Let's Talk About Films
1953 · 18m · Canada
Directed by Julian Biggs
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative
Film-group leaders watch an audience discuss a familiar movie and compare a failed screening with a successful one to learn how to centre discussion in the group.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1953 NFB instructional film about *how to discuss film* is exactly the kind of self-aware meta-loop that should feel precious and dated, except Biggs actually uses it to interrogate pedagogy itself—turning a bureaucratic how-to into something genuinely subversive about power dynamics in group viewing.
Biggs locates this essay within a rich tradition of institutional cinema and Griersonian documentary, using the structure of comparative screening (failed vs. successful) as a formal argument about facilitation and collective interpretation—it's a film about film criticism that understands its own place in that discourse.
The decision to let the audience *do the talking* rather than impose voice-over instruction creates this quiet, almost uncomfortable authority shift; the film trusts the viewer's discomfort with silence and digression as the actual pedagogy, which on an 18-minute budget is a masterclass in restraint.