The Motion Picture Director (Sep 1925 - Feb 1926)

20 THE MOTION PICTURE DIRECTOR /' ebruary VICTOR SEASTROM DRAFTING OF EUROPE AMERICAN SVEND GADE THE vast, world-conquering popularity of American screen production has resulted in the drafting of the best directorial brains of Europe into the work of film production in Hollywood. Of the group pictured above, the majority have come from Europe after outstanding achievement in the film industry there had attracted the attention of American producers. Eric Von Stroheim is the only real exception to this rule among those listed here; while he studied the stage and was an actor in Europe, he worked in pictures in Hollywood as an extra, a character player and a star before becoming a director. Inevitably, one tends to put the foreign directors into one group classification, and American directors into another, and to say that the work of the former differs from that of the latter. Actually, the director whose natural dramatic methods most resemble those of Ernst Lubitsch, for instance, is not one of the other foreigners, but an American. The same might be said of Svend Gade, as we know him by his work to date ; while Benjamin Christianson groups with the foreigners only by race. BENJAMIN CHRISTIANSON Freulich ERIC VON STROHEIM The closest bond that exists between any of the foreign directors occurs in the case of Victor Seastrom and Mauritz Stiller. The latter was a pioneer European director, and Seastrom was an actor in Stiller’s pictures. Seastrom, how