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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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The Lens, Not the Library. A conversation, and an old quarrel with Borges
Rabbi Mario Rojzman and I discussed how the Torah functions not as a container of all stories, but as a master lens through which we can read every human encounter, across all cultures.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 122 min read
Totems Without Theology
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.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 117 min read
How Paella First Conquered Spain.
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.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 84 min read
A Law That Returns: Tilaï Restored at Cannes
A law that returns. Idrissa Ouédraogo's Tilaï, winner of the 1990 Grand Prix, returns to Cannes in a 4K restoration commissioned by the Institut français — Cinémathèque Afrique. Salle Buñuel, Wednesday 13 May, 11:30.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 84 min read
Evita: A Balanced Portrait of Argentina's Most Polarizing Figure.
Originally blacklisted in Argentina and now the most widely viewed film in the Heritage Film Project catalogue, Evita (2005) achieved its unusual evenness of tone through a single deliberate choice: the script was written in English rather than Spanish — the director's first screenplay in his second language. A close reading of how that linguistic distance produced the most balanced portrait yet of one of the twentieth century's most polarizing political figures.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 711 min read
Carola Saavedra: Between Berlin and a Place Named Peixoto — A Documentary by Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Carola Saavedra: Between Berlin and a Place Named Peixoto is an award-winning Heritage Film Project production directed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley, part of his ongoing series of documentary essays on contemporary authors.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 59 min read
White: A Season in the Life of John Borden Evans. A documentary by Montes-Bradley. North Garden, Virginia, 2014
In the deep winter of 2014, Heritage Film Project's Eduardo Montes-Bradley spent a season at the North Garden, Virginia farmhouse where the painter John Borden Evans and his wife, designer Beth-Neville Evans, have lived and worked for more than thirty years. White is the portrait that came out of that winter — and the Richmond International Film Festival's Best Documentary of 2015.
Heritage Film Project
May 35 min read
How Alban Berg, With the Complicity of Alma Mahler and a Trusted Friend in Greenwich Village, Made the Journey from Vienna to Buenos Aires.
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.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 35 min read
James Monroe's Farm During the Reign of Terror, Cradle of the University of Virginia
James Monroe owned Monroe Hill from 1789 to 1799 — the exact decade of the French Revolution, with most of it spent in Paris during the Reign of Terror. A note on the film, the Jefferson Trust, the absent landlord whose hill became the cradle of the University of Virginia, a rumor of Monroe's face in David's Coronation of Napoleon, and the unmarked grave of his daughter Eliza at Père Lachaise — a few rows from Jim Morrison.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 28 min read
The Saskatchewan Odyssey of the Jewish Diaspora in Canada
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.
Heritage Film Project
May 17 min read
A Curated Catalogue: Documentary Trilogies Now Available for Institutional Programming
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.
Heritage Film Project
May 13 min read
An Hour with Leon Botstein
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.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Apr 295 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
Documentary Film Fund Is Proud to Support: The Voice Before the Silence — Norberto Ramírez and the Sonidos de Salta Sound Archive
Norberto Ramírez's Sonidos de Salta is one of Latin America's most significant oral heritage archives — a living sound bank documenting the writers, inhabitants, and landscapes of Argentina's northwest. A resource for academic institutions in ethnomusicology, musicology, and cultural anthropology.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Apr 295 min read
La Voz Antes del Silencio: Documentary Film Fund apoya la imprescindible labor de Norberto Ramírez y el Banco Sonoro de Salta
El Banco Sonoro de Salta, creado por Norberto Ramírez, es uno de los archivos de patrimonio oral más significativos de América Latina — un banco sonoro vivo que documenta escritores, pobladores y paisajes del noroeste argentino. Un recurso para instituciones académicas en etnomusicología, musicología y antropología cultural
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Apr 295 min read
A Rooster, Two Musicians, and a Kitchen in Cuba. What Buena Vista Social Club Left Behind
Recorded in the back patio of a home in the barriada de Santa Amalia, municipio of Arroyo, this surviving fragment of the documentary project Son Tres Son captures two musicians, a rooster who refused to stay out of it, and the sounds of a kitchen preparing lunch. The song is Síctera Cubana, written by Carlos Enrique García Fernández, recorded in La Habana in 1994 by Trío Los Titanes. Some recordings capture a performance. This one captured an afternoon.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Apr 281 min read
Let's Face It, On Face/Off, John Woo, and the New Light That Original Work Casts on Ancient Myths
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.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Apr 276 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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