What is American film? It cannot be neatly delineated or defined – it is a capacious beast of tensions between ordered and messy, success and failure, corporatisation and independence, the regional and the global, and mainstreams and margins. Histories of Hollywood, ‘indie’, studios, institutions, technologies, talent, periods, and styles have given shape to multiple histories of American cinemas. But this is less of a story, and more of a debate. We do not present this book as a geography or indeed a history lesson, despite its structuring rationale as one of linear chronological order. The chapters contained in this book do not tell a story of development and change. Hence, the reader will find some less well-known choices side by side with classics, the classical, porn and blockbusters, high-art and low-brow, because American cinema is all those forms and expressions. Our ambition here is to keep American film as an object of continuing interest and unexpectedness. We encourage our imagined community of colleagues, teachers, and students to experiment, and we hope this book supports new pedagogical journeys in the practice of screening cinema.