Symposium: Do you regard film as as high an art form as literature? Why or why not? If so, what films are the equals of great literature?

The article presents a symposium on films as an art form as literature. On the face of it, there's nothing preventing narrative film from aspiring to the condition of art, but few films seem to have achieved it. Like popular fiction or song, movies are stunted by the constraint of form. That they deliver on the promise of entertaining an audience large enough to recoup the vast figure needed to launch even a modest effort. The great foreign films (the so-called "art" movies) are, of course, proud to ignore the constraint, happy to be long, baggy, humorless, ambiguous, shaped with no concern for jolts or thrills; to be, in short, always more and less entertaining.