Victor Oscar Freeburg

Born in Iowa in 1882, Victor Oscar Freeburg was an American writer, teacher, and painter whose career moved between literature and the emerging world of motion pictures. Archival records at Yale describe him as a writer, painter, and teacher, and show that he studied at Yale and later earned a doctorate at Columbia.

He taught English and public speaking at several institutions, including the United States Naval Academy, the College of the City of New York, Haverford College, and Columbia. His early scholarly work included Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama (1915), but he is especially remembered for turning serious attention to film at a time when that was still unusual.

In books such as The Art of Photoplay Making and Pictorial Beauty on the Screen, he argued that movies should be judged not just as entertainment but as a visual art with its own principles of composition, light, and design. That mix of literary training and cinematic curiosity makes his writing a fascinating window into how people first began to think deeply about the art of film.