Francisco remembers Richard Burton, one of the greatest actors of the last century, able to recite Shakespeare backward, who arose from grinding poverty in Wales to the heights of fame both on the London stage and the Hollywood screen, and who died at age 58, full of talent, but also of lusts for fame and for alcohol.

Driving to the Academy for the Oscar nominated documentary selections for this year, Francisco learns that Karl Lagerfeld, of whose life and work he was a scholar, passed away. Here is Francisco’s impromptu appreciation of the person and his unique impact on others. Karl was more than an icon, he was the last modernist in fashion.

Francisco’s ringside analysis of the circus as a metaphor for film, discussing Federico Fellini’s quasi-documentary, “The Clowns” alongside Wim Wenders’s “Wings of Desire” and other works. Nostalgia fills the fate of this world, “All the circuses have become stages,” claims a retired clown, characters, like so many others, left in an empty sadness. Has cultural film followed this fate?

Looking at a summary of current scientific thinking on creativity, Francisco finds important flaws in methods and approaches that narrowly study the mystery of what it means to create.

Francisco discusses the short, virtuosic life of Swedish DJ Avicii, and “Avicii: True Stories”, a revealing documentary shot over five years and across more than forty countries.

Film’s great age has passed, but it has been preserved in VHS, DVD’s, Blu-Ray, and lately streaming platforms. But like VHS and DVDs, streaming can die — and much more suddenly. Francisco reveals that the solution to cultural preservation of the moving image has been with us all along.