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These are the initial three volumes in a projected ten-volume series, scheduled for completion in 1993, which explores American cinema through the 1980s. Musser, who teaches film studies at NYU and Columbia, focuses on what he considers to be the first 12 years of American cinema, beginning when films were first projected in 1895. A good portion of the work is devoted to the precursors of film: the magic lantern and its successors, including the stereopticon and such exotic mechanisms as the zoopraxiscope and phasmatrope. Although Musser recounts the plots of many of the early films, it is the film industry rather than film as an art form (however primitive) which he emphasizes. 1907 i...Log In or Sign Up to Read More