Following the University Singers’ Spring Concert 2026 at UVA Old Cabell Hall, conducted by Michael Slon, I did something I hardly ever do: I reopened the final edit of Life and Music in the Age of George Frederick Bristow.

Los Cuentos del Timonel es el retrato documental que Eduardo Montes-Bradley filmó en Berlín sobre Osvaldo Bayer — historiador, periodista y anarquista argentino, autor de La Patagonia Trágica — ganador del Cóndor de Plata al Mejor Documental 2002 otorgado por la Asociación de Cronistas Cinematográficos de la Argentina.

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.

Pérez Celis es el retrato documental que Eduardo Montes-Bradley filmó en 2005 en el atelier de Little Haiti, Miami, sobre el pintor argentino Pérez Celis — uno de los grandes exponentes del arte latinoamericano del siglo XX. Un film sobre la creación, la motivación y la filosofía del acto de pintar.

When Americans think of classical music with an American accent, they think of Copland, Gershwin, Bernstein. The story, as commonly told, begins in the twentieth century. That assumption is wrong. Before them, in the concert halls and streets of 19th-century New York, George Frederick Bristow was already asking what it meant to make music in a democracy built from wilderness.

The counter-archive — the film that recovers what institutional memory has suppressed — operates exactly as Morin prescribed, and without needing his permission.

The University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson. The day it opened its doors, between ninety and one hundred and twenty enslaved people were living on grounds. They cooked. They cleaned. They built. They served the students and faculty in the pavilions along the Lawn. Individual students, prohibited from bringing their own enslaved people to Grounds, simply rented them from Charlottesville.

In April 1999, Argentina's Clarín gave Eduardo Montes-Bradley's documentary Soriano a full-page review in its prestigious Cultura y Nación section. Critic Jorge Carnevale called it "a revealing film" — a verdict that, twenty-seven years later, still holds.

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.

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

In 1984 Enrique Shore was the photographer of Argentina's CONADEP, walking through the cells and torture chambers to make the images that became evidence against the juntas. Four decades on, he photographs birds in flight. A tribute to a master of capturing what escapes.

Legend has it that veterans of the Pacific campaigns remember hearing a harmonica in the dark between landings — but nobody ever knew who was playing it. This documentary is the story of how we found him: William J. Eckert, Marine, Hamburg-born, Iwo Jima veteran, harmonica in his pocket through all of it.

Volví a ver Adelante Cubanos, la película de 1959, y descubrí que no era un retrato del fin de la República. Era el comienzo de la Revolución hablándose a sí misma, antes de saber lo que iba a hacer.

From George Frederick Bristow to Bad Bunny to Dudamel — American music was never forged. It was always being molded. A meditation on the NYT's story of the week.

Pilar Roca on João de Lira Cavalcante Neto — the Fortaleza journalist who left the newsroom to become one of Brazil's most read biographers, the writer of the definitive lives of Getúlio Vargas, Padre Cícero, and Maysa, for whom history is never finished.

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.

This morning Joseph Horowitz sent me an article in The New York Times about who actually does a dictatorship's dirty work — not fanatics, but the mediocre and the passed-over. I have already seen this movie. I filmed its first act, on Super 8, in the streets of Buenos Aires in 1974.

A find from the research desk of The Lost Republic: a Havana inventory listing a Thorvaldsen, a Wappers, a Columbus given by Columbus's own heir — and what these works tell us about the artistic world into which the Cuban Republic was born.