Reads as the lede a Wix preview card would show. The phrase "whose marble built much of civic America" is the hook — concrete, immediate, no jargon. The closing — "to the Apuan town from which they sailed" — gives it emotional shape without being florid.

A walk with Paul Chaleff through the gardens of the Hudson Valley — and a question about what the future will make of sculptures that begin in abstraction, answer to no god, and conduct their argument in a language the documentary is being made to help decipher.

How paella became, against his will, the symbol of a Spain that, after 1898, learned to show itself through the image. From Valencia to the Hispanic Society, a visual operation that Sorolla would fix in his panels.

A 1970 Buenos Aires LP of Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto leads back to a 1954 Vienna recording session, a Hannover-born conductor Alma Mahler had trusted, and a New Year’s Eve ritual in a Greenwich Village townhouse where two record producers poured molten lead into cold water and read the shapes.

A documentary portrait of Romanian Jewish settlers on the Saskatchewan prairie — told through the reflections of Rabbi Tuffs — tracing the flight from persecution, the hardship of sod dwellings, the tragedy of a woman buried near the fence, and the Talmudic warning that no amount of land is worth separating yourself from the community.

A catalogue of documentary films actively curated into programs designed to reach their rightful audience. Four trilogies — on the American Renaissance, Latin American literature, African American history, and three unparalleled women in the arts — now available for institutional programming, with more to come.

Leon Botstein had agreed to sit before our camera earlier in the year, but a sequence of inconveniences pushed our meeting past the date we had set for the avant-première at the Century. When the interview finally happened, at his residence at Bard, he gave us not an answer but an essay — on Bristow, Dvořák, the modern piano, and the long, unfinished business of figuring out what America sounds like.