Very interesting question; I'm not sure. People's expectations going into a film and their opinions walking out of a film are never isolated, they're not floating on some asteroid thousands of miles from anything else. They might talk to somebody else about and decide they like it or decide they don't, they might read reviews, watch trailers, compare it without having seen it to other films.

Films relate to one another; it's a self-reflexive, intertextual medium, in itself and in our appreciation of it. There was a Swedish director, I forget who, who once claimed he had never ever seen a film. I found that hilarious and fascinating, and would, for the sole purposes of myth, like to believe it was true.

Herzog says, "Cinema is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates", which I take to mean several things, but here am going to use it to argue that the more educated we are outside of Cinema or cinematic practices, the less valid our appreciation of it is. Or perhaps it might even include education as regards film studies too - indeed, many people who actually study film study around it, skirting over issues such as social or economic representations of the time and culture in which it was made.

My dad isn't very educated. Not academically. He neverwent to university, and dropped out of high school as soon as he could. He hates his job, reads very little, but loves some of the films I suggest to him. As an example, we watched Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) on the big screen together; it was my first time, his first time, and we both came out thinking it was fantastic. I connected with its existentialism and the cinematic shaping of that philosophy, whereas he openly admitted, "I don't have a clue what they're talking about, but it was fantastic." He liked the scenery, the depressing setting, the generally slow pace and consistent rhythm of the film.

I've been considering lately whether the most valid (or raw) response to a film might be from somebody such as Herzog's mysterious hero Kaspar Hauser, who, in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) is locked away in a tower all of his life, and then released into society with absolutely no education as to what he is, or what the world is. He's old enough to move, eat, and his five senses are intact and sharp, but he hasn't communicated to anybody in his whole life. He has never seen beyond the stone walls of his cage.