ANN ARBOR— Although many film students today regard the golden age of cinema as a topic of classroom discussion only, many of the writers in the second volume of the Michigan Quarterly Review‘s (MQR) special centennial issue on the movies make it clear that film was far from an academic subject in their experience.

” We are reminded by their testimony, and their nostalgia, of the bedrock significance of film for so many people in so many cultures,” say co-editors Laurence Goldstein, University of Michigan professor of English, and Ira Konigsberg, U-M professor of English and film/video studies. ” What passes now as classic cinema was more than a mind- blowing distraction, more than an escape, a place of refuge from the hard realities outside the theater. It was an art form central to the cultural life of the planet, one that people took in like milk, that gave them nourishment and hope.”

MQR is published by the U-M. The second part of MQR’s ” The Movies: A Centennial Issue,” an anthology of essays, reviews, fiction, poetry and graphics on the subject of film, includes works by William Paul, U-M associate professor of English and film/video studies; U-M alumnus John Briley, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for ” Gandhi” ; and Poonam Arora, who teaches film and cultural studies at the U-M-Dearborn. Paul’s essay calls attention to a topic usually neglected in film scholarship: the screen, its size, its shape and its place in the motion picture theater.

In a short memoir, Briley refers to film as the major art form of the 20th century and expresses gratitude for having participated in a film industry conscious of the quality of its product and its moral impact on audiences. Arora reviews four books that deal with multicultural cinema, one each on the movies of China and India and two collections of essays on ethnographic film. In all, the writings of more than two dozen contributors appear in the second part of MQR’s special movies issue. Part 2 is now available at local bookstores and at the MQR office in Room 3032, Rackham Building. For more information, call (313) 764-9265.

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