Charles Musser

Charles John Musser (born 16 January 1951) is a film historian and documentary film maker. 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 focused on such topics as Edwin S. Porter and early cinema, Oscar Micheaux and race cinema of the silent era, Paul Robeson and film performance as well as a variety 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).

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 the former Marilyn Keach, he has two sisters, Nancy Musser (Sutton) and Jane Musser (Nelson). 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 Yale freshman as its undergraduate college admitted women for the first time. 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 and his senior thesis was entitled "Russian Formalism and Early Soviet Film Theory".

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