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.
He 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.”
These films were destined never to have a commercial breakthrough. For Mr. Sitney, that was the whole point.
“The precise relationship of the avant-garde cinema to American commercial film is one of radical otherness,” he wrote in the preface to “Visionary Film,” adding, “They operate in different realms with next to no significant influence on each other.”
The esoteric, sometimes impenetrable nature of the work he championed was, in Mr. Sitney’s view, a principal virtue. As he was finishing his career at Princeton, he promised a seminar that was “guaranteed to be of interest to very, very few students,” he told The Nassau Literary Review in 2015. The university, he said, was “the great enemy of poetry.”
It was a chance encounter, as a 14-year-old high school student in New Haven, Conn., with Luis Buñuel’s 1929 surrealist classic, “Un Chien Andalou” — written by Salvador Dalí — that set Mr. Sitney on his lifelong passion.
He “wandered into a screening” of the film, he told The Brooklyn Rail in 2005. “And for a certain kind of pretentious art-oriented adolescent, ‘Un Chien Andalou’ was the perfect film! I was hooked!”
He began “Visionary Film” with a precise description of the events in “Un Chien Andalou.” That in turn allowed him to take on his first subject, Maya Deren’s pioneering “Meshes in the Afternoon” (1943), a kind of ur-text for the American avant-garde.
Those opening pages set forth both Mr. Sitney’s method and his ruling preoccupations.
The disconnected images, metaphors and tropes of Buñuel’s film are “far from being puzzling,” Mr. Sitney insisted. On the contrary, “the film achieves the clarity of a dream.”
In the same way, he wrote, Ms. Deren “observed with accuracy the way in which the events and objects of the day become potent, then transfigured, in dreams, as well as the way in which a dreamer may realize that she dreams and may dream that she wakes.”
The voluminous, fragmentary work of Mr. Brakhage, with its sometimes eccentric methods of scratching onto the film stock itself and its preoccupations with light and the act of seeing, was a key interest throughout Mr. Sitney’s career.
“Brakhage,” he wrote in “Visionary Film,” “invented a form in which the filmmaker could compress his thoughts and feelings while recording his direct confrontation with intense experiences of birth, death, sexuality and the terror of nature.”
The Princeton humanities scholar Daniel Heller-Roazen said of Mr. Sitney: “He was committed to the idea of the visionary. What he found in Brakhage was a poet of vision, someone constantly changing the field of vision.”
Mr. Sitney’s judgment that Mr. Brakhage had “transformed” avant-garde filmmaking led him to predict, in a 2003 interview with The New York Times, that “in the entire history of the medium, when all the pop-culture interests have faded, a hundred years from now, he will be considered the pre-eminent artist of the 20th century.”
Paul Adams Sitney was born on Aug. 9, 1944, in New Haven, Conn., the only child of Harry Sitney, the owner of a small general store in Branford, Conn., and Katherine (Adams) Sitney, a hairdresser.
While he was still in high school in New Haven, he organized a film society at the local Y.M.C.A. and began writing a newsletter, Filmwise, in which he wrote about the works of Ms. Deren and others. “He started writing about it as a way of actively trying to understand it,” his daughter Sky said in an interview. “He understood the relationship of this cinema to poetry.”
He met Mr. Brakhage in New York City when he was 16 and showed his films at the Film Society. He also began sneaking into the Yale University library to read up on film history.
He earned a B.A. in classics at Yale in 1967. But even before then, in 1963 and again in 1964, he had traveled to Europe with a collection of avant-garde American films to show at the International Exhibition of New American Cinema.
After getting Anthology Film Archives off the ground, he went back to Yale, where he earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1980 under the deconstructionist scholar Paul de Man. He joined the Princeton faculty that same year and taught film history, as well as courses on major filmmakers, the language of cinema and avant-garde cinema, until his retirement in 2016.
There were some more traditional forms of cinema that Mr. Sitney didn’t disdain, especially Italian film. In his book “Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics” (1995), he wrote about the neorealists of the late 1940s and ’50s: “The uniqueness of the Italian works, vis-à-vis other relevant cinemas, lies in the stylistic organization of elements of apparent rawness, their emotional intensity, and their focus on current social and political problems.”
His other books included “Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature” (1990) and “Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson” (2008). He also edited a number of anthologies, including “Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism” (1978).
Besides his daughter Sky, from his first marriage, to Julie Adams, Mr. Sitney is survived by a son, Blake Sitney, from that marriage; two daughters, Augusta and Miranda Sitney, from his second marriage, to the filmmaker Marjorie Keller Sitney, who died in 1994; and four grandchildren.
Until the end of his career, Mr. Sitney remained a defender of the elite preoccupations that defined him.
“There’s in the art world in America now a deep hatred of the idea of originality and inspiration, a deep hatred of revelation,” he said in 2015. “There’s some ridiculous notion that art can be democratic. Art is the least democratic of all things!”
Sheelagh McNeill and Jeff Roth contributed research.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
The post P. Adams Sitney, Leading Scholar of Avant-Garde Film, Dies at 80 appeared first on New York Times.
