John Woo's Face/Off is a genuinely original piece of cinema. But originality is a more interesting thing than we usually give it credit for. The most original works are not the ones that arrive from nowhere — nothing arrives from nowhere — but the ones that cast a new light on myths and narrative tensions that have been traveling through human storytelling for centuries. That new light doesn't diminish what came before. It illuminates it.

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.

You probably know Piazzolla from Adiós Nonino, or from the Kronos Quartet recording that made a generation of American listeners suddenly aware that something extraordinary had been happening in Buenos Aires for thirty years without their knowing. What is harder to explain is why it took so long — not for American audiences to discover him, but for Buenos Aires itself to accept what he had made.

A stained glass window is a work of art — a dialogue between form, light, and color. Its fragility is comparable to human life, and yet like human beings it is capable of withstanding the assaults of time and oblivion. To preserve this heritage is to recognize where we come from and what road has brought us here.

Life and Music in the Age of George Frederick Bristow soon to be release through Alexander Street / ProQuest, reaching universities, colleges, and public libraries worldwide. A 65-minute documentary about a composer New York forgot — and why that forgetting matters.

Paul Chaleff occupies a position in contemporary American art that resists easy classification. Working in ceramics, yet rarely confined by the expectations of the medium, his work moves between object and sculpture, between function and form — propositions rather than tools — and into a philosophical territory rooted in existential inquiry.

A forgotten roll of film shot near Charlottesville VA resurfaces, revealing a quiet collaboration with guitarist Willie De at the abandoned Swannanoa estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

A filmmaker's shelf holds four books on one of the least documented chapters of twentieth-century American history: the African Americans — writers, engineers, artists, intellectuals — who traveled to or settled in the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1960s, in search of a society that promised what America denied them. Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Robert Robinson. Before these books go into storage, they deserve a post.

Un vitral es una obra de arte, un diálogo entre la forma, la luz y los colores. Testigo mudo de la historia, su fragilidad es comparable a la vida humana — y como ella, capaz de resistir los embates del tiempo y del olvido. Preservar este patrimonio es reconocer de dónde venimos.

A filmmaker's response to Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace — the Soviet epic restored by Criterion and available now in its full four-part, seven-hour form. On spectacle, chaos, Pierre Bezukhov, and why nothing in the history of cinema quite compares.

On my desk sits a first edition of Domingos en Hyde Park, published by Ediciones Sur, Buenos Aires, 1936. On the flyleaf, in a confident cursive hand: "A R. E. Montes Bradley, con toda simpatía — Victoria Ocampo." The essay it introduces — La Historia Viva — is one of the most remarkable political documents written by a Latin American intellectual in the twentieth century. It is remarkable not because Ocampo admired Mussolini. Many did. Between 1921 and 1935, Franklin D. Roos

A visit to Valencia’s Mercado Central reveals how traditional market exchanges are being reshaped by tourism and photography. As fish become objects of display and images, the space shifts from commerce to spectacle, raising questions about what is gained and lost in the process.

A filmmaker's meditation on the African diaspora across Brazil, Cuba, and the United States — beginning in a restaurant in California in the early 1980s and arriving, decades later, at the Bay of Guanabara, where historian Haroldo Costa offered the sentence that changed everything: We did not cut the umbilical cord. The first in a series of essays exploring Black History not as a month but as a living, continuous thread.

There is a painting in the Art Institute of Chicago that almost no one stops to look at. Thomas Birch painted it sometime between 1806 and 1812, and he called it Capture of the Tripoli by the Enterprise. It commemorates a war that has been almost entirely forgotten — which is a pity, because that war contains the most important argument the United States ever made about the freedom of the seas. And that argument is more urgently relevant today than it has been in two centurie