Offscreen Notes
P.A. Sitney R.I.P.: 1944-June 8, 2025
Saddened at the news of the passing of film critic/teacher P.A. Sitney at age 80, whose groundbreaking book Visionary Film remains the most influential book on post war American experimental cinema. Immersed in the American experimental scene of the 1950s and 1960s, coined the New American Cinema, Sitney was well poised to describe and define this creative explosion of non-narrative works, a secton of which he indelibly defined as 'structural' cinema, by these four characteristics 1) fixed camera 2) rephotography 3) loop printing 4) the flicker effect. Another of his books I liked just as much is Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature. The study and appreciation of avant-garde and experimental cinema is forever indebted to this giant of film history, theory and criticism.
