George Pearson

George William Pearson (born March 19, 1875 in Kennington , London , † February 8, 1973 in Malvern ) was a British film director , producer and screenwriter .

Life

Pearson initially worked as a teacher. In 1913, as a married 37-year-old with three children, he gave up his teaching profession and started working as a screenwriter and film producer at Pathés studios in London. In 1915 he went to Gaumont , where he invented Ultus , the avenger of injustice, which was popular in four films between 1915 and 1917 as the British counterpart to the French Fantômas .

In 1918 he founded the film production company Welsh-Pearson with Thomas Welsh, which produced in new studios in Craven Park. Her most financially successful films included four Squibs comedies (1921-1923) that established Betty Balfour as a star in the UK. They owe their success to the mixture of down-to-earth humor of their heroes from the working class and the portrayal of typical mishaps in life, which was well received by the audience.

In addition to these works of simple entertainment, he also created more artistically demanding, emotionally charged film dramas with Nothing Else Matters (1920), Love, Life and Laughter (1923), Reveille (1924) and The Little People (1926). Pearson attached particular importance to the visualization of the feelings of his protagonists with cinematic means. Reveille is considered his masterpiece, which portrays the struggle for life of ordinary people and injustices in times of peace. In this silent film, Pearson portrayed a minute's silence for the war dead in a particularly vivid way.

Pearson was an advocate of film art and became a founding member of the London Film Society and president of the Association of British film directors. He gave lectures and spoke out against the introduction of quotas for British films, as this would decrease the quality of British films. His company did not make the transition to talkies and went bankrupt in the early 1930s. In 1934 he separated from Welsh and shot cheap productions for Julius Hagen at Twickenham Studios until 1937.

When the war began, Pearson joined Alberto Cavalcanti in the GPO Film Unit and, as Director-in-Chief of the Colonial Film Unit, took care of the training of filmmakers from friendly Commonwealth countries. In 1948 he became an honorary member of the Royal Photographic Society, and in 1951 the British Film Academy . In the same year he was named Officer of the British Empire (OBE). He retired from work at the age of 80 and published his autobiography Flashback in 1957 : an Autobiography of A British Film Maker .

Web links

• George Pearson in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• George Pearson at screenonline