While I enjoy your writing, Armond, this statement is absurd. How can you negatively construe a filmmaker making a personal film that does not “want for popular response?” You fail to understand that film can exist as an art form outside the realm of “popular” consumption. You laughably define film culture as that which “moviegoers care about and talk about.” How many films on the Sight & Sound list would exist if this were the conventional standard? Following your rationale – film should exist only as a medium of mass entertainment. Your argument is grossly reductive.