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Earlier this month I discovered this Deco delight on the excellent silent film Tumblr The Loudest Voice, where it was billed as “Ad for Bettina Loved a Soldier, 1916” with no further information as to where it came from. The film has an IMDb page but on its listing on the Progressive Silent Film List the survival status of the fim is “unknown.” A synopsis of the film can be found in Clive Hirschhorn’s The Universal Story (which documents the 2,641 films produced by Universal from the silent era until 1982) and there is also a synopsis on the TCM database.

Searching for the origins of the ad, which was more than likely an insert in a trade magazine (though what a poster it would have made), I stumbled across a treasure trove of similar ads on Flickr. The ads, all for Bluebird Photoplays Inc. and all seemingly drawn by one Burton Rice,...

Has another photo existed with so many great filmmakers in one shot? This was taken in 1936 on the occation of the creation of the Japan Film Directors Society.

Front row, from left:

Teinosuke Kinugasa (1896-1982)

Yoshinobu Ikeda (1892-1973)

Sadao Yamanaka (1909-1938)

Mansaku Itami (1900-1946)

Heinosuke Gosho (1902-1981)

Minoru Murata (1894-1937)

Shigeyoshi Suzuki (1900-1976)

Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956)

Second row, from left:

Tomotaka Tasaka (1902-1974)

Yasujiro Shimazu (1897-1945)

Hiroshi Shimizu (1903-1966)

Yutaka Abe (1895-1977)

Kiyohiko Ushihara (1897-1985)

Kajiro Yamamoto (1902-1974)

Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963)

Tomu Uchida (1898-1970)

Third row, from left:

Mikio Naruse (1905-1969)

Kintaro Inoue (1901-1954)

(Via Vermillion and One Nights.)...