Every ten years, the British film magazine Sight and Sound, in conjunction with the British Film Institute, polls leading critics and scholars, asking them to rank the ten best films of all time. Considered the definitive evaluation of the cinematic canon, since the poll’s inception only four films have been named as the greatest of all time: Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thieves (1948), Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and, most recently, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Rather than relitigate which film is rightfully declared “best,” this class will use these four films as an entry point into the art of cinema, and as a lens into the ways that taste changes over time, not just in cinema but in visual culture more broadly.