What ever happened to The Film Society?

Illustrated by Kamaal Samuel, Illustrator

The longest lasting film club in Chapman University’s history, The Film Society is now the only one still operating on campus — or at least it was until the fall of 2025, when changes to university policy made it the last to fall in Chapman’s silent crusade against … watching movies.

For the uninitiated, The Film Society used to host weekly film screenings followed by group discussions out of the Digital Arts Media Center theater every Thursday night. The screenings would be advertised weekly in the Dodge Slate newsletter and promoted to incoming students.

“The Film Society began as a strictly academic organization set up by the film and media studies department as an extracurricular way for media studies students to get research and writing opportunities,” said sitting Film Society president and senior film and media studies major Carol Liddle.

Liddle is referencing Chapman’s former relationship with the peer-reviewed magazine Film Matters, in which film and media studies students were once able to publish academic writing through Chapman professor Kelli Fuery’s work as special issues editor for the magazine.

“Then it turned into more of a screening club, and they used to do the exact same thing as us (now), but they were allowed to have more of an audience — campus advertising did a lot for them,” said Liddle.

This shift fit the club into a tradition of organized, academic film appreciation as old as the medium itself. With members meeting weekly to watch films and discuss foundational concepts of film theory, The Film Society was not a far cry from the original French and German ciné-clubs where these topics were first hotly debated, only now functioning as an extension of a college education.

However, since the start of the 2025-2026 academic year, Chapman’s updated university policy has deemed screenings held by students without public performance licenses to be illegal, and as a result The Film Society has been frozen and restricted from reserving rooms on campus due to copyright issues.

The change comes following the Trump administration’s crackdown on universities that permitted protests in support of Palestine. In reply, Chapman set about holistically redesigning its university policy based on lawsuits other universities have faced in order to protect its federal endowments.

Among the likely countless changes made to the university’s governing document, the restrictions placed on The Film Society are deeply troubling as they suggest that in its new form, Chapman does not consider film appreciation an academically serious endeavor according to Liddle.

“The federal policy on (film screenings) is more ambiguous than Chapman’s, and the school has decided not to support us insofar as adopting a more generous and supportive interpretation of the policy,” said Liddle, referencing federal fine print that exempts “pupils” from the need for licensing, a stipulation that had previously protected the club.

With official activities stalled by the university for the past year, The Film Society’s board has been rushing to resolve this issue, which, unattended, would leave future generations of students without a space for film appreciation at Chapman. And it hasn’t been easy.

“We’ve been having meetings with people that end up being more temporary than we would like where things aren’t followed up on,” said senior writing for film and television major and the second sitting Film Society President Phineas Larson. “We’ve tried our best: we’ve presented our cases, we’ve tried to think of solutions every step of the way, but they’re usually met with smiles and nods and then nothing else.” 

Other student organizations like DKA, the film-focused business society, and Women in Film have been able to continue sporadically hosting their own screenings in Chapman facilities, despite also breaking the university policy that led to The Film Society’s deplatforming, indicating an unexplained double standard.

“It’s important to me that this club continues because it’s an excellent way to experience more films and talk about films in general; it’s super vital,” said Larson. “I want to do as much as we can to make sure that, in the fall, (the new leadership isn’t) going in blind — but we haven’t been helped a ton with that, obviously.”

The Film Society’s younger members, those inheriting the club in the fall, feel similar about the vitality of such a space at one of the country’s highest-ranked film schools.

“(Film Society) has always fostered a unique inclusivity compared to other clubs,” said sophomore film and television production major Tommy Cope. “Discourse and individual opinion are not just encouraged but prioritized, and there is no elaborate system which makes it difficult for anyone to express their perspective.”

Since being barred from campus, meetings have been held at the members’ houses with personal projectors, bedsheets and camping chairs. The home-spun approach has endeared itself to members new and old, but the resulting decline in attendance and exposure has illuminated a larger issue: the foreclosure of film appreciation at Chapman University.

“People at Chapman don't appreciate film as much as they should, and you have to blame the school,” said writing for film and television major and senior Aidan Hart. “It's caused by the school promoting stuff like AI where you’re encouraged not to think. What’s happening to The Film Society is downstream of a content-farm culture that's been cultivated at Dodge.”

Such attitudes have been recently stoked by the school’s support of the Tilly Norwood symposium and the creation of a new grant, the Innovative Filmmakers Challenge, which will annually award $40,000 to student films that make creative use of AI and other emergent technologies. It suggests a shift away from the study of filmmaking as an industrial craft to something more automated and nebulous, out of step with the history of the medium.

“The school needs to prioritize learning things from films in a more practical way than they currently do,” said Hart. “You don't get many chances in a lot of classes to ask the question of, “How is this functionally working?” or “What is this getting across to me?” But at The Film Society, you do.”

Modern media consumption habits — driven by the fact millions of videos are available on one’s phone — may also be to blame for The Film Society’s dire attendance.

“It might be the amount (of media) that is now at our fingertips,” said junior film and media studies major Emma Harvie. “Going out of your way to make yourself appreciate something or challenging yourself to appreciate something can feel kind of fracturing.”

With the future of the club in the hands of an unresponsive university, and a notable portion of the constituency graduating this spring, what hope there is for the club lies with its inheritance. 

“Entering Chapman, I was very excited to partake in the exact kind of thing that The Film Society does,” said Harvie. “I really found my community when I started regularly attending, so it’s really disappointing that the school won’t support us now or allow us to reach a wider audience of people like me who might feel lost or without a community at Chapman.”

Harvie will lead the club into the 2026-2027 academic year as The Film Society’s new president, accompanied by a board of current juniors, sophomores and freshmen. They will continue to fight for the reinstallation of the club as a vital part of Dodge College.

“I come to The Film Society because I love watching movies with a big group of people in a dark room on a big screen,” said freshman film and television production major Henry Kaufman. “It’s that simple. It’s always fun and usually movies that not everybody has seen a thousand times: it’s just about opening your mind to new things.”