I think by just watching some good cinematography and paying close attention to details. Eventually you start seeing patterns and certain techniques used everyw

I think by just watching some good cinematography and paying close attention to details. Eventually you start seeing patterns and certain techniques used everywhere, then you start noticing movies intentionally trying to be meta and subverting those patterns and techniques, and that’s where the big eye openers start. A bit less visual, but that’s how it happened to me with music. There was even some guy on reddit who decided to go through the entire history of hip hop and listen to every single influential album chronologically [1]. From what i remember him describing, it was a completely different experience listening to newer hip hop after going through all the earlier works, as a lot of it was built through the same techniques of self-referencing and trying to be meta. 1. https://reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/448wl4/man_who_knows_nothing_about_hip_hop_listens_to/ https://reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/448wl4/man_who_knows_no...