P. Adams Sitney, avant-garde film historian and professor of visual arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts, Emeritus, died on June 8. He was 80 years old.
P. Adams Sitney, avant-garde film historian and professor of visual arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts, Emeritus, died on June 8. He was 80 years old.
I was asked to write something for the official obituary for Princeton and they included some of my comments, but I though I’d put in the full text here to express a few more of my feelings about his great work, and this great loss. (The questions in each part are what they posed to me.)
—What would you consider Professor Sitney’s greatest contribution to film studies?
P. Adams’ book, “Visionary Film” (1974) was a brilliant analysis of the groundbreaking films at the heart of the experimental film movement of the time. I disagreed with some of his ideas, but that’s fair enough: No one can please everyone all the time. And I know that P. Adams wasn’t interested in pleasing people. Rather, he was deeply devoted to the works made by the many filmmakers about whom he wrote, regardless of people’s opinions about those films, and he championed them not only in his book but by his work in developing the “Essential Cinema” series at the Anthology Film Archives.
—-And to Princeton?
I taught film production, not film studies, but was often in conversation with my students about his courses. It was obvious that his passionate approach to film, his way of speaking about it and insisting that students embrace and engage in the work as he did, made a profound impression on them. In fact, a few of my students changed their dreams of being a filmmaker into dreams of being a film scholar in the mode of P. Adams, who was always unbought and unsold.
Very few people I’ve known have had the intense convictions that he had–which at times was incredibly irritating: When he believed in someone, that was it! One might think of that as a problem, but I think in an educational setting it’s really valuable for students to witness that kind or degree of conviction, because if they also have a spine, they can thereby learn further how to stand their own ground.
—Can you share an anecdote or memory that sheds light on his life or work?
I spent countless hours in his office on Thursday mornings before we had class, when we talked about so many things. Not just about film, but also about issues related to class work and administrative work. He was a goldmine of information about how to navigate my job, and also an endless source of hilarious stories and serious ideas about the many filmmakers whose work we knew…and differently admired. One of my favorite memories is a day when we stood in the hallway having a very heated argument: He was defending Tarkovsky, and I was defending Kiarostami. Both of us had brutal words to say about the other’s opinion, and neither of us persuaded the other, and I went away thinking how it was always so much fun, and so real, to be able to arm-wrestle with P. Adams about filmmakers. His unshakeable spirit is what made his life and work so wonderful and makes this loss so profound.