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The Purple Rose Of Cairo

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Chapter 3 The third chapter will mainly discuss Woody Allen?s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) to examine how a theme about cinema-goers reflects a desire from the filmmaker and the audience. The film fabricates a fantasy where the protagonist of a film called ?The Purple Rose of Cairo?, Tom Baxter (enacted by Jeff Daniels), ?steps? out of the film during a screening. He joins Cecilia (starred by Mia Farrow), a frustrated waitress and aggrieved wife who has watched this film countless times, and starts an adventure in the real world. Confronting the chaos caused by Tom arbitrarily leaving the screen, Gil Shepard, an actor who impersonates Tom, comes to persuade Tom to return to the film, while pursuing Cecilia at the same time. In the end, Cecilia chooses to stay in reality but ends up alone due to Gil abandoning her for his career in Hollywood. Allen sets the story background in New Jersey during the Depression, when moviegoers frequently went to see films in order to escape from their hopeless reality caused by underemployment and the market downturn of the 1930s. Allen was especially inspired to create a film set in the 1930s, since this period coincided with his childhood, and he recalled the passionate cinema audiences of the time (Allen and Bj?rkman, 2004). Established as a reflexive fiction based on the ?past?, The Purple Rose of Cairo embodies Allen?s recollection of his boyhood cinephilia. Thus the work bears autobiographical determination, representing Allen?s

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