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Charles John Musser (born 16 January 1951) is a film historian and documentary film maker who has "added a great deal to our knowledge of early cinema with his writings and his filmmaking." 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).〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://filmstudies.yale.edu )〕 ==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 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". Musser 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'' in September 1972 and eventually became the first assistant editor. In New York he worked with and learned from producer/director Peter Davis, Richard Pierce and Tom Cohen then followed the film to Los Angeles and assisted editors Lynzee Klingman and Susan Morse. He subsequently graduated from Yale in 1975. While a part-time graduate student, receiving his MA in Cinema Studies from NYU in 1979 and his Ph.D. in Fall 1986, 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 price-winning short ''A Private Life'' (1980) and as a researcher on such films as Milos Forman's ''Ragtime'' (1981) and Woody Allen's ''Zelig'' (1983).〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0615854/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1 )〕 ==Early Films== 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." Musser became interested in the origins of editing. From his research he soon realized that film 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 and were 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 of the Arts grant to make the documentary ''Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982)'', which 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. Musser had less success getting grants for subsequent projects but continued to work as a film editor and researcher to make a living while pursuing research and writing. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Charles Musser」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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