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

Ann Arbor, long known for its political and cultural activism, has an equally compelling history of engagement with film and media. In their quest to show art and independent films and in their efforts to raise money in the name of artistic freedom, local and campus societies pushed the boundaries of conformity. Delving into almost one hundred years of rarely glimpsed history, Cinema Ann Arbor melds interviews, deep archival research, and over four hundred images into a vivid history of film in one extraordinary town. These stories, told with urgency and exquisite detail, are firsthand accounts of the unforgettable people who created Ann Arbor’s magnificent twentieth-century film scene.

Featuring interviews with filmmaker Ken Burns, Oscar-nominated editor Jay Cassidy, producer John Sloss, and more, this masterpiece provides insights into how a Midwestern college town developed a robust underground art film community that inspired those across the country. Variety’s Owen Glieberman 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.＂

This is a must-have book for cinema and media aficionados, film archivists, and anyone interested in the cultural history of Ann Arbor.

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 more where he writes about film, music, business, history, and culture.