Cinema Ann Arbor: How Campus Rebels Forged a Singular F… (2025)

I entered the Ann Arbor film scene in 1989 as a movie-mad freshman, spending my first semester enraptured by Hugh Cohen’s Art of Film lectures and screenings. I also monopolized his office hours - thank you for your generous indulgence, Dr. Cohen. This book is a prequel series to my time in Ann Arbor, and it’s glorious to see all the people and places that defined my celluloid coming of age coming together over decades to build the film paradise I joined as a fan, a scholar, and a minimum wage grunt in the State Theatre projection booth. Time to write my long-planned movie memoir.

This book chronicles a century of campus film culture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Frank Uhle traces the beginnings of the film culture to the 1920s when Amy Loomis, manager of the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre, arranged showings of films, including foreign and experimental films. This set the tone of what was to come as the campus spawned a variety of film societies that in the coming decades showed a wide variety of films as art and films as entertainment including foreign, experimental, Hollywood classics, and contemporary Hollywood films.

Film societies like the Art Cinema League (perhaps the first American campus film society), Cinema Guild, Cinema II, and the Ann Arbor Film Cooperative included among their members: Big Chill writer/director Lawrence Kasdan, Oscar-nominated editor Jay Cassidy, Oscar-winning visual effects designer John Nelson, and film critic Neal Gabler, who helped to found the Ann Arbor Film Cooperative and also joined the Cinema Guild and Cinema II, and said "Ann Arbor was a film hotbed in those days".

Future Variety chief film critic Owen Gleiberman was covering the film scene in 1979 for the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, and wrote “There is so much film here-screenings, classes, and endless, endless discussions-that you almost get shell-shocked.”

The book is overflowing with so many great stories drawn from the history of film exhibition in Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor hosted numerous film luminaries over the years, including Jean-Luc Godard, Sam Fuller, Frank Capra, Andy Warhol, and Pauline Kael, who was on the jury of the Ann Arbor Film Festival. And in the audience of the screenings in Ann Arbor were future filmmakers like Ken Burns and Michael Moore.

Ann Arbor also saw early screenings of films like “Taxi Driver”, “Dawn of the Dead”, and a March 3, 1977 screening of Werner Herzog’s 1972 film “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”, a month before it opened in New York.

Other highlights of the book include a description of the logistics of a typical campus film society screening, from programming, to set up, to the ticket prices. Uhle also describes numerous “Birth of a Nation” controversies stretching from the 1910s to the 1980s. There’s a great chapter on a film censorship case involving the movie “Flaming Creatures” where the police confiscated the print mid-showing and the film society members were arrested and tried on obscenity charges for showing the film on campus in 1967. The book also includes a history of porn on campus as it went from a curiosity to mainstream acceptance and a money-maker for several of the campus film groups.

Once VCRs, cable television channels, and video rental stores showed up, it was all downhill for these vital cultural outlets, and the last chapter of this book chronicles the depressingly swift fall of the film societies. The film societies sputtered, switched to weekend-only showings, and resorted to desperate measures to hold on to some reason to continue to exist, even as the writing was on the wall. In 1983 there were an average of 500 features shown per term but that number dwindled throughout the 1990s as the film societies resorted to showing sneak previews of new films for the Studios and a variety of other gimmicks to stay afloat. The venerable Cinema Guild’s final screening occurred in 2007.

This book is profusely and beautifully illustrated with the pictorial and graphic history of campus film exhibition. There’s flyers, schedules, newspaper articles, pictures of on-campus filmmaker appearances, film society membership cards, night deposit bags, projection equipment, even a mugshot from the “Flaming Creatures” arrests. And Uhle’s background as a projectionist informs the book which includes excellent descriptions and details of the theaters, projectors, projector staff, screens, and much more.

The film culture of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan has been long and fruitful and the community has been a place of film appreciation and filmmaker appreciation and a receptive audience for film in all its many genres and forms from the most experimental to the most commercial. Frank Uhle’s wonderful book tells the full history of that unique film culture. It is both a fine local history and also a fine film history, with important information about film exhibition and film audiences stretching from the days of the silent films up to the early 2000s.

Once upon a time, there was a University of Michigan undergraduate who thought she was artsy (she wasn't), spent a lot of time in existentialist thought in the cafés (this part is true - again, the artsy thing), and loved going to movies at the Michigan Theater or... "campus cinema" (definitely true!). Okay, you dragged it out of me ...it was me! This book is a gem and brought up a lot of great memories of my university days. The photos are a real treasure, and I enjoyed reading the history of what happened before and after my cinéphile days in Ann Arbor. This book is beautiful and, on a side note, very reasonably priced. I was shocked when I got it and discovered it was a glossy hardback with photos galore. I highly recommend this book to all Wolverines and enthusiasts of film... distribution? Dissemination? Presentation? I suppose this is kind of a niche book, but if it interests you, you will not be disappointed.