Cinema Ann Arbor: How Campus Rebels Forged a Singular Film Culture

PREVIEW

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A FILM PROJECTOR CLICKS AND WHIRS TO LIFE, AND
AN ILLUMINATED IMAGE FLASHES BEFORE OUR EYES.

The room goes silent, and everyone is transported to a communal sensory experience that often lasts far beyond the time on screen. Before streaming subscriptions, or even the era of VHS tapes, gathering with people to view films was a mainstay of cultural life. Nowhere was this more evident than in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the public university and its community prominently put movie-watching and movie-making at the center of artistic and intellectual activity.




Delving into almost one hundred years of rarely glimpsed history, Frank Uhle melds interviews with eighty key people, deep archival research, and over four hundred mostly unseen images into a vivid account of just how the history of motion pictures and the history of Ann Arbor—and the University of Michigan—are intertwined.

Told with the urgency and exquisite detail only available to an active, decades-long participant in Ann Arbor’s film culture, Cinema Ann Arbor uncovers unexpected and essential stories of the university’s film societies and the campus rebels who ran them. Uhle unearths firsthand accounts of arrests, protests, ripoffs, bomb threats, and other behind-the-scenes drama. He introduces readers to unforgettable people—nonconformists and artists and nerds from the Weather Underground to the Velvet Underground—who composed the magnificence of Ann Arbor’s twentieth-century film scene.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Cinema Ann Arbor submitted by NiBo on June 9, 2023, 7:26pm Interesting book. I love local history.

Campus Film Societies submitted by JAV on June 18, 2024, 9:43am Cinema Ann Arbor is a great book that covers cinematic activity in Ann Arbor, mostly on the UM campus, in the 20th century. It's filled to the brim with reproductions of posters and other ephemera and very well put together. The book tells the story of the campus film societies that were showing several film screenings a day in the 60s and 70s.