In Remembrance of Anthony (Tony) Pipolo (1940–2023)
by Stuart Liebman, Cineaste Contributing Writer

Tony Pipolo, a long-time contributor to Cineaste and a friend to many of its editors and writers, passed away at his home after a protracted illness on March 27, 2023. My memories of Tony go back more than fifty years, and the earliest ones have become surprisingly hazy as they have been overlaid by the times we spent together and the ever-deepening friendship with him, with Carole, his wonderful wife of fifty-four years, and with their daughter Isabel and her family. (I am eternally grateful to Carole for her extraordinary skill when typing my dissertation on a rushed basis during the pre-computer age.)

Educated at St. John’s University in Queens, NY, Tony earned an M.A. in English Literature and completed his PhD in Cinema Studies at New York University in 1981. While still pursuing his doctoral studies in 1968, he had already become a faculty member of the English Department at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York, and during the next four decades thousands of undergraduates benefited from his courses in film and literature. Starting in the 1990s, he also regularly helped dozens of PhD students at the CUNY Graduate Center to use some of the theoretical, historical, and critical methodologies of Film Studies to expand the scope of their dissertations in Art History, Theater, and other disciplines. As overburdened by teaching responsibilities at CUNY as he was, he nevertheless also accepted occasional invitations to offer film courses at Princeton University. His enviable intellectual breadth and pedagogical range always fired his commitment to teaching.

I had come to New York in 1972 after deciding against a career in Art History and instead became a graduate student in the relatively new Cinema Studies PhD program at NYU. Tony had entered the program two years earlier as one of the first to channel his academic career into the complex history of movies and the rapidly developing critical and theoretical appreciations of the medium’s artistic potential. His teaching responsibilities at CUNY and from 1973 onward, my own, left few opportunities for us initially to meet. Eventually, however, sometime in 1974 we both were able to enroll in a seminar entitled “Dreyer/Bresson” which was taught by the brilliant young scholar, P. Adams Sitney. The course yielded two wonderful results: Tony’s and my shared enthusiasm for Sitney’s approach to the extraordinary films he screened served to jump-start our budding friendship; and over the course of the semester and beyond, P. Adams became a mentor and friend until the end of Tony’s life.

A passionate moviegoer, Tony knew a great deal about—as well as a great memory for the details of—Hollywood movies. It was, however, his experience of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible—a film he screened and taught many times during his career—that convinced him that larger intellectual horizons of cinematic art were worthy of extended analysis and critical support. At NYU, Sitney’s readings of avant-garde films through the lenses of literature and literary theory and the late critic Annette Michelson’s insistence on close analysis of modernist cinematic texts became foundational for Tony’s own future scholarly writings. The first fruit of the “Dreyer/Bresson” course led to his pioneering doctoral dissertation about the several circulating versions of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1929). Ultimately, too, Tony’s fascination with Bresson’s films led to his splendid book, Robert Bresson: A Passion for Cinema, published by Oxford University Press in 2010. It was truly a great honor for me to be asked to present him with the “Siegfried Kracauer Award” for significant achievement in film criticism for this book, a labor of love whose seed had been planted nearly four decades before.

Tony remained passionately committed to the work of the most formally innovative international “Art Cinema” and avant-garde filmmakers who had emerged from the 1940s to the present. Over the years, he contributed pieces on Aleksandr Sokurov, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Béla Tar, among other notable filmmakers in magazines and journals such as Film Comment, October, and The Village Voice. He also wrote frequently for Cineaste, over the years contributing dozens of book and film reviews, feature articles on the films of Stanley Kubrick, Robert Bresson, and Fasssbinder, as well as ambitious historical articles such as “Hero or Demagogue?: Images of Lincoln in American Film” and “Joan of Arc: The Cinema’s Immortal Maid.” During the last decade or so of his life, he also wrote reviews of many new releases as well as comprehensive accounts of the avant-garde film programs featured at the annual New York Film Festival for the on-line edition of Artforum. This second enterprise in particular led to The Melancholy Lens: Loss and Mourning in American Avant-Garde Cinema, published by Oxford in 2021. This, his last book, offered illuminating, highly original psychoanalytic studies of films by Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopolous, Robert Beavers, and Ernie Gehr. He was able to make this psychoanalytic turn in his thinking about film because he somehow had found the time to earn his credentials as a psychotherapist, an occupation he practiced for several years after retiring from teaching.

