Exercise on Chaplin's _The Immigrant_
Overview
A no-frills essay assignment featuring Chaplin's The Immigrant.
Beginning with Illustration in Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant
We’ve already begun to concentrate on some of the various ways that silent-era, slapstick comedies managed to get their audiences to laugh. One of the more unexpected sources of humor that we’ve discovered lies in the way these films portrayed people and situations that would ordinarily cause a great deal of anxiety for audiences in the 1910s and 20s. In Buster Keaton’s Cops, for example, we saw how a series of encounters with angry police officers – the kind of encounters that still causes people to feel nervous – could make audiences laugh. As Keaton and other pioneers of film comedy discovered, the climax of a comic routine seems all the funnier if some anxiety is built up along the way and then abruptly dispelled with a punch-line at the end of a gag.
Now we’re looking at one of Charlie Chaplin’s most popular short films. As you watch our (25 minute) imbedded stream of The Immigrant, make some quick notes about the way in which Chaplin portrays some of the things that would generate anxiety for immigrants who have just arrived in this country. Imagine these immigrants sitting in a movie theater in 1917, watching Chaplin encounter some of the very challenges that they themselves were facing in their own lives. Make a list of the people and situations in the film that might cause immigrants to feel threatened, humiliated, or frustrated. We’ll discuss your lists on our board and look at the way in which Chaplin manages to dispel the anxiety of immigrants in his audience by infusing flashes of humor into the scenes you’re listing for us.
For our first, formal writing assignment, we are using the Illustration/Example strategy to address the immigrant experience as depicted in Chaplin’s film. Our focus should be on form: placement of the thesis, paragraphing, topic sentences, transitions, etc. We are looking for neat, clean, simple organization and prose free of mechanical errors. Your essay will be submitted at four stages in the writing process as four separate documents in the TurnitIn “assignments” feature: thesis, outline, rough draft with Works Cited page, and final draft. I will provide feedback via the “comments” field at each stage.
You’ll begin by consulting the list of examples you made to develop a controlling idea and thesis about the film’s use of humor as social commentary. Then you’ll develop an outline by identifying categories for paragraphs that group like examples together, and that you can describe in strong topic sentences.
Your rough draft will be MLA formatted. It will have a Works Cited page with ONE source on it (Chaplin’s The Immigrant). Your final draft will be at least 800 words in length and free of typographical and grammatical errors.
Let’s get moving!