The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism

by P. Adams Sitney

Book by Sitney, P

Genres: Film

295 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1978

About the author

P. Adams Sitney was a historian of American avant-garde cinema. He was known as the author of Visionary Film, one of the first books on the history of experimental film in the United States.

Reviews

[Nathan Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I'm very glad to be in possession of a copy of this Anthology Film Archives collection of various pieces related to avant garde filmmaking from the '20s to the '70s -- some criticism and analysis, but mostly philosophical ranting from the filmmakers themselves -- what I mostly learned is how bad an idea it is to give a surrealist film director a typewriter. I've spent a goodly amount of time around art students and this is still some of the most humorously self-important and combative, sometimes flagrantly nonsensical stuff I've ever read, much of it from artists I think are quite brilliant, like Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage. You also get to read Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov bitching about one another, and Jean Epstein bitching about everybody -- bitching being, of course, the true key to understanding great art. Interestingly enough, the most insightful material in the book from the artists' perspective is by the two major women directors of the avant garde, Germaine Dulac (who retired from making films to be an early teacher of film) and Maya Deren, whose admiration for UPA and Orson Welles I found quite endearing. Dulac and Deren's pieces are passionate but also clearheaded; the case they both make that filmmakers should harness the creativity possible in their medium rather than imitating literature and film is essentially the same as what their peers argue in much more lavish and inscrutable phrasing. The book also includes some good critique and context by the editor P. Adams Sitney, whose analysis of Frampton's (nostalgia) completely upended my perception of that great film, and a delightfully far-out interview with Harry Smith, but the lurching back and forth between pieces that take avant garde cinema seriously and pieces that seem like parodies of the sensibility that creates it makes this a pretty difficult read.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I ran the film series at Beyond Baroque I ate this book page by page. Basically a collection of essays by European and American Avant-Garde filmmakers. Everyone from Durac to Brakhage, Michael Snow, etc. Adams Sidney put this collection together and it's really essential collection to have if you even 'admire' avant-garde "art" films.