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.

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.

Life and Music in the Age of George Frederick Bristow (2026) is a documentary exploring 19th-century American music and New York’s search for cultural identity. Through the life of composer George Frederick Bristow, the film examines opera, symphonic ambition, immigration, and canon formation, situating New York within a broader dialogue across the Americas. Available in feature and classroom editions.

And then the Civil War barged in, rude as a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. You can’t tell Bristow’s story without it: 750,000 Americans dead in four years—how many of them might have someday sat in a concert hall to hear one of his symphonies, or become the next generation of musicians carrying his work forward? I hit pause on everything else and started patching together that chapter—still pinning photos to the wall like a detective.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, an extravagant Frenchman arrived in New York with a gold-tipped baton and a sense of theater that the concert stage had never seen. His name was Louis-Antoine Jullien, and long before Liberace—or anyone who understood that art and spectacle could share the same stage—there was Jullien.

The Future of Documentary Filmmaking is here, and the opportunity is immense. We can speak across borders, build communities of curiosity, and reimagine how memory and truth circulate. But the work demands a routine, a sustainable practice, and a kind of faith—the same faith composers once needed when creating music that might never be performed.

The distinction—between the beautiful and the sublime—was crucial to nineteenth-century aesthetics, and it became the fault line in the cultural dialogue between America and Europe. Europe had the beautiful: cultivated landscapes, historic cities, art that had been refined over centuries.

Colonel James A. Gray, the founder of the World Monuments Fund. She described him as a man who solved problems with quiet boldness—the kind who didn't just raise money but took action. In 1965, he founded what became WMF after pursuing ideas that seemed audacious at the time, like stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In 1968, he arranged to bring an Easter Island moai to New York's Seagram Building to remind the world what was at stake—heritage, memory, humanity itself.

Explore Louis Comfort Tiffany’s stained-glass windows in their original settings with Tiffany in the Wild. At Woodlawn Cemetery in New York and other historic sites across the United States and Havana’s Colón Cemetery, Tiffany’s opalescent glass transforms mausoleums into living museums of light and memory. From Woodlawn’s Belmont, Woolworth, and Gould mausoleums to the Lewis Ginter Mausoleum in Richmond, these radiant works reveal the collaboration of architects, sculptors,

In the annals of American art preservation, few stories are as compelling as Hugh McCain's personal connection to Louis Comfort Tiffany and his subsequent mission to save the master's work from destruction. Through a remarkable interview conducted by Les Anderson, we gain intimate access to McCain's memories—not just as a scholar and museum director, but as one of the last people to know Tiffany personally and witness the splendor of Laurelton Hall before its tragic demise.

The future of documentary filmmaking hinges on a filmmaker’s ability to adapt to the ever-evolving funding landscape.

Michael’s devotion to French was not merely academic; it was deeply personal.

The Piccirilli Factor at The Met

Back in Charlottesville, I eagerly began editing the footage captured last week in New York with Lisa Ackerman and John Belardo.