In a profile of Josef von Sternberg for the New Yorker in March 1931, the year Americans got to see the English-language version of Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), the author begins where most writers do when discussing the Austrian-born director who conquered Hollywood with his outré style, both on and off the [...]
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Shari Kizirian
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Shari Kizirian is a cultural journalist living in Rio de Janeiro. She has been a member of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s Writers Group since 1998 and co-edits its programme book.
Articles by Shari Kizirian:
Recine, the International Festival of Archival Cinema, is the stuff a cinephile’s dreams are made of. Its slate bulges with beloved classics, premiering restorations, and a host of new films competing for prizes, including one for best research. Each day from 10am to 5pm, films were scheduled back-to-back in the vaulted-roof “cellars” of the National [...]
It’s great to have an excuse to re-watch a fondly remembered film. Repeated viewings can deepen our appreciation as favourite moments are relived, high points relished, previously overlooked nuances, connections or details revealed. But there’s a danger, too, that it might turn out to be not as great as our memory of it, and that [...]
In 1926, the October Revolution Jubilee Committee pulled Sergei Eisenstein, Grigorii Aleksandrov, and cameraman Eduard Tisse away from Generalnaia Liniia (The General Line, eventually completed in 1929) to begin work on a new film. Commissioned along with Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Konets Sankt-Peterburga (The End of St. Petersburg, 1927), Boris Barnet’s Moskva v Oktiabre (Moscow in October, [...]
History weighs heavy around the pretty neck of Madame Dubarry. The story of a young grisette in a Paris hat shop who coquettes her way to the top, it is set on the eve of the French Revolution and was made in the middle of a German one. A cast-of-thousands spectacle, it got both its [...]
Before American and European motion pictures took over Brazilian movie screens in 1911, domestic cinema was enjoying a bela época. Dominated by actualités and newsreels as most early cinemas were, Brazilian cinema also produced the popular genre of filmes cantantes, which un-spooled to the sounds of singers, musicians, and actors stashed behind the screen. Their [...]
São Paulo 25 March – 5 April 2009 Rio de Janeiro 26 March – 5 April 2009 Brasília 14-26 April 2009 A poster advertising the It’s All True Documentary Festival, held 25 March-5 April in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, claims that popcorn “goes good” with documentaries too. Anyone who has laid out [...]
