The Films of the Eighties: A Social HistoryIn 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. |
From inside the book
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Billy Joel's popular song of 1989 , " We Didn't Start the 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 ...
Epic inspirational films - first Chariots of 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 ...
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 history . The first real formation ...
Like the beleagured firemen in The Towering Inferno ( 1974 ) , the American people in the seventies were trying to put out fires that their leaders had started . The seventies was characterized by America's struggle to escape and ...
The curiosity about the war had been satisfied by the outpouring in the late seventies of both the films and the many excellent books ( Michael Herr's Dispatches , Philip Caputo's Rumor of War , James Webb's Fields of Fire , Tim ...
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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 |