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THE JOURNAL
A DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER'S BLOG
NEW YORK CHARLOTTESVILLE VALENCIA
THE GUASTAVINO EFFECT
Genius at Work on Ellis Island | For nearly fifty years I've managed to stay away from two of New York’s famous landmarks: the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I'm not attracted to seeing a place simply because one is supposed to see it. I'm more interested in scouting a location, when the visit has a purpose and the building has something I need to understand. This time I had a purpose: Rafael Guastavino.
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Soriano: el documental que el tiempo convirtió en un archivo de voces
Durante años me preguntaron dónde se podía ver. Hoy vuelve, completa, mi primer documental sobre un escritor: Soriano, el retrato del Gordo que la academia desdeñó y los lectores amaron. Una película que el tiempo convirtió en el archivo de toda una generación.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 224 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
Una Cierta Mirada: Juan José Sebreli y el retrato de Buenos Aires en el siglo XX
Una Cierta Mirada es el retrato documental que Eduardo Montes-Bradley filmó en 2004 sobre Juan José Sebreli — sociólogo, ensayista y filósofo argentino — recorriendo los paisajes urbanos, arquitectónicos e intelectuales de Buenos Aires que definieron su vida y su pensamiento. Un film sobre la ciudad como destino y el siglo XX argentino como experiencia vivida.
Heritage Film Project
May 216 min read
Che Guevara Believed North Korea Was a Model for Cuba to Follow
A photograph from a drawer at the Cuban Heritage Collection raises a question the iconography has spent sixty years avoiding. In December 1960, Ernesto Guevara sat with Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang and called his regime a model.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 204 min read
Don Quixote: A Spanglish Version for el barrio
Years ago Ilan Stavans sent me the most sacred sentence in Spanish, rewritten in Spanglish. Moving to Spain now, I still can't decide whether it's desecration or birth. After Bad Bunny's Super Bowl, was Stavans a precursor?
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 206 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
Cuba: What the Republic Promised and the Revolution failed to Delivered
I went back to watch Adelante Cubanos, the 1959 film, and realized it was not a portrait of the Republic's end. It was the Revolution speaking to itself in its first months, before it knew what it was going to do.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 194 min read
The Manifiesto Herrán. Un filme documental de Norberto "Negro" Ramírez.
Manifiesto Herrán es el retrato documental de Teresa "Cuqui" Leonardi Herrán — poeta, docente y militante feminista de Salta, Argentina — construido a partir de los testimonios de su hijo Martín, sus compañeras intelectuales y sus amigos más cercanos. Un film sobre la coherencia como forma de vida, la poesía como acto político y el amor como fuerza revolucionaria.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 195 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
El cuerpo de la memoria de violinistas negros. Black Fiddlers, un filme de Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Un recorrido por la memoria musical afroamericana y la influencia decisiva de los violinistas negros en las tradiciones del folk y la música popular estadounidense.
Pilar Roca Escalante
May 183 min read
Feminism and the Lebanese Phalange. The Two Battles of Jocelyne Khoueiri
From the demarcation lines of Beirut to the foot of a Pope — Jocelyne Khoueiri’s life passed through two battles, and the truth she chose at the end.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 183 min read
Tauromaquia para un espectador incómodo
Una reflexión sobre la tauromaquia no como defensa, sino como contradicción: la dificultad de apartar la mirada frente a un rito antiguo que nuestra época intenta dejar atrás.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 173 min read
Running Through Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac at the Grolier Club
A visit to the Grolier Club's Kerouac exhibition on its closing day, where the letters outrank the novels and the title turns out to be a pencil mark in Dostoyevsky.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 155 min read
No Jews, No Dogs: The Talmudic Roots of American Freedom
A boy newly arrived in Miami reads a hotel sign on Collins Avenue: No Jews. No Dogs. He is old enough to understand it instantly. Decades later, as Rabbi Ed Farber, he traces that sign — and the values that made it possible, and the values that made it wrong — back to the first chapters of Genesis. A Heritage Film Project documentary.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 1410 min read
Note from Cuban poet José Kozer on a Documentary Film about Alice Parker
A walk through the archives at the Cuban Heritage Collection with Gladys Gómez-Rossie, the sight of José Kozer's name on a shelf, and the letter the great Cuban poet once sent on the Alice Parker documentary — recovered hours later from my own correspondence.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 145 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
The Piccirilli Factor to Screen at Villa Rinchiostra in Tuscany
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.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 123 min read
Jorge Luis Borges: Un documental que expone ideas.
A September 2000 clipping from Clarín reviews Harto the Borges and, near the foot of the third column, announces the coming birth of a son named Thomas Benjamín — conceived in Pompeya during the shoot.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 122 min read
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