"Appearing in 1974, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde invented a tradition and created a history for a field that was generally regarded, except by a few zealots, as an obscure backwater. Visionary Film opens with founding mother Maya Deren, goes on to explicate her heirs Gregory Markopoulos, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage, ruminates on the radical nature of underground movies and Harry Smith's arcane animations, and concludes with a formalist tendency the author himself had identified several years before and named "Structural Film.""
"In the process Sitney more than made the case for his subject's cultural centrality, arguing that as some filmmakers (many of whom had been painters) Americanized Surrealism and extended Abstract Expressionism, others had affinities with high-modernist poets Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Charles Olson. Although the book was unreviewed by the New York Times, the paper's lead film critic, Vincent Canby,"
A 1974 intervention invented a tradition and created a history for American avant-garde film, elevating it from an obscure backwater to cultural centrality. Founding figures included Maya Deren and heirs Gregory Markopoulos, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, with Harry Smith notable for arcane animations. A formalist tendency named Structural Film was delineated. Some filmmakers Americanized Surrealism and extended Abstract Expressionism; others showed affinities with modernist poets Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Charles Olson. The intervention was readable and canonical, earning mainstream critical notice while provoking objections from practitioners who rejected literary analogues as an inadequate interpretive toolkit.
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