I saved your credo too though I might have trouble finding it on my computer (different computer than the one I'm on now so I can't check yet). That seemed to me one of the more dubious of your assertions--maybe just in the way you put it -- "Plot and narrative can be dispensed with." As it turns out they rarely can, though obviously they can sometimes. Tree of LIfe is a notable recent film that is not really out to tell a coherent story. And it may get across some emotional messages better as a result of that disregard. Polemical films like Godard's are not really chronological narratives, it's quite true. Sokorov's may be a lot like Malick's.

I don't know if I write more now than in college. Maybe so. I was an English major. That did require writing. But I was smarter and wittier and quicker then. Swift said of his youthful masterpiece The Battle of the Books, "What a genius I had when I wrote that book," and I know what he meant. We slow down. But hopefully (a word I would not have used) I'm more broad-minded and kinder now. One of my teachers wrote on a paper about Jane Austen's Middlemardh (which unfortunately I've lost), "Why don't you grow up and develop some literary taste. A+"