History Paper

Film Paper (15%) is a 1,000-plus-word report on an approved film as an artifact or statement of its time. Again, all reports are to be formally organized according to the parameters (for history scholarship) of the Chicago Manual of Style.

In this paper, you are to use a film as a kind of secondary document, a product of its time and place in America. Examine your film as a piece of history and not a piece of art. Thus, you are not interested in how your film “entertains” per se (there should be no “I really liked this film, it made me smile” or “laugh” or “cry” in your paper) or in the purely cinematic achievements of its stars, directors, and producers. Instead, focus on how the movie reflects or speaks to issues that were apparent in American society at the time the movie was produced. Of course to do this, you will have to know a bit about that history/those issues. You must establish the context of your film by referencing at least four secondary sources that provide you and your reader the information needed to properly assess your movie as a reflection of its era.

Perhaps it is best to think of the paper as having two tasks. It is necessary to provide insight into the movie’s plot and major turning points. In the interest of brevity, chronicle only the events that drive the film and will be central to your subsequent analysis. Be careful in the paper to neither overdo it by mentioning every event in the film (no matter how incidental they are to your later argument) nor allow your prose to devolve into an unsophisticated “then this happened…and then this happened” construction. Having laid the groundwork, the second task of the paper is to assess how those key plot themes were reflective of some aspect or aspects of American society at the time.