HUMS 131 Final Exam Movie Study Guide

Course: History, Power and People (Fall 2026, Dr. Seda Altuğ) Scope: Final is NOT cumulative - covers material from the midterm week (Week 7) onward. Films covered: Passion in the Desert · Oliver Twist · Germinal · Suez · America America · Joyeux Noël

How the exam works based on the Fall 2025 midterm

The final's format is identical to the midterm:

• Part 1 - Long Essay (50 pts): Choose 1 of 2 questions. Max one A4 page. You must give concrete examples from course notes, primary sources, AND the movies, with precise chronology and careful wording.
• Part 2 - Short Essay / Terms (50 pts): Choose 5 of 8 terms. At least 3 sentences each. Refer to course notes, primary sources, and movies.

Takeaway for the films: You don't get asked "summarize the movie." You use a film as evidence - a scene that illustrates a theme from a reading. For every film below, memorize one or two specific scenes you can drop into an essay or term answer.

Quick-reference table

1 Passion in the Desert Lavinia Currier 1998

Week 7 - Northern Intrusions: Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign Pairs with: Napoleon's addresses/letters on Egypt · Edward Said, Orientalism (excerpts)

Passion in the Desert - Summary

Based on Balzac's 1830 short story, set during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt (1798–1801). A young French officer, Augustin Robert, is assigned to protect Venture, an elderly artist commissioned by Napoleon to sketch Egypt's landscape and monuments. After a Mameluke attack scatters their regiment, Augustin becomes lost in the desert. Stripped of his army, language, and uniform, he forms an intense, obsessive bond with a leopard he names Simoom. The "civilized" European soldier gradually unravels and is consumed by the desert.

Passion in the Desert - Key Themes

• Orientalism in action. The artist sketching Egypt = the European impulse to catalog, represent, and possess the East as an object of knowledge. This is Said's core argument: Western "knowledge" of the Orient is a form of power.
• The desert as the "Other." The film literalizes the European fantasy of the East as seductive, dangerous, irrational, and feminized.
• Loss of self / "going native." Augustin's disintegration dramatizes Western anxiety about the colonizer being absorbed by the colonized.

Passion in the Desert - Exam Angles

• Essay evidence: Use it for any question on imperial knowledge-as-power or how Europe imagined the non-West. The commissioned-sketches scene = perfect concrete example of Said's Orientalism.
• Likely term links: Orientalism, Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign, Description de l'Égypte (the scholarly project the artist embodies), Mamelukes.

2 Oliver Twist Roman Polanski 2005

Week 9 - Industrialization and the Economic Foundations of Europe's Global Power Pairs with: Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (excerpts)

Oliver Twist - Summary

Adaptation of Dickens's novel, set in 1830s England. Orphan Oliver is raised in a brutal parish workhouse, where he famously "asks for more" gruel and is punished and sold off to an undertaker. He flees to London, falls in with Fagin's gang of child pickpockets (the Artful Dodger), and is caught between the criminal underworld of Bill Sikes and Nancy and a chance at rescue.

Oliver Twist - Key Themes

• The underside of industrialization. While Kennedy explains how industrial productivity made Europe globally dominant, the film shows the domestic human cost: urban poverty, child labor, the workhouse system, and the New Poor Law mentality (1834) that treated poverty as a moral failing.
• Surplus population & the city. The mass of orphaned, exploited children = the dark side of the demographic and economic upheaval that powered Britain's rise.

Oliver Twist - Exam Angles

• Essay evidence: For questions on the social costs of industrialization or the gap between Europe's global power and its internal misery, pair the workhouse with Kennedy's macro-argument - power abroad rested on a harsh new economic order at home.
• Likely term links: Workhouse, New Poor Law, industrial revolution, child labor, urbanization.

3 Germinal Claude Berri 1993

Week 10 - Industrialization and Labor Mobilization Pairs with: Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England (excerpts)

Germinal - Summary

Based on Émile Zola's 1885 novel, set in a coal-mining town (Montsou) in northern France in the 1860s. Étienne Lantier arrives looking for work and lodges with the Maheu family of miners. Witnessing starvation wages, dangerous mines, and the contrast with the comfortable mine owners, Étienne organizes the workers. A strike erupts, turns violent, is crushed by troops, and ends in tragedy - but the final image is of seeds "germinating," a future revolt.

Germinal - Key Themes

• Birth of class consciousness. The film is the dramatic twin of Engels: it shows the immiseration Engels documents - exhausted bodies, child labor underground, hunger, premature death.
• Capital vs. labor. Sharp visual contrast between the bourgeoisie's dinner table and the miners' empty pots = the structural inequality of industrial capitalism.
• The strike as collective action. Mobilization, solidarity, and its brutal repression by the state on behalf of capital.

Germinal - Exam Angles

• Essay evidence: The single best film for labor mobilization / the rise of the working class. Use the strike and its repression as concrete evidence alongside Engels.
• Likely term links: Class consciousness, proletariat, strike, Engels, Zola/Germinal, industrial capitalism.

4 Suez Allan Dwan 1938

Week 11 - Alternatives to Western Dominion? Egypt's path to modernization, 1805–1882 Pairs with: Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha's Men (excerpts)

Suez - Summary

A heavily fictionalized Hollywood account of the building of the Suez Canal (constructed 1859–1869) under French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps (Tyrone Power). The film invents a romance between de Lesseps and the future Empress Eugénie and frames the Canal as a heroic European engineering triumph. (It's so inaccurate that de Lesseps's descendants sued for libel.)

