Film Criticism, Social Issues and Student Audience Reception #ECIL2023

Finally in this session at European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL) in Krakow, Poland (this is Sheila) is Correlation between Film Criticism, Social Issues and Student Audience Reception presented by Zlatko Vidačković (coathored with Nikša Sviličić) (abstract is here). The data was collected by interviewing three academics and administrating a questionnaire to about 300 (I think 334) students in Zagreb, Croatia. The presenter raised the question - what is the role of film criticism today, and presented a large number of important perspectives from the literature. Just picking up on some of the points - A critic should not have any prejudice and aim to ignore marketing techniques or other practices that create favour and bias. They should be able to position the film critically within the film corpus - they should have "knowledge + taste" and enlighten the reader. From that perspective film criticism is still needed, and perhaps more than ever.
The research results included that: student respondents to the questionnaire on the whole rarely looked at film reviews; the reviews influenced moderately the opinions etc. about the film; the participants mostly followed on social media, sites like Rotten Tomatoes, vlogs etc.; asked about extent to which social issues affects their choice of films, the answer was moderately; if books affected their choice of films, it was  mostly fiction; film lectures affected the students' film choices moderately little. From the academics' interviews, there were varying perspectives on the students' engagement with film reviews and the social issues that might be portayed in films.
Conclusions (from the literature and from the research) include: art criticism should be supported to counter the power of commercialism and marketisation; this is still the case even with the rise of many people giving their opinions about films online; younger people turn to digital media to find reviews; some social issues (such as freedom) are more appealing in films; students are more open to discussing films than writing about hem; the students also prefer to discuss social issues rather than artistic issues.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Krakow main square