According to the description provided in Writing about Movies, on pages 8–11, write…
Use one of the films we covered in the first two modules of the semester.
Here is an example I did using The Plow that Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz, USA, 1936), a film we will study in Module 5.
The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) is a film about the drought in Great Plains region of the United States during the 1930s. The film chronicles the various causes of the Dust Bowl, as the disaster has been called, including over farming, predatory lending and foreclosures, and the drought that led to crops failure. The large number of farm failures during this time led to many desperate families to move west to seek better fortunes.
The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) offers a leftist view of the Dust Bowl. It blames the boom-and-bust nature of capitalism. During the war, the region’s fortunes boomed as wheat became a cash crop. But with the end of the war and a prolonged drought, the crops began to fail, causing thousands of farmers to lose their livelihoods.
The film also blames the banking industry for extending loans to farmers that trapped them in debt and for foreclosing on their farms. This devastated the farmers and would contribute to the stock market crash of the late 1920s and the Great Depression through the 1930s.
Today, we can see that the film advocated for government intervention to offset corporate greed that, in the events documented in the film, contributed to the Dust Bowl disaster.