Response to An Original Art Form

Film is a media that incorporates many other forms of art, but never have I regarded it as overqualified method of reproduction. I always thought of film as a balanced compilation. At the start, I believed Richter too hypercritical: true, film relies on ideas and concepts derived from other arts, but new things can only be comprehended by relating them to familiar things. Only when he used the films Ballet Mecanique and Andalusian Dog as examples did I start to understand his point: both avante garde films can not be expressed outside film. It seems film has vast unexplored territory buried underneath the mainstream.