Followup from the other day
OK, so there is one other filmmaker I thought of who seems to compete on Lynch's level of movies as art versus narrative: Jim Jarmusch. "What?" you say? "They're like total opposites!" you say? Yeah, but that doesn't make them unequal artistically. Ghost Dog is by far the closest Jarmusch has come to having something resembling a plot in one of his films that I know of, but that doesn't keep any of them from being moving and free-form and brilliant. (This thought occurred while watching Stranger Than Paradise followed by Down By Law today.)