Suez - Key Themes

• Read it against the grain. The film glorifies the Canal as a Western gift to civilization. The course frames the same project as the mechanism through which Egypt was financially and politically penetrated - Canal debt led to European (esp. British) control and the 1882 British occupation.
• Whose modernization? Fahmy's All the Pasha's Men is about Mehmed/Muhammad Ali's attempt at an independent, Egyptian-led modernization (army, state-building) - an "alternative to Western dominion." Suez shows what happened instead: modernization captured by European capital.

Suez - Exam Angles

• Essay evidence: For "Were there non-Western alternatives to European dominance?" use Suez as the cautionary example - modernization that became a vector of dependency - contrasted with Muhammad Ali's earlier project (Fahmy).
• Watch for a "bias/representation" angle: the exam may reward noting that the film is propaganda for the European civilizing narrative.
• Likely term links: Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Muhammad/Mehmed Ali, Khedive Ismail, 1882 British occupation of Egypt, Eastern Question.

5 America America Elia Kazan 1963

Week 12 - "A Mission to Civilize"? Europe's New Imperialism, 1881–1912 Pairs with: Jules Ferry, Speech to the French Chamber of Deputies · Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview · General Act of the Berlin Conference, 1884

America America - Summary

Kazan's semi-autobiographical epic (based on his uncle). In the late 1890s, a young Cappadocian Greek, Stavros Topouzoglou, lives in poverty in Ottoman Anatolia. He witnesses a Hamidian massacre of Armenians (his Armenian friend Vartan is killed). Determined to escape oppression and poverty, Stavros undertakes a long, harrowing journey - robbed, betrayed, forced to compromise himself - to reach Constantinople and ultimately emigrate to America, the mythic land of freedom.

America America - Key Themes

• The Eastern Question from below. While Ferry and Osterhammel theorize the "civilizing mission" and the Berlin Conference carves up Africa, this film shows the lived experience of imperial collapse and minority persecution in the late Ottoman Empire.
• Migration as escape from the periphery. "America" = the dream of the West held by those crushed at the margins of empire - the human flip-side of the North/South divide the course traces.
• Violence against minorities / state weakness. The Hamidian massacres foreshadow the violent unmaking of the multi-ethnic Ottoman order.

America America - Exam Angles

• Essay evidence: Strong for the idea of "the West" as a global aspiration, and for the human cost of the Eastern Question / late-Ottoman disintegration. Connects the receiving end of the West/non-West divide.
• Likely term links: Eastern Question, Hamidian massacres, Ottoman minorities (millet), the civilizing mission, emigration, Jules Ferry, Berlin Conference (1884).

6 Joyeux Noel Christian Carion 2005

Week 13 - The Great War: Remapping the Middle East Pairs with: Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) · McMahon-Hussein Correspondence (1915–16) · Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger

Joyeux Noel - Summary

Dramatizes the real Christmas Truce of December 1914 on the Western Front. Scottish, French, and German soldiers spontaneously lay down arms on Christmas Eve - sparked by carol-singing (German tenor Sprink and soprano Anna) and bagpipes. The men meet in no-man's-land, exchange gifts, bury their dead together, play football. Afterward, all three sides' commands punish the soldiers for fraternizing: units are disbanded, transferred, and shamed.

Joyeux Noel - Key Themes

• The human cost of nationalism and total war. The truce exposes the gap between ordinary soldiers' shared humanity and the state/nationalist machinery that demands they kill each other.
• WWI as the great rupture. The war that the secret diplomacy of Sykes-Picot and the McMahon-Hussein letters would use to remap the Middle East - promising Arab independence while secretly dividing the region between Britain and France.
• Population unmaking (link to Clark). Twice a Stranger is about the forced population exchanges that the war's nationalist logic produced; Joyeux Noël shows the moment that logic briefly broke down.

Joyeux Noel - Exam Angles

• Essay evidence: For questions on WWI, nationalism, and the remaking of the world order, use the truce as the human counterpoint to the cynical great-power diplomacy of Sykes-Picot.
• Likely term links: Christmas Truce (1914), Sykes-Picot Agreement, McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, no-man's-land, total war, nationalism.

Cross-cutting themes likely long-essay material

These thread through multiple films and readings - exactly the kind of synthesis a 50-pt essay rewards:

1. The hidden costs of Europe's global power. Oliver Twist + Germinal show that industrial dominance abroad rested on brutal exploitation at home. (Kennedy, Engels)
2. Orientalism & the "civilizing mission" as ideology. Passion in the Desert + Suez + America America show how Europe imagined and justified its expansion. (Said, Ferry, Osterhammel)
3. Alternatives to Western dominion and why they failed. Suez (Egypt's modernization captured by European debt) vs. Muhammad Ali's independent project. (Fahmy)
4. The unmaking of multi-ethnic empires & the human cost of nationalism. America America + Joyeux Noël + Clark - minorities, massacre, migration, forced exchange. (Eastern Question, WWI)

Practice essay prompts predict-the-exam

• "Industrialization made Europe globally dominant but at enormous human cost." Discuss using readings and at least two films.
• "Europe justified its expansion through the language of civilization and knowledge." Explain with reference to Orientalism and the New Imperialism, using films as evidence.
• "Were there viable non-Western paths to modernity in the 19th century?" Discuss Egypt's experience.
• "The First World War remade the global order at the expense of ordinary people and subject populations." Discuss.

Study tips

• For each film, lock in 2 specific scenes + the one reading it pairs with. That's enough to deploy it as evidence.
• Keep chronology precise - the midterm explicitly rewards it (e.g., Napoleon in Egypt 1798–1801; Suez Canal 1859–69; British occupation 1882; Christmas Truce Dec 1914; Sykes-Picot 1916).
• When a film is historically inaccurate (Suez especially), say so - using it critically shows stronger understanding than taking it at face value.