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Charles John Musser (born 16 January 1951) is a film historian,documentary filmmaker, and afilm editor.^[1] Since 1992, he has taught atYale University, where he is currently aprofessor ofFilm and Media Studies as well asAmerican Studies andTheater Studies. His research has primarily focused onearly cinema, and topics such asEdwin S. Porter,Oscar Micheaux,race cinema of the silent era,Paul Robeson, film performance, as well as a variety of issues and individuals in documentary. His films includeAn American Potter (1976),Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982) andErrol Morris: A Lightning Sketch (2014).^[2]

Musser was born inStamford, Connecticut and grew up inOld Greenwich andRiverside.^[3] The son of Robert John Musser, who worked for Union Carbide, and his wife Marilyn (née Keach). He has two sisters, Nancy and Jane. His grandfather,John Musser, was chair of the History Department and later Dean of Graduate School at NYU.^[4]

Musser attended St. Paul's School inConcord, New Hampshire, where he took Public Affairs courses withGerry Studds. He also apprenticed to local studio potter Gerry Williams, a former conscientious objector whose father was close friends withGandhi. Studds and Williams did much to shape his political consciousness in the late 1960s. He won the school's history prize his senior year. In the fall of 1969, he became a freshman at Yale University. He created his own major in film studies and, took classes withJay Leyda,Standish Lawder,Murray Lerner,David Milch,Michael Roemer and Peter Demetz. His wrote his first film paper on Dziga Vertov'sMan with a Movie Camera (1929) and his senior thesis was entitled "Russian Formalism and EarlySoviet Film Theory."^[3]

Musser temporarily left Yale in 1972, moving to New York City to work in the film industry. After a series of short jobs, he was hired to work onHearts and Minds (1974) and eventually became the first assistant editor.^[2] In New York he worked with and learned from producer-directorPeter Davis and media theoristTom Cohen. Musser then worked in Los Angeles with assisted editorsLynzee Klingman andSusan E. Morse.^[3] He graduated with aBA in Film and Literature from Yale in 1975. He received hisMA in Cinema Studies from NYU in 1979, and earned hisPh.D. in Cinema Studies in the Fall of 1986.^[2]

While a part-time graduate student, Musser continued to work in the film industry as a film editor on projects such as the television seriesBetween the Wars (1978) and Mikhail Bogin's prize-winning shortA Private Life (1980), as well as a researcher on such films as Milos Forman'sRagtime (1981) and Woody Allen'sZelig (1983).^[5]

Musser received a bi-centennial grant from theNational Endowment for the Arts to makeAn American Potter (1976), a film about New Hampshire studio potter Gerry Williams. Althoughpottery is generally considered a traditional craft, Williams is shown to be not only a master of traditional techniques such as Chinese reds, but an artist and innovator who invented and developed the processes of “wet firing” and “photo resist” glazing. The documentary was awarded a Blue Ribbon in the Arts category from theAmerican Film Festival, "Best in Category-Fine Arts" from theSan Francisco Film Festival, as well as aCINE "Golden Eagle."

Musser became interested in the origins offilm editing. From his research he soon realized that editing was not "invented" but rather editing (the juxtaposition of one shot or scene to the next) and "post-production" were the domain of the exhibitor in the 1890s. Editing was only centralized inside the production company in the early 1900s.^{[citation needed]} Edwin S. Porter, an exhibitor who moved into production and became America's first "filmmaker," embodied this shift. Receiving theSociety for Cinema Studies Student Award for Scholarly Writing for his essay "The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter," Musser soon garnered aNew York State Council on the Arts grant to make the documentaryBefore the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982). The documentary had its world premiere at theNew York Film Festival. Carrie Rickey of theVillage Voice called it one of the year's best documentaries. It was subsequently shown at theLondon,Berlin,Sydney andMelbourne film festivals.

Early in his career, Musser had published a variety of articles that challenged much of the revisionist historiography around “early cinema.” In 1983, Musser published an article inJournal of Cinema and Media Studies (then simplyCinema Journal) to addressDouglas Gomery's criticism of Musser's historical model, which Gomery claimed downplayed theVitagraph and the company's role outside of New York City. Musser denied this t be true.^[6]

In 1990 through 1991, Musser published a trilogy of books on pre-1920 American cinema. The first to be published wasThe Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990), the first of the trilogy to be published, garnered the Jay Leyda Prize from Anthology Film Archives (now suspended), the Theatre Library Association Award (now the Wall Award) from the Theatre Library Association, and the Katherine Kovacs Book Award in Cinema and Media Studies. Its opening chapter expanded on an earlier, influential essay that proposed looking at the early years of cinema within the framework of “screen practice.”^[7] The book provides a broad overview of American cinema into thenickelodeon era, emphasizing both the diversity of cinematic expression and the rapid and ongoing transformations in the modes of production and representation. It details the ways in which key aspects of post-production that had been in the domain of the exhibitor (specifically the juxtaposition of shots or short scenes, which we now recognize as film editing) shifted to the production company between roughly 1899 and 1903, allowing for a new centralization of creative control and the formation of what we would recognize today as the filmmaker. Musser also detailed the legal battles and other factors that led to serious disruptions of the American industry and produced what is sometimes referred to as “the chaser period” in 1901–03. Revival came with the industry's dramatic shift from featuring news films and other forms of nonfiction to longer story films in the course of 1903, coinciding with the introduction of the three-blade shutter that reduced flicker and created a much more pleasurable viewing experience. Musser argued that the rise of the story film preceded and made possible the rapid proliferation of specialized motion picture theaters popularly known asnickelodeons,^[8] in contrast to Professor Robert C. Allen of theUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,^[9] who argued that the rise of fiction films was a calculated response to the nickelodeon boom by film producers.^[8]

Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company^[10] was a revision of Musser's dissertation and the first of the trilogy to be completed but the second to be published due to the introduction of new publication methods involving digital technology.^{[citation needed]} Portions of the book were published as articles prior to publication.^[11] It is also the companion to his documentary Before the Nickelodeon and lists the 18 complete Edison films (many only a single shot in length) and sources for the various quotes that are heard on the sound track. The book is a double portrait ofEdwin Stanton Porter and Thomas Edison's motion picture business, from the inventor's early experiments through his selling of the business 30 years later in 1918. Musser sees Porter as a representative of the fading old middle class 1) in his methods of filmmaking (his consistent use of partnerships with experienced men of the theater such as George F. Fleming, J. Searle Dawley, and Hugh Ford); 2) his system of representation (the alinear temporal structures of his films which often depended on simple, easy to follow stories; well-known stories familiar to his presumed audience, or a live commentator or lecturer to explain what might otherwise be unclear; and 3) the ideology of his films, which mixed progressive even radical elements with more conservative ones. In many respects Harry Braverman's various insights inLabor and Monopoly Capital; The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974) shaped the intellectual framework of the book.^{[citation needed]}

In 2014, Musser co-founded TheNew Haven Documentary Film Festival, which he co-directs with film directorGorman Bechard. The festival expanded from one day screening four films in 2014 to three days and over 20 films in 2015, to over 80 films spread out over 11 days and numerous venues the following year.^{[12][13][14][15]}

• Charles Musser atIMDb
• Yale Film and Media Studies Program: Charles Musser

• American film historians
• American male non-fiction writers
• Yale University faculty
• Living people
• American documentary filmmakers
• 1951 births
• Writers from Stamford, Connecticut
• People from Riverside, Connecticut
• People from Old Greenwich, Connecticut
• Historians from Connecticut

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