[Thor Joachim Haga]

I think subjective evaluations can open up a whole new room of understanding of a work.

A sort of related example is featurettes on DVDs and Blu-rays. Most of the time, they’re straightforward featurettes about the nuts and bolts of the production (sometimes casually, sometimes more in-depth), and they can be both enlightening and useful. But they don’t really widen my horizons.

Vice versa, you have something like the feature-length ‘making of’ on my old DVD of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, which is more of a ‘film essay’, really, that contains vibrant, almost poetic language and plenty of interpretations. These (often subjective) observations have led me to a deeper understanding of the work; things I hadn’t noticed on my own. Doesn’t mean I have to agree with everything (I have my own interpretations as well), but they’re gateways into a work. Liner notes can fill that function too, but they rarely do.