Arthur Robison
Arthur Robison (1883–1935) was an American-born German filmmaker most closely associated with the German Expressionist movement. Born in Chicago to a Jewish family that returned to Germany when he was a child, he studied medicine at the University of Munich and practised as a doctor before turning to film as a writer-director in 1914. Across some twenty films between 1916 and 1935 he became known for atmospheric, psychologically charged work; his masterpiece Warning Shadows (Schatten — Eine nächtliche Halluzination, 1923) is a Faustian dinner-party fable about a count, his wife, and her four suitors confronted with their own jealousy by a travelling shadow-player, and is notable for trying to dispense with intertitles entirely. Critics Lotte Eisner and Siegfried Kracauer both counted it among the masterpieces of the German silent screen.