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THE JOURNAL
A DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER'S BLOG
NEW YORK CHARLOTTESVILLE VALENCIA

FEATURE ESSAY
The numbers do not fully absorb. As of this writing, 1,783 cultural heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed in Ukraine since February 24, 2022. Among them, 46 have been completely erased. The Ministry of Culture counts 346 artists and 132 media workers dead. PEN Ukraine had already reached 102 cultural figures killed by the end of 2024, and the count has not stopped. These are not collateral casualties. They are the point.
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Ignacio Zuloaga: The Other Face of the Spanish Modernist Coin
Writing from Valencia, Eduardo Montes-Bradley finds Zuloaga's canvases in the Museo de Bellas Artes and, from Sorolla's dark twin to the red and black roosters of El gallo negro, traces the two Spains — from the crack of 1898 to the Civil War songs of Republican refugees in Buenos Aires.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 244 min read


City of Memory, City of Forgetting: Valencia in Layers
Nanjing accumulated its past, layer upon layer. Valencia did something stranger — it kept some layers and erased others. Reading a city through what remains, and what was made to disappear.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 144 min read


Chronicle of a Summer: A Film That Still Has Something to Teach Us
I recently rewatched Chronicle of a Summer, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's 1961 film, for the first time in nearly fifty years. I must have first seen it as a young teenager. The strange thing this time around was the math: this film was shot in the summer of 1960 — basically the moment I was born. Watching it again, I found myself looking less at "subjects" in a sociological experiment and more at my own parents' generation, caught on camera at exactly the age they would have

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 65 min read


Arte Brasileiro: Marcelo Soares
Pilar Roca Escalante visita o ateliê de Marcelo Soares em Timbaúba e traça o retrato do xilogravurista e cordelista de Olinda, herdeiro do "poeta-repórter" José Soares. Entre rendeiras, violeiros, o pavão misterioso e as vestes do cangaço, suas gravuras transpõem em imagem a música e a alma do Nordeste.

Pilar Roca Escalante
Jul 23 min read


Stepping Into the Light
In the Jim Crow South, Black men and women paid to step into the photographer’s studio and be seen as they chose. The Holsinger Studio Collection holds the record of that quiet defiance.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 302 min read


Nude Muse in Bronze from Acapulco.
A modernist bronze of a woman — commissioned by Colonel Frank "Brandy" Brandstetter, founder of Las Brisas — leads back to a Carrara dynasty, to Rodin, and to the one building where Ponzanelli's marble met Tiffany's glass.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 265 min read


Aurora (Cristi Puiu, 2010): The Romanian Don Quixote
A New Orleans Creole melody from the 1840s holds the edges of twenty-first-century Bucharest. Cristi Puiu's Aurora is cinema of formal austerity, post-socialist collapse, and one man's inevitable violence — framed entirely by Gottschalk.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 184 min read


Medium Format: Intimacy and Pleasure: Size Matters.
I use medium format photography to calm my anxiety. To feel at ease. To walk around the neighborhood without a destination. And to experience what feels like an ancient sensation — of being one with the image.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 23 min read


The Burning Archive: Ukrainian Art in the Time of War
The numbers do not fully absorb. As of this writing, 1,783 cultural heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed in Ukraine since February 24, 2022. Among them, 46 have been completely erased. The Ministry of Culture counts 346 artists and 132 media workers dead. These are not collateral casualties. They are the point.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 305 min read


The Brightness of Light: Paul Wagner's Georgia O'Keeffe Documentary
Wagner's film traces O'Keeffe's journey from Midwestern roots through the New York avant-garde and into the New Mexican desert, weaving through it a persistent and very American anxiety: the question of cultural identity. What is American art? What is American? It is a concern that feels more urgent in the United States than perhaps anywhere else. I had assumed this preoccupation belonged in the 1800s, in times of the Centenary, the Gilded Age. But it seems the quest carried

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 303 min read


Giacomo Puccini came from a family that fortune consistently favored. His younger brother Michele was the one exception — he crossed to South America first, fell to yellow fever, and never came home.
Giacomo Puccini’s younger brother Michele died unknown in Rio in 1891, after a duel and a flight from Jujuy. The warning that kept Giacomo in Italy reached me through Héctor Tizón — a Jujuy judge — in a film I directed twenty-five years ago.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 252 min read


Edouard Manet, and the Foreign Eye on Imperial Brazil
Before Brazil painted itself, the world saw it through other people's hands. Debret's three folios, a sixteen-year-old Manet on a school ship, and the foreign eye on imperial Rio.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 224 min read


Why I Stopped Submitting to Small Film Festivals (And What Works Better)
A filmmaker's reckoning with the festival circuit — who finances whom, why public money raised in cinema's name never reaches the maker, and the day the screen became a chamber for amplifying everything but the film. The author is keeping his films, and his right to choose.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 2013 min read


J.J. Lankes: Among Poets and Rebels — Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson
A documentary portrait of American woodcut master Julius John Lankes — filmed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley and Soledad Liendo — tracing a pastoral vision of agrarian America, a lifelong friendship with Robert Frost, and a defiant career undone at last by the Cold War machine it had always refused to serve.

Heritage Film Project
May 189 min read


Modern Cuban Painters, Revisited
A Tuesday afternoon between meetings at the Frost Art Museum at FIU, where Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York: Revisited returns the landmark 1944 MoMA exhibition to American walls eighty-two years later.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 143 min read


Paul Chaleff and the Point of Transition
Robert C. Morgan visits Paul Chaleff's Pine Plains studio and finds a sculptor working the fault line where two dimensions become three — where a vessel becomes a sculpture, where function dissolves into form. A meditation on clay as a tactile counterweight to the digital fatigue of our age.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Apr 293 min read


Daniel Chester French, The Piccirilli Factor, and George Bristow: An Unexpected Trilogy Across Art, Music, and Cultural History
How three documentaries — on Daniel Chester French, the Piccirilli Brothers, and George Frederick Bristow — became, almost by accident, a trilogy about the nineteenth-century American search for a cultural identity. A reflection on sculpture, music, authorship, and the long shadow of Massa-Carrara.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Apr 263 min read
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