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- New York Times
P. Adams Sitney, Leading Scholar of Avant-Garde Film, Dies at 80
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.'
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