"Landscapes of Learning," in the conference title, prompts a literal reading of landscape and its place in film analysis. This article considers landscape's mental and emotional dimensions and the discovery of landscape as a malleable analytical concept. A critique of film as a visual text is invited. Particular analytical approaches to film follow, through notions of soundscape and, using Gilles Deleuze's work on cinema, through orientations such as 'the tectonics of sensation' (percept and affect) and 'the mise-en-scène of the brain' (landscape as a mental construct). These concerns and their implications put us in a position to approach the rest of the conference title's focus on hearts, minds and stories, both in terms of film study in the English classroom and in the light of questions and approaches that open up a film for students.