Charles John Musser (born 16 January 1951) is a film historian, documentary filmmaker, and a film editor. Since 1992, he has taught at Yale University, where he is currently a professor of Film and Media Studies as well as American Studies and Theater Studies. His research has primarily focused on early cinema, and topics such as Edwin 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 include An American Potter (1976), Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982) and Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch (2014).
Early life and education
Musser was born in Stamford, Connecticut and grew up in Old Greenwich and Riverside. 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.
Musser attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, where he took Public Affairs courses with Gerry Studds. He also apprenticed to local studio potter Gerry Williams, a former conscientious objector whose father was close friends with Gandhi. 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 with Jay Leyda, Standish Lawder, Murray Lerner, David Milch, Michael Roemer and Peter Demetz. His wrote his first film paper on Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and his senior thesis was entitled "Russian Formalism and Early Soviet Film Theory."
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 on Hearts and Minds (1974) and eventually became the first assistant editor. In New York he worked with and learned from producer-director Peter Davis and media theorist Tom Cohen. Musser then worked in Los Angeles with assisted editors Lynzee Klingman and Susan E. Morse. He graduated with a BA in Film and Literature from Yale in 1975. He received his MA in Cinema Studies from NYU in 1979, and earned his Ph.D. in Cinema Studies in the Fall of 1986.
While a part-time graduate student, Musser continued to work in the film industry as a film editor on projects such as the television series Between the Wars (1978) and Mikhail Bogin's prize-winning short A Private Life (1980), as well as a researcher on such films as Milos Forman's Ragtime (1981) and Woody Allen's Zelig (1983).
Early Films
Musser received a bi-centennial grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to make An American Potter (1976), a film about New Hampshire studio potter Gerry Williams. Although pottery 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 the American Film Festival, "Best in Category-Fine Arts" from the San Francisco Film Festival, as well as a CINE "Golden Eagle."
Musser became interested in the origins of film 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. Edwin S. Porter, an exhibitor who moved into production and became America's first "filmmaker," embodied this shift. Receiving the Society for Cinema Studies Student Award for Scholarly Writing for his essay "The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter," Musser soon garnered a New York State Council on the Arts grant to make the documentary Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982). The documentary had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival. Carrie Rickey of the Village Voice called it one of the year's best documentaries. It was subsequently shown at the London, Berlin, Sydney and Melbourne film festivals.