the constitution of an experience of film-watching, paying particular attention to how the medium’s formal elements are deployed in order to induce the experience of a world in narrative film. In this connection, our working hypothesis will be that our experience of the diegetic worlds of film is built and structured around our experience of agency as we find it in those worlds. In the second module of the course we will focus on the constitution of agency in film, on the ways in which action in general is portrayed and rendered intelligible by the resources of the medium, and on how personhood is both constituted and problematized in film through the play between the concepts of agent, actor, character, and person. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between personhood and role-playing. The third module will center around the distinctive ways in which and the extent to which our own experience of ourselves and our social world is mediated by narrative film. Throughout the course, we will watch films from a wide range of periods and genres (Chaplin, Fischinger, Kon, Marker, Hitchcock, Oshima, Bergman, Arnold, Oppenheimer, etc.), and read texts by philosophers, critics and theorists (Merleau-Ponty, Metz, Bazin, Sartre, Sontag, Cavell, Pippin, Mulvey, Mills, etc.).