Does theater need to break Hollywood's rules to make its audience think?

A few people have already brought up my critique of counter-cinema, which is, what is the point? By deliberately setting out to break the rules of cinema, counter-cinema is just as bound by these rules as Hollywood. And since counter-cinema isn't aiming to please an audience, and actually often tries to be the opposite of entertaining, it isn't even valuable as a form of entertainment.

Peter Wollen, in his article "Godard and Counter-Cinema," compares Godard to Brecht, saying that both are "suspicious of the power of the arts-- and the cinema, above all-- to 'capture' it's audience without apparently making it think, or changing it." I do think this is a valid suspicion. Films have the power to capture our attention, so it seems somehow wrong that they should spend two hours in charge of our brain without inspiring us to think about something.

But I'm not sure I believe that counter-cinema films do a better job of this. For example, the first difference Wollen lists between Hollywood and counter-cinema is narrative transitivity vs. narrative intransitivity. The article suggests that narrative intransitivity somehow forces the audience to pay more attention. But I found the opposite to be true-- while I can easily follow a consistent narrative in a film, breaking the film up into little pieces serves only to distance me from the film and make me less interested in what is going on on the screen, so that I actually pay much less attention.