P. Adams Sitney


Paul Adams Sitney was a historian of American avant-garde cinema. He was known as the author of Visionary Film, one of the first books on the history of experimental film in the United States. He was also a critic of academia and its effect on the arts, once notably calling Princeton "the great enemy of poetry".

Background

Paul Adams Sitney, a native of New Haven, Connecticut, was born on August 9, 1944. At fourteen years old, while wandering into a screening, the film that set the course of his life was the 1929 Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s collaboration Un Chien Andalou. As a teenager, he then formed a film society and published the newsletter Filmwise, for which Sitney successfully recruited Anaïs Nin to write and Jean Cocteau to draw a cover. This led to Sitney being invited to write for Film Culture, and he was regularly contacted by news publications for film expertise. He also read film criticism at the Sterling Memorial Library and once met Stan Brakhage.
While in high school, Sitney worked at a local hospital.
He also traveled to Europe and Buenos Aires with programs of experimental films.

Career

Sitney originally attended Trinity College under a full scholarship, where he studied Greek under professor James Notopoulos. After Notopoulos fell ill and Sitney's parents divorced, he left Trinity and took a year off, during which he lectured in Europe.
Sitney then transferred to Yale University, where he received an A.B. in classics in 1967 and a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1980. While at Yale, Sitney avoided being drafted with the help of a professor, and instead lectured again in Europe.
He co-founded the Anthology Film Archives in 1970 as general director and, along with Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka, Ken Kelman, and James Broughton, served as one of the members of the Anthology Film Archives Essential Cinema film selection committee. He was Professor of Visual Arts at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Sitney also taught at Yale and Bard College.
Sitney was a fixture at New York University's doctoral program in its new cinema studies department in 1970. Before moving to Princeton, he also taught at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He has been a major critical leader and intellectual supporter of the New American Cinema avant-garde movement.
Four main techniques that Sitney identified for structural film are: fixed camera position; flicker effect; re-photography off the screen; and loop printing. These techniques were implemented by experimental filmmakers in the 1960s to create cinema "in which the shape of the whole film is pre-determined and simplified".
Sitney appeared in Jonas Mekas's film Notes for Jerome.

Personal life and death

Sitney was Roman Catholic and a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.
Sitney was married twice; he had two children with his first wife, Julie Adams, and two with his second wife, Marjorie Keller. He died after a short battle with advanced metastatic cancer at his home in Matunuck, in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, on June 8, 2025. Sitney was 80.