Paul Adams Sitney – P.Adams to his friends – who died on June 8, was a ground-breaking historian of American avant-garde cinema. He was the author of Visionary Film, one of the first books on the history of experimental movies. He was also a fierce critic of academia and its effect on the arts, calling Princeton, where he taught for many years, “the great enemy of poetry.”
P.Adams was born in New Haven but eschewed Yale to go to Trinity College. He transferred to Yale after freshman year, and while he loved his Greek, Latin and Sanskrit classes, “I so loathed the all-male environment I married after one he semester.”
“All my life I backed into my most important decisions. As a townie I didn’t go to Yale until my family moved away. Because I was an inadequate philologist I took an easier path, becoming a film critic and historian. I even became a university professor because I failed as an arts administrator.
“In 1980 I took a one-year post at Princeton and stayed 36, retiring in 2015.” He set a Princeton record for the number of courses he gave (nearly 300) and the number of programs in which he gave them (11).
“My happiest experience was a staggeringly rigorous great books course, but most of my seminars were spent dissecting nearly incomprehensible films. If the students did not find me funny, I probably wouldn’t have survived there. Universities tolerate a few outspoken cranks like me as long as we have no power.”