Charles Musser

Quick Facts

Full Name	Charles Musser
Occupation	Film Historian
Date Of Birth	Jan 16, 1951(1951-01-16)
Age	73
Birthplace	Stamford
Country	United States
Birth City	Connecticut
Horoscope	Capricorn

Charles Musser Biography

Charles Musser is one of the most popular and richest Film historian who was born on January 16, 1951 in Stamford, Connecticut, United States. Musser was interested in the history of editing. After his studies, he realized that editing films wasn’t “invented” but rather editing (the juxtaposition of a shot or scene to another) along with “post-production” were the domain of the exhibitor during the 1890s. They were centralized within the production company at the beginning of the 1900s. Edwin S. Porter, an exhibitor who shifted into production and became the first American “filmmaker,” embodied this change. In the end, he was awarded the Society for Cinema Studies Student Award for Scholarly Writing for his essay “The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter,” Musser was soon awarded an New York State Council of the Arts award to produce this film Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982), which premiered during the New York Film Festival. Carrie Rickey of the Village Voice said it was one of the top of the year’s documentaries. The film was later played in festivals like the London, Berlin, Sydney and Melbourne film festival.

Musser quit Yale in 1972 and moved into New York City to work in the film industry. After a few short assignments, he was hired to assist on hearts and Minds in the month of September, 1972. He was eventually appointed the film’s director’s first assistant. The film was shot in New York he worked with and learned from director/producer Peter Davis, Richard Pierce and Tom Cohen then followed the film to Los Angeles and assisted editors Lynzee Klingman and Susan Morse. He later was awarded a degree from Yale in the year 1975. As a part-time graduate student, he earned the MA in Cinema Studies from NYU in 1979 and a Ph.D. in the fall of 1987, Musser was still working in the field of film: in the role of film editor for projects like the television program Between the Wars (1978) as well as Mikhail’s prize-winning documentary A Private Life (1980) and also as a researcher for films like Milos Forman’s Ragtime (1981) and Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983).

In 2014, Musser co-founded The New Haven Documentary Film Festival, which he co-directs with film director Gorman 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. The festival has just celebrated its 5th year.

Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company 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. 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 of Edwin Stanton Porter, America’s first important filmmaker, 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 in Labor and Monopoly Capital; The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974) shaped the intellectual framework of the book.

Musser went to St. Paul’s College at Concord, New Hampshire, where he studied Public Affairs classes along with Gerry Studds. He also worked as an apprentice to the local studio pottery maker Gerry Williams, a former conscientious objector whose dad was close to Gandhi. Studds and Williams helped shape his political stance in the latter half of the 1960s. He was awarded the school’s historical prize in his senior year. In the autumn in 1969, the student was an Yale freshman, as the undergraduate college began admitting women to the university for the first time. He developed his own program in film studies and was in lessons together with Jay Leyda, Standish Lawder, Murray Lerner, David Milch, Michael Roemer and Peter Demetz. He wrote his first film-related paper about Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and his final thesis was titled “Russian Formalism and Early Soviet Film Theory”.

Charles Musser Net Worth

Charles Musser is one of the richest Film Historian from United States. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Charles Musser 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

Musser published the trilogy of books on pre-1920 American cinema that span an eight-month span in 1990-91 with indexing going back the back. Prior to that, Musser was a prolific writer, publishing a range of pieces that challenged a lot of the revisionist historiography on “early cinema.” Such arguments were typically relegated to footnotes. The first book to get published The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990) The first in the trilogy that was published it won the Jay Leyda Prize from the Anthology Film Archives (now suspended) as well as 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. The book’s first chapter expanded an earlier, influential piece that suggested looking at the beginnings of cinema in the context the concept of “screen practice.” The book gives a comprehensive outline of American cinema from the Nickelodeon era, focusing on the variety of cinematic expression, as well as the rapid and continuous changes in the methods that were used to create and represent. It describes how important aspects of post-production which were the responsibility that of the show’s producer (specifically interspersing scenes and short sequences, which today we consider editing films) moved to the production firm between 1899 and 1903 which allowed for a new centralization of control over creative ideas and the development of what we know as the filmmaker. Musser also outlined the legal battles as well as other issues that caused major disruptions in the American industry, and triggered what’s known by the name of “the chaser period” in 1901-1903. Revival was brought about by the shift of the industry’s focus from presenting news films and other kinds of nonfiction, to longer films during 1903 and an introduction of the three-bladed shutter that cut down on flickering and provided a more enjoyable watching experience. Musser showed that the advent of the story movie preceded and enabled the rapid expansion of motion picture theaters that were specialized often referred to as nickelodeons unlike those like Robert C. Allen who depended on cherry-picked data and claimed that the increase of the fiction film was a deliberate response to the boom in nickelodeon by the film industry’s producers.

Charles John Musser (born 16 January 1951) is an historian of film and documentary filmmaker. Since 1992, he has been a professor in the department of film and media studies at Yale University, where he is currently a professor in Film and Media Studies as along with American Studies and Theater Studies. His work has been centered on topics such including Edwin S. Porter and early cinema, Oscar Micheaux and race cinema in the silent era, Paul Robeson and film performance, and various other subjects and individuals in the field of documentary. Some of his films are An American Potter (1976), Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982) and Errol Morris The Errol Morris Story: An Errol Morris Lightning Sketch (2014).

Musser received a bi-centennial grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to make An American Potter (1976), on New Hampshire studio potter Gerry Williams. Although pottery is generally considered a traditional art–-and often a craft, Williams is shown to be not only a master of traditional techniques such as Chinese reds but an innovator who invented and developed the processes of “wet firing” and “photo resist” glazing. The documentary, an admiring portrait of his mentor, 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.”

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Who is Charles Musser Dating?

According to our records, Charles Musser married to Maria Threese Serana , Lynne Zeavin. As of December 1, 2023, Charles Musser’s is not dating anyone.

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Facts & Trivia

Charles Ranked on the list of most popular Film historian. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in United States. Charles Musser celebrates birthday on January 16 of every year.