Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Series

P. ADAMS SITNEY (1944-2025)

September 27 – September 29

September 27-29, 2025

When P. Adams Sitney passed away on June 8, 2025, Anthology lost one of the last living links to its formation, and the world of American experimental film studies lost arguably its foundational scholar. Alongside Jonas Mekas (as well as Peter Kubelka, Jerome Hill, and Stan Brakhage), P. Adams co-founded Anthology, which would ultimately open in 1970. In 1974, after creating and editing the journal Filmwise as a teenager, writing extensively for Film Culture, editing Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision, and editing several other volumes for Anthology, he published his seminal book Visionary Film. One of the very first – and certainly the finest and most comprehensive – historical/critical overviews of American avant-garde cinema, Visionary Film has remained the definitive text on the subject for the past 50 years. Without a doubt the preeminent historian of American experimental film, P. Adams also wrote brilliantly about European narrative cinema, as well as literature and poetry. He was a student of the literary giant Harold Bloom, taught generations of students at Princeton, and until the very end gave public talks at Anthology and other venues, which, thanks to his incredible erudition, charisma, and mischievous personality, were legendary. He has been a presiding spirit for the past 55 years here at Anthology, and his influence, example, and body of work are embedded in every part of what we do.

The scope and depth of P. Adams’s writing and teaching was so immeasurable that representing his life and work in a single weekend is impossible. But to pay public tribute to him, we offer several programs that we know he would have jumped at the opportunity to see (and present): a selection of short films by Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, and Marjorie Keller (P. Adams’s second wife); a rare presentation of a work by Gregory Markopoulos; an Essential Cinema screening of Dreyer’s ORDET (1955); and – in acknowledgement of Sitney’s interest in Italian cinema, which resulted in his 1995 book, “Vital Crises in Italian Cinema” – a screening of Ermanno Olmi’s IL POSTO (1961). Reflecting P. Adams’s devotion to seeing and presenting films on film, all these works will screen on 16mm and 35mm.

Special thanks to Augusta, Blake, Miranda, and Sky Sitney; as well as to Robert Beavers.

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