CINEMA ANN ARBOR

How Campus Rebels Forged a Singular Film Culture

hardcover, color, 340 pages (summer 2023, Fifth Avenue Press and University of Michigan Press), $39.95

ISBN 9780472133475

free ebook available for Ann Arbor District Library cardholders

AUTHOR-HISTORIAN

FRANK UHLE

Cultural historian FRANK UHLE writes about the fascinating people and stories behind beloved film and music projects, with an emphasis on his adopted hometown of Ann Arbor. A projectionist since the early 1980s, Uhle’s devotion to film was catalyzed when he joined one of the University of Michigan’s student film societies as an undergraduate. Membership in Cinema II provided a rigorous education in the movies and a warm, robust, and lasting community of fellow film lovers whose stories take shape across the pages of Cinema Ann Arbor. Uhle has shown films for various campus film societies, the University Drive-In, the Michigan and State theaters, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and along the way made experimental 8 mm films, helped archive the papers of Orson Welles, and served as proofreader for Psychotronic Video magazine. He’s also the host of a long-running radio program on WCBN that highlights Michigan music, and a frequent contributor to Pulp, Ugly Things, and other publications where he writes about film, music, business, history, and culture.

PUBLICITY

Contact Raj: Rajtawneypr@gmail.com or Danielle: dcoty@umich.edu

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.

Interviewees including filmmaker Ken Burns, Oscar-nominated American Hustle editor Jay Cassidy, and Boyhood producer John Sloss provide insights into how this midwestern college town developed an underground art film community to rival any in the country. Before cable television or the internet, these student-run groups provided critical access to alternative viewpoints and cultures during some of the most turbulent decades of the past century and were often at the forefront of seismic cultural shifts. Cinema Ann Arbor reveals the authentic human struggles and triumphs of the college town revolutionaries who rolled movie cameras, occupied folding theater seats, and threaded reels in shadowy projection booths. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman says, “Frank Uhle has captured the moment when cinema became, for a new generation, a kind of religion, with its own rituals and sacred texts and a spirit of exploratory mystery that has all but vanished from the culture.”

PUBLISHERS

Cinema Ann Arbor is co-published by two extraordinary independent publishers.

FIFTH AVENUE PRESS

A division of the Ann Arbor Public Library, Fifth Avenue Press is a locally focused and publicly owned publishing imprint. Learn more.

University of Michigan Press

The University of Michigan Press is part of Michigan Publishing at the University of Michigan Library. It publishes 170 new titles each year in the humanities and social sciences. Learn more.