The Melancholy Lens was to have been followed by a second book integrating close formal analysis with psychoanalytic readings of selected works by a number of Hollywood filmmakers. Unfortunately, it was unfinished at the time of his death. Stanley Kubrick, a modernist, as Tony described him, “obsessed with perfection as a medieval craftsman,” would have been a central figure in the book for the ways he had challenged the esthetic, technological, and narrative conventions of American industry practice. Readers of Cineaste would have gained hints of how Tony would have pursued his (psycho)analysis of some of Kubrick’s movies when the magazine published several of his masterfully detailed critical assessments of more than two dozen books about Kubrick’s work that had been released after the filmmaker’s death in 1999 (“Stanley Kubrick’s History Lessons,” Cineaste, Spring 2009). These pieces reveal what an astute and exacting reviewer Tony was. His writing was always informed by a quality that might be best characterized by plucking a word from the title of his Bresson book. That word is “passion,” a passion for watching and thinking about films. His thinking about films was always conveyed in prose that was eminently readable, writing that blended complexity with admirable lucidity, unmarred by faddish, shifting academic jargons. He could be blunt, sometimes even caustic, in his criticisms, but always remained fair-minded and willing to praise authors who had earned it.

He expected no less of other writers when he took on editing responsibilities for three very different journals over the course of his career. He was (as was I) one of the original editorial team in 1983 that produced Persistence of Vision, a wide-ranging CUNY series devoted to themed issues on various topics about international films such as the demise of New German Cinema, “Psychoanalysis and Cinema,” “Philosophy and Cinema,” or Jean Renoir’s political films of the 1930s. In 1986, he became a coeditor of Millennium Film Journal, a nearly ten-year-old, New York-based magazine focusing on American and international avant-garde filmmaking. Finally, for the last seven years of his life, Tony served as the sole editor of The Psychoanalytic Review, expanding its purview, and elevating its stature as it became one of the leading journals in its field. He sent two future issues with still unpublished texts devoted to vital studies of transgender psychology to the presses just before he resigned his position to concentrate on his health challenges in January 2023.

A person of the broadest cultivation, Tony’s commitment to the art of cinema in its myriad forms was matched only by his engagement with all the other cultural practices—theatrical, operatic, musical, and artistic—that were going on in New York City. He was always a prodigious reader. New and interesting tomes, whether Paul Ceylan’s or Giacomo Leopardi’s poems; or Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Peter Brook’s writings about the French novelist’s work; or Joseph Franks’ five volume biography of Dostoyevsky. I remain mystified by how he found the time to fit and place all this intellectual abundance into his life. Indeed, I am sure I am not the only one who has wondered how Tony could somehow conjure additional hours out of every day, hours that were seemingly inaccessible to anyone else, to pursue all his cultural interests. (At their fiftieth wedding anniversary dinner, I toasted Carole and Tony’s seventy-five years together; when they protested, I explained that they alone seemed to manage to live and work and read and see and screen thirty-six hours a day. The numerical calculations in my toast were therefore entirely correct.)

Make no mistake about it: despite Tony’s intellectual commitments to exacting modernists like Brakhage or Bresson did not reflect any desire to live as austerely as Bresson’s country priest. He loved to eat and drink too much ever to adopt the diet of stale bread and bad wine chosen by the devout curé of Ambricourt. I do not mean to suggest that Tony was in any sense a sybarite. Rather, whenever I needed a recommendation of a new restaurant for a special occasion, I would always turn first to him among all my friends, knowing that he would be au courant with the latest new venues. (That did not stop me from wondering why he even bothered dining out since Carole was such a marvelously ambitious, inventive cook—as well as a most gracious host. And Tony also took great pride in his selection of bottles he collected from the wine stores of New York and abroad. Their proprietors and his many delighted dinner guests will miss his patronage!)

Over the last several months, Tony faced the prospect of his death with extraordinary directness and courage. Even as his condition became increasingly dire in the hospital, he seemed to put aside his concerns when I visited. His intellectual curiosity reanimated as he asked me about a newly released film, including the recently “Oscarized” Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All at Once, that his illness had prevented him from seeing. (Astoundingly, he caught up with it while at home in hospice care.) And he eagerly displayed his new find, Grey Bees, by the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov, which Carole had started to read to him. I will definitely read it because I have never regretted any of Tony’s literary recommendations. His capacity—indeed, his enthusiasm—for new intellectual and artistic challenges was always an integral part of Tony’s life. Now, sadly, he has joined several others among Cineaste’s close collaborators—Dan Georgakas in 2021 and Rahul Hamid in 2022—whose singular voices and perspectives on the art and politics of cinema Cineaste has recently lost. Their passing deeply affects those of us who knew them well, even as we are comforted somewhat by our awareness that their publications inspired many of the magazine’s readers who did not. We also know that friends and Cineaste subscribers alike will miss their passionate commitment, a commitment we share, to stimulate our readers to think more deeply about and through the art of cinema.

Stuart Liebman is professor emeritus at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Copyright © 2023 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 3