The Films of the Eighties: A Social HistorySIU Press, 1995 - 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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... Fire , " a flashcard social history of America from the fifties to the eighties , sums up this reduplication of history . In both the fifties and the eighties , eight years of the American presi- dency were occupied by a smiling ...
... Fire ( 1981 ) and then Gandhi ( 1982 ) — won the first two Academy Awards , while other literary films like The French Lieutenant's Woman ( 1981 ) , Educating Rita ( 1983 ) , A Passage to India ( 1984 ) and A Room with a View ( 1985 ) ...
A Social History William J. Palmer. Chariots of Fire , and the promise of existential films such as Michael Mann's Thief ( 1981 ) and Richard Rush's Stunt Man ( 1980 ) never amounted to a trend in film history's participation in social ...
... fires that their leaders had started . The seventies was characterized by America's struggle to escape and survive Vietnam exacerbated by the international embarrassment of Watergate . Thus the sociohistorical climate itself chose the ...
... Fire , Tim O'Brien's doing After Cacciato , Gustav Hasford's Short Timers , Donald Bodey's FNG , John Del Vecchio's 13th Valley ) about the war . Yet despite these accommodations of the Vietnam War as active issue , that war did not ...
Contents
| 16 | |
The Coming Home Films | 61 |
The Terrorism Film Texts | 114 |
The Nuclear War Film Texts | 179 |
From the Evil Empire to Glasnost | 206 |
The Feminist Farm Crisis and Other Neoconservative | 246 |
The Yuppie Texts | 280 |
Film in the Holograph of New History | 308 |
Index | 325 |
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| Title | The Films of the Eighties: A Social History |
| Author | William J. Palmer |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | SIU Press, 1995 |
| ISBN | 0809320290, 9780809320295 |
| Length | 335 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |