Who taught you how to see?
Your parents, sure, as they pointed to things and told you the words for them, thereby helping you understand where one object was said to end and another begin. Who else? The friend who invited you to partake for the first time, and in so doing initiated the process of reversing the earlier distinction-making and letting all color and form merge back into their unities? Okay, and who else—maybe an art (or art history) teacher along the way who helped you discern style and technique behind the color and form?
For me, a crucial figure in this group was the late P. Adams Sitney, my college film professor. And it wasn’t only I who benefitted from his eyes, his way of seeing—generations of students did, as well as all the readers of Visionary Film and his other books. So have all of those who have ever entered the doors of Anthology Film Archives, which Sitney co-founded back in 1970.
Next weekend Anthology is hosting a tribute series to Professor Sitney that reflects various aspects of his life and work. And it just so happens that the thoughtfully curated program is far more worthy of the name of this site than anything else I’ve ever covered here. We’re talking films that have never been digitized or screened on this continent. That’s part of the Sitney legacy, though: to discover, share, and champion work that may be challenging to access but has the power to change your relationship to the medium itself. As a youngster, I'd already been familiar with some of the syllabus titles, canon classics such as RASHOMON and REAR WINDOW. But then imagine sitting in front of a big screen and having your neurons rewired by the films of Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Michael Snow, and Maya Deren. To this day, MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON is in my Letterboxd top four.
In any case, here are some quick thoughts on the films in the program that I have seen...
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IL POSTO (1961)
The beauty of Ermanno Olmi’s Milan-set anti-coming-of-age film is the heartbreaking beauty of modern cities themselves—all the promise and freedom, all the stark impersonality and sneaking despair, along with the dawning suspicion that the former is just a lure for the latter. Watching IL POSTO, you’ll be reminded of various postwar “schools” of filmmaking across the Continent, but the film is clearly its own thing. The actors, with their small, telling gestures and shy glances, are all so real that the nonprofessionals come across as professional, and vice versa. There’s a degree of lowkey inventiveness to every scene, and the ending is a whispered blow to the heart. A film of deep humanity that has the power to touch even those who are sick to death of humanity.
WALDEN: REEL 2 (1969)
Forty glorious 16mm minutes pulled from the Jonas Mekas epic. You’ll spot some famous people (and Sitney himself, briefly) in this compilation of various short segments that make the New York of the 1960s seem more alive than the city of 2025. Revel in colors and lighting that are somehow both muted and extravagant, and in music that is vibrant, quirky, and at times seems to blend hypnotically in and out of the diegetic sound. A must-see for New Yorkers, both those who are genuinely nostalgic and those who are young enough to be fatally charmed by the nostalgia “aesthetic.”
ORDET (1955)
Sitney loved Dreyer, and in fact, it was through him that I first experienced this extraordinary and powerful film—and which is required viewing for anyone already under the spell of DAY OF WRATH or THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC. I’m hardly going to add anything new or insightful about this masterwork, but I probably should mention that the version being screened is in Danish only, with no subtitles, so keep that in mind.
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In sum, if you’re a cinephile who has the chance to catch this series, go ahead and make the pilgrimage; it’s an event that might revitalize your love for the art form itself, a result that would both honor and embody what P. Adams Sitney was always about—and always will be.
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