Charles Musser

Yale University

February–June 2006

Charles Musser is professor of American studies and film studies at Yale University. He is a preeminent scholar of early American cinema, and the author of the prize-winning The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York, 1990) and Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley, 1991). He has edited many volumes on cinema and has also made films, including An American Potter (1976). His book project at the Clark is entitled Film, Truth, Documentary Practice: A History, and explores the complex, troubled, and unstable relationship between art and documentary.