P. Adams Sitney, Leading Scholar of Avant-Garde Film, Dies at 80
He championed works of cinema that were destined never to have a commercial breakthrough — which, to him, was the whole point.P. Adams Sitney, who pioneered the study of avant-garde film, helping to focus attention on a rarefied corner of American filmmaking, died on June 8 at his home in Matunuck, R.I. He was 80.His daughter Sky Sitney said the cause was cancer.In books and magazine articles, and at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, which he helped found, and Princeton University, where he taught film history and other subjects in the humanities for over 35 years, Mr. Sitney championed a type of film that is largely unknown to the cinema-going public, but which forms a distinctive part of the American artistic canon.His passion was mostly short films that had nothing to do with narrative or characters and everything to do with light, images, objects and dreams. His book “Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde,” which has gone through three editions since first being published in 1974, is still regarded as the leading study of the genre.Mr. Sitney’s “Visionary Film,” originally published in 1974, is still regarded as the leading study of the genre.Oxford University PressHe championed the work of avant-garde pioneers like Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas and Peter Kubelka, several of whom helped him found Anthology Film Archives, the East Village bastion of avant-garde cinema, in 1970. He saw their films as pure experiments toward achieving one of cinema’s true vocations: the mirror of the dream state.“Fragmentation brought the imagery to the brink of stasis, so that after some hours hovering around that threshold, the image of a couple walking into a Japanese garden had the breathtaking effect of the reinvention of cinematic movement,” he wrote of an episode in Mr. Markopoulos’s 80-hour, 22-part 1991 epic, “Eniaios.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
