Response to Lev Manovich's "What is Digital Cinema?"

So when I was reading this article at times I was trying to relate it to our 1st film montage project. And I was thinking, in the case of montage, are all films prior to the digital age narrative, as Mertz believes? But then I was thinking, because our montages were created with still images, are these even considered film or cinema. Then I realized how these are some questions that I just have assumed the answers to and never contemplated them for an extended period prior to this assignment. I proceeded to then "wikipedia" (as those of us from the digital age would say) film, cinema, and montage so see if my previous assumptions regarding these topics agree with what the ever-so-trusted wikipedia says. Here's what they had to say (just to give to meat to where I'm going with this):
"Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or special effects."
And then they go into it further recognizing certain early forms of the film making that we're accustomed to, such as animation or putting individual photos together to create some sort of motion. So I suppose our montage films would be considered films. But I don't see all of them being narrative. Some of them portray a narrative more than others, however many were a mish-mash of images and textures.

The very nature of pre-digital film as a medium is to record reality. Tarkasky even goes as far as saying that film can never be abstract, because it's always a record of something that happened in real space and real time. I don't know if I completely buy it, but he makes a valid point.
Now when we have the option of digital editing and animation, the possibilities have expanded tremendously. Now we can make technically abstract films. And the narrative nature of conventional films has become more dimensional we the possibilities of interactivity exist.

I also thought it was mentioned how digital animation isn't film at all, but a sub-genre of painting.