The Films of the Eighties: A Social HistorySouthern Illinois University Press, 1993 - 335 pages In this remarkable sequel to his Films of the Seventies: A Social History, William J. Palmer examines more than three hundred films as texts that represent, revise, parody, comment upon, and generate discussion about major events, issues, and social trends of the eighties. Palmer defines the dialectic between film art and social history, taking as his theoretical model the "holograph of history" that originated from the New Historicist theories of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. Combining the interests and methodologies of social history and film criticism, Palmer contends that film is a socially conscious interpreter and commentator upon the issues of contemporary social history. In the eighties, such issues included the war in Vietnam, the preservation of the American farm, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, changes in Soviet-American relations, neoconservative feminism, and yuppies. Among the films Palmer examines are Platoon, The Killing Fields, The River, Out of Africa, Little Drummer Girl, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Silkwood, The Day After, Red Dawn, Moscow on the Hudson, Troop Beverly Hills, and Fatal Attraction. Utilizing the principles of New Historicism, Palmer demonstrates that film can analyze and critique history as well as present it. |
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... stunt man during the making of a movie . Like Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American , which in 1954 caricatured the first American CIA excursions into Vietnam , Richard Rush's Stunt Man will always be bathed in a weird prophetic ...
... Stunt Man explores . Two snatches of music dominate the sound track of The Stunt Man . One , a jangly circus anthem , governs the pace of the film , ushers the film out of the symbolic , metaphysical mode of the dialogue passages into ...
... stunt man for America . In the metaphor , the vet did the dirty work that others did not want to do . The risks involved in their stunts constantly escalated . The stunt man grunts were deceived during the war , and then when it was all ...
Contents
The Vietnam War as Film Text | 16 |
The Coming Home Films | 61 |
The Terrorism Film Texts | 114 |
Copyright | |
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