Write a 3–5-page paper (double-spaced) in response to one of the questions given below. When you discuss the films in your paper, do not be too general: give specific examples of characters and scenes and plot points. If your memory is hazy and you feel that you need to see the film again, you can watch any of the movies from this course at the library. They are all on reserve at the media center. You should look at the course readings (on the ol.berklee site) that are mentioned in the question, and you may want to quote or refer to these sources in your paper. When citing information or quotations from the sources, you do not need to give a full citation; just write the author’s last name and the page number and put it in a footnote1 or in brackets at the end of the sentence. [Smith, p. 29] Please use either italics or quotations marks to identify the titles of all movies mentioned in your paper [The Great Train Robbery or “The Great Train Robbery”]. If you are having a hard time remembering the names of characters, specific plot points, or the name of the director or screenwriter, I suggest that you consult the internet. All the films that we are watching in this course are well known, and you can find detailed wikipedia articles for most of them. You do not need to give a citation for general information about the film taken from the internet (names of characters, for example), but if you include a detail about the movie taken from the internet or a book that is not something we have talked about in class, you need to include a citation. Topic: The 1920s witnessed rapid social change, and nothing attracted more attention at the time than the appearance of a new sort of woman: the flapper. With their bobbed hair, short skirts, and liberated manner, these young women were very different from the saintly housewives and devoted mothers of the previous Victorian Era. The movie Our Dancing Daughters (1928) features a number of female characters who might be described as flappers. Look at the articles by Bruce Bliven (“Flapper Jane”), Mary Garden, and Margaret Sanger on the course site for Nov. 8. From different perspectives, each of these writers is trying to describe a new sort of modern woman—a woman whose appearance and attitudes, and even views on sex and marriage, has changed. Do you the young women in Our Dancing Daughters reflect the sorts of social and cultural changes that the authors of these articles are discussing? How do these young women differ from the heroines that we have seen in films such as The Sheik (Lady Diana), Tol’able David (Esther), The Birth of a Nation (Elsie Stoneman, the two Cameron daughters), or the comedies of Lloyd, Chaplin, and Keaton? (You don’t have to talk about all these films; you can pick and choose.) Do the female characters in Our Dancing Daughters serve a different plot function than the women in those earlier movies? Are they more active? Do they relate to men differently? Do they have a different code of morals? Does the movie approve of the flapper lifestyle? When all is said and done, does the central character in the film (Diana) still have something in common with those earlier movie heroines?
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