By Mikayla Hyndman

Week 8’s Monday class began with the long-awaited introduction to Alexandra Heller-Nicholas – an Australian film critic, broadcaster and writer. Initially, Alexandra guided us briefly through how she was going to run the discussion for today, including topics such as the role of the critic, consumer advice and cultural criticism.

Alexandra then spoke to us about an inspiration of hers; Pauline Kael, a film critic from the New Yorker. To give us a taste of why she considered Kael so great, Alexandra showed us a film clip titled The Current Critic where Kael details her time at the New Yorker, and states that the best films are the “ones least expected”. Here, Alexandra used this clip to drive the discussion about what is and what isn’t good film criticism

Here are the points she discussed:

• TASTE ­– “Taste classifies and it classifies the classifier”. Alexandra made sure that we understood the factors of taste, such as class and social differences and we can distinguish taste from context and opinion.
• PRIVILEGE AND BIAS – Racial, class, gender bias/differences, privileges. Alexandra also mentioned something called “ego privilege” before proposing the question of a film critic’s authority in telling the audience what films are considered great and what are not.
• AUDIENCE – We should always be cautious in considering our audience. Who are they and how can we connect to them?
• SCALE AND DETAIL
• HISTORY
• CONTEXT & OPINION

When Alexandra mentioned the concept of opinion, context and taste by advising the class to use our taste as a guide but to keep it in check. However, she also mentioned that having taste isn’t a bad thing as we are all human and have things that we enjoy and things we don’t enjoy.

Towards the end of the class, we watched an Australian short film by Lucas Testro titled I’m You, Dickhead (2014). The class was divided on whether they enjoyed the short or not, and before long, we were asked to write a capsule review (around 200-400 words) and then swap our work with someone else in the class. Overall, we discussed the interesting concept of how everyone can watch the same thing yet still take on different ideas and create totally different arguments.

This was the last time we got together this week, as Wednesday’s class was cancelled. If anyone wanted to watch the short film again, here is the link: https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2015/08/13/im-you-dickhead/