- Working on Hearts & Minds (1974)
Charles Musser is a professor of American Studies, Film Studies and Theater Studies at Yale University, commonly known as Yale-New Haven since the founding of its half-sister institution of Yale–NUS, which will open in Singapore in 2013. Yale-New Haven is an institution of higher learning in the four college area, along with University of New Haven, University of Southern Connecticut, and Albert Magnus.
Charlie is currently finishing several books and completing a documentary film, Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch. For the 2011-12 academic year, he is teaching the year-long Documentary Film Workshop, World Documentary (Fall) and Documentary and the Environment (Spring).
LINKS to RELEVANT WEBSITES
Charlie is the Director of the Yale Summer Film Institute.
Charlie’s faculty webpage at Yale. (It’s out of date–Yale has changed it programs for website three times in the last few years.)
Charlie recommends this article in the New York Times: “What Is College For?”
LINKS to FRIENDS’ WEBSITES
I might not be making films if it wasn’t for Alexis Krasilovsky, now a professor at Cal State-Northridge. She also took the photograph of me in the editing room. Here is her website.
The first dissertation I supervised was Charles Lyons’ at Columbia University. It became The New Censors: Movies and the Culture Wars (Temple University Press, 1997). Charlie was a widely admired reporter for Variety and continues to write for the New York Times when he isn’t working on film projects. His personal website is here.
I was also co-advisor for Miriam Posner’s dissertation Depth Perception: Filmmaking and Narrative in American Medicine, which I co-directed with John Warner. Miriam is now coordinates and teaches in the Digital Humanities program at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has a great website and blog about her efforts in these areas: http://www.miriamposner.com/index.html
Suzanne O’Malley became the Associate Director of the Yale Summer Film Institute, where she teaches some of our most popular courses. Suzanne keeps me honest. Her personal website is here.
Ashish Chadha aka Ashish Avikunthak is an experimental filmmaker and close friend. We ended up teaching Documentary Film Workshop in 2009-10, after which he got a job at University of Rhode Island. His personal website is here.
Tom Isler (Yale’s ’03) was a Film Studies major who took critical studies courses with me in documentary and took Documentary Film Workshop with D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. Post Yale, he has formed a company with his brother, Gloaming Pictures, and made a number of documentaries including a festival favorite–Two’s a Crowd (2011). Perhaps we’ll talk about the Isler Brothers the way we used to talk about the Maysles Brothers. Tom has also gotten a law degree at Penn–and working on a documentary using his newly-established legal expertise. All this and more is on their Gloaming Pictures website.