P. Adams Sitney
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of Visual Arts, Princeton University

Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow - Class of Spring 2011

P. Adams Sitney is a preeminent film theorist and historian of European and American avant-garde film. Known for his early intellectual and critical support of the New American Cinema movement, he wrote Visionary Film (Oxford, 1974), widely regarded as the first major history of postwar American avant-garde filmmaking. The author of Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford, 2009), Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics (University of Texas, 1995), and Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature (Columbia, 1992), he has also edited several essay collections on filmography. Sitney was an important figure in the early years of New York University’s doctoral program in Cinema Studies, which was established in 1970. He was a founder of New York’s Anthology Film Archives and has served as a member of its Essential Cinema film selection committee.

Project Description

Cinema and Poetry

As Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the Academy, Sitney worked on a wide-reaching book, Cinema and Poetry. The project touches upon topics of longstanding importance to his research and teaching: the theoretical texts and films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Andrey Tarkovsky, with a concentration on how these two filmmakers used the concept of poetry to approach issues of filmic syntax and worldview – without explicitly invoking models from the poetic tradition. The second focal point of the work analyzes the lineage of Jean Cocteau and his followers in the American avant-garde who sought to create “film poems” as extensions of written verse in moving imagery, often with poetic soundtracks.

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