Subscribe

When we talk about George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1778–1860) we tend to leap from one dazzling highlight to another: the child prodigy who, at age ten, performed a Viotti concerto in Paris before an audience that included Thomas Jefferson, to the electrifying 1803 Vienna premiere of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major, Op. 47—the fiery work later rededicated as the “Kreutzer” Sonata after the famous falling-out between the two musicians.

And then, in William Hill’s New York there are the specifics. My favorite: the Daguerreian Gallery of Illustrious Americans, located at 205 Broadway, already present in the city by the mid-1840s. Its inclusion is not incidental. It places this image at the threshold between older forms of representation and the emerging modern world of mechanical reproduction.

As America strove to forge identity through music, literature, painting, and the arts more broadly, a remarkable innovation was quietly reshaping the musical landscape. It was precisely in this context that the piano, transformed by the invention of the iron frame by Bostonian piano maker Alpheus Babcock, entered the scene.

Those vast canvases—painted by artists paid to glorify emperors and battles—have now become our raw material. They are documents, not simply works of art. They are the visual record that allows us to animate history, to give shape to events, to place our subjects in a world that would otherwise exist only in text and memory.

Workflow is changing. Production models are changing. The way we capture, process, and share images is changing. And the audience — students, scholars, the public — is consuming information faster, with greater intensity, and through tools that barely existed a few years ago. In the middle of this shifting landscape, I asked ChatGPT an opinion...

This article is not an argument for restoring the former name or returning the monument. Reasonable people may still disagree about symbols in public space. But we should all agree that history must be based on what we can prove — not on what we “find fair to assume.”

The following unsigned article appeared in The Choir Leader in December 1898—the very month of George Frederick Bristow’s death. The author could not have known that the composer would pass away only weeks later, and thus the piece stands midway between tribute and obituary. Written in the past tense yet with the expectation of further work to come, it praises Bristow’s integrity, idealism, and devotion to American musical life while lamenting the nation’s failure to recogniz

Charlottesville, a city that once aspired to be a center of learning and culture, now bears the shame of this desecration.

As a documentary filmmaker, I was moved by Lankes’s vision and by his friendship with Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson. With J.J. Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia, I aimed to explore how his art and his dialogue with Frost, Anderson and others framed an American understanding of work, place, and purpose.

In 2004 I had the privilege of producing a film on Jesús Ramón Vera, a celebrated poet, writer, and devoted comparsero from Salta, Argentina. Vera’s life and work offer a fascinating journey across the cultural frontier of Northwest Argentina, blending high literature with the deep, collective traditions of the Andean highlands.

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.

Across painting, music, and the decorative arts, the exotic functioned as a field of projection—a way for Western culture to measure itself against the imagined other. Lévy’s brush, Tiffany’s glass, Bridgetower’s bow: each transformed foreignness into beauty, light, and sound that spoke as much about the Western imagination as about the East it sought to evoke.

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.

When Borges declared 'I'm fed up with him' about his own persona, he didn't imagine it would become my documentary title. 25 years later, 'Harto the Borges' remains relevant—a polyphonic portrait using multiple voices that resist synthesis, mirroring Borges's own literary techniques. My reflections on the methodology and complete transcription now available on Academia.edu to mark the anniversary.

I find myself trapped in 1898, not by choice but by some strange force, as if the year itself were a lucid dream from which I cannot—or perhaps do not wish to—wake. Every path of research leads back to this temporal crossroads, this pivot point where centuries collide in the most unlikely symphony of events.

Two decades have passed since the premiere of Testigo del Siglo at the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival, where the memoirs of Ismael Viñas—a man who shaped Argentina’s intellectual and political landscape—first flickered on screen. Viñas, the founder of Contorno magazine, a collaborator of Arturo Frondizi, and the creator of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN), left Argentina in 1976, never to return.

A mysterious letter arrives from Berlin, sent by Albert Imhoff, a blind critic and old friend of the filmmaker's father. Discover his profound analysis of the documentary "Rita Dove: An American Poet," a journey through memory, the "American dream", and the poet's quest to find a "different way out".

Between 1898 and 1933—spanning thirty-five years until Tiffany's death—Arlington Street Church commissioned what would become the largest collection of single-themed Tiffany windows in the world. Sixteen magnificent panels, conceived and executed as a unified narrative, demonstrate what becomes possible when patronage extends beyond individual commissions to embrace a complete artistic vision.

In the 1880s, Louis Comfort Tiffany lokking at this 700-year-old tradition would asked: “What if we could bring this magic into people’s daily lives, and into their homes?” The question lead Tiffany to reimagined the medieval trinity for a new world.

Perhaps, we have to stop swimming and let the current take us to safe harbor, or to a sandy beach somewhere. Come to think of it, it was in fact Aronovich who explained to me once how Weinschenk himself used to talk of shades of gray in film as beaches. And here I go again! drifting in free association when I should be getting ready to pick my daughter from school and talk about what we're going to do once we move to Madrid.