Victor Oscar Freeburg

Born in 1882, Victor Oscar Freeburg was an American writer, teacher, and later painter whose work moved between literature and the emerging art of film. Archival records at Yale describe him as a writer, painter, and teacher, and trace an academic career that included teaching English at the United States Naval Academy, the College of the City of New York, Haverford College, and Columbia in the years before and during the 1910s.

Freeburg is best remembered for his early books on cinema, especially The Art of Photoplay Making (1918) and Pictorial Beauty on the Screen (1923). These works argued that motion pictures should be judged not only by plot, but also by visual composition, movement, and artistic design. He also wrote Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama (1915), showing the range of his interests from Renaissance literature to modern screen art.

Although he is not as widely known today as some other early film thinkers, Freeburg stands out as one of the writers who took movies seriously at a formative moment in their history. His papers, preserved at Yale, suggest a long creative life that included teaching, criticism, and other artistic work before his death in 1